The Good Doctor Season 6 Episode 5 Review: Growth Opportunities

St. Bonaventure celebrated Halloween! Sort of, anyway.

On The Good Doctor Season 6 Episode 5, several staff members wore costumes for the first ten minutes of the hour, but once the stories kicked into higher gear, it seemed like any other day at the hospital.

How odd! At least we got some compelling medical stories out of it and an end (for now) to Shaun and Glassman’s conflict over Lim.

Maybe Shaun told Asher off-screen to take off his Halloween makeup. He was bewildered by why Asher wore it, and Asher had to deliver awkward news.

It probably isn’t sanitary to wear Halloween makeup in the OR, and it might be harder to take a doctor dressed like a green goblin seriously.

Skylar’s storyline took a strange turn when the doctors did the genetic testing. I expected her to have a rare disorder that required a risky, experimental procedure. Instead, the doctors got involved in the drama surrounding the child’s parentage.

The doctors claimed they had to track the bio-dad down to warn him about his genetic abnormality. That felt like a stretch; there was no way to tell him about this without revealing how it came up.

He and any other children he had weren’t in immediate danger; it wasn’t as if he were someone who had recently had close contact with a patient who had COVID or HIV.

Telling Mick he was Skylar’s biological father felt like the doctors were going into territory that was none of their business.

Once Skylar went into liver failure and needed a living donor ASAP, the medical team had more of a reason to track down her biological father. Of course, there was no guarantee he would be a match just because they were related, but there was a chance he could save her life.

However, he wasn’t obligated to donate part of his liver to a virtual stranger just because they shared DNA, and his reasons for not wanting to get involved were understandable. The surgery was risky and would put him out of commission long-term, and he has a family of his own elsewhere.

Although this story had a happy ending, I didn’t feel comfortable with Lea going to the bar where he performs regularly and showing him a video of Skylar singing.

It was manipulative and bordered on harassment since she was the third or fourth person to try to convince him to do this.

This mess happened because Shaun supervised this case without anyone giving him feedback. While he’s an attending now, he should still be consulting regularly with senior doctors about his patients, which wasn’t happening here.

Shaun also decided to delegate most of the dirty work to the residents so he could focus on finding a way to make Lim walk again.

Andrews wouldn’t have been happy if he knew that’s what Shaun was doing. He’d probably say that was a dereliction of duty, as Shaun is supposed to supervise residents, not tell them to take care of patients entirely on their own.

Lim’s potential surgery became another reason for Glassman and Shaun to butt heads.

Why was it up to Glassman to decide whether the surgery was too risky? This should have been Lim’s decision from the get-go. It’s her body, not Glassman’s, and she neither asked for nor needed his protection.

Glassman’s attitude toward Shaun was aggravating until Lea talked some sense into him.

Lea: Look, Shaun isn’t going to apologize. Someone has to make the first move.
Glassman: And it has to be me?
Lea: Of course it has to be you.
Glassman: Shaun is a grown man and you’re his wife.
Lea: He has ASD. And he’s your son.

Glassman kept harping on Shaun’s needing to take responsibility for causing Lim’s paralysis. I still haven’t seen any evidence that Shaun was responsible for that.

Glassman COULD have said that he was sorry she suffered this outcome — that’s just good bedside manner — but there was no need to take responsibility beyond that.

Thank goodness Lea got Glassman to finally get over himself.

His behavior was more childish than Shaun’s. He kept avoiding Shaun and insisting that Shaun was to blame for the rift because he wasn’t doing what Glassman wanted.

Glassman is a brilliant neurosurgeon, and there’s no doubt he saved Shaun’s life when he was younger. But he also is overcontrolling and generally refuses to consider anyone else’s point of view.

Those flaws contributed to his daughter’s death and his recent divorce. They almost caused a permanent rift with Shaun. And he was taking over Lim’s medical decisions, which eventually would have pissed her off too.

Lim made the right decision by rejecting the surgery, even if Shaun didn’t understand it.

Powell was right that she was interested for the wrong reasons — she thought being able-bodied again would fix her life and was still grieving the loss of her limbs.

I didn’t understand what had happened with Lim’s date. The little we saw involved him salvaging the evening after the restaurant’s humiliating suggestion about how to deal with the lack of wheelchair ramps.

When she sent him home, I didn’t get the sense that it was because he wasn’t interested in her romantically; I thought she was upset about what had happened at the restaurant.

While Lim doesn’t owe Shaun an explanation, it would be nice if she shared that she wants to try to accept herself as she is and appreciates his efforts.

Shaun was doing this because he wanted to salvage his relationship with Lim, so knowing that she doesn’t hate him would go a long way to ending his attempts to pressure her into changing her mind.

When Ollie and his brother came into the ED, they reminded me of Shaun and his brother, so I knew it would end up with Shaun talking to them.

What a sad story, though!

What did you think of this Halloween episode, Good Doctor fanatics? Hit the big, blue SHOW COMMENTS button and let us know.

The series is taking a brief hiatus before the next new episode, but in the meantime, you can watch The Good Doctor online.

The Good Doctor airs on ABC on Mondays at 10 PM EST / PST. The next new episode will air on November 14, 2022.

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Jack Ori is a senior staff writer for TV Fanatic. His debut young adult novel, Reinventing Hannah, is available on Amazon. Follow him on Twitter.

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