'The Good Doctor' Season 1, Episode 14 'She' Recap: New Characters and New Perspectives [SPOILERS]

“The Good Doctor” is testing Dr. Shaun Murphy’s (Freddie Highmore) understanding of different people. In the last episode, we saw him learning that he shouldn’t call people a terrorist based on their religion. Now, he needs to understand how biology doesn’t always fall in line with what someone wants to be. Shaun learns that his new patient, Quinn Darby (Sophie Giannamore), identifies as a girl despite being biologically male. Meanwhile, a new resident surgeon joins the team—and she’s more focused on doing her job than making friends.

The ‘He/She’ Dilemma

Shaun, Claire (Antonia Thomas), and Jared (Chuku Modu) are introduced to a new resident, Dr. Morgan Reznick (Fiona Gubelmann) and are presented with two new cases. To shake things up a bit, Dr. Melendez (Nicholas Gonzalez) and Dr. Lim (Christina Chang) decide to have a little friendly competition among their residents. Both teams are dealing with similar cases of severe stomach pains. Claire and Morgan join Melendez in figuring out what’s causing a History Teacher’s pain. Meanwhile, Shaun and Jared join Dr.Lim with a unique case involving Quinn. After a routine examination, it’s revealed Quinn is biologically male. This confuses Shaun because he doesn’t understand the situation. He comes off as rude, insisting Quinn is a man.

But Quinn teaches him more about being misunderstood, especially when her life is at stake. Quinn’s parents and grandmother had to make a decision on whether or not the doctors should take out her testicles to stop cancer from spreading.  In the end, Shaun tries to see things in Quinn’s perspective and get a deeper understanding of how she feels. She tells him about what it feels like to be the freak. This hits close to Shaun, leading him to call her the proper pronouns. Before the episode’s end, we see Shaun asking his new neighbor to help him break into a pool. Apparently, floating in an empty pool will help him understand what his patient was feeling.

Claire vs. The New Girl

Claire was always the number one girl on Team Melendez, but Morgan is shaking things up. A History teacher’s appendix burst but he refuses to leave his twins alone at home. Morgan offers up Claire to make the arrangements for the patient’s children, while she wheels him into surgery. It’s very obvious the new character on “The Good Doctor” will do anything to be considered the best, even if it meant bringing down her fellow residents. But Morgan was blindsided, realizing empathy was Claire’s strong suit. Claire offered to help their patient with his kids, enough to bring tears to his eyes. The new doctor took it as a challenge and made sure to level the playing field.
The cat-fighting didn’t last too long when they found out their patient was allergic to the pain meds they gave him. They had to perform emergency surgery and implant a permanent colostomy bag for irreparable damage. In the end, it almost looks like the feud between the two is over—until Morgan surprises everyone with a special visit from the patient’s kids. This upsets Claire when her kindness was used for competition. She leaves the hospital frustrated and bumps into Dr.Melendez. He reassures Claire that she’s a smart and special girl. It is interesting though to see a little competition on “The Good Doctor,” so who knows who the new girl would try to one-up next.

‘The Good Doctor’ Talks About Fertility

Shaun took time in accepting that his new patient identified as a girl while Dr. Andrews (Hill Harper) dealt with a few stuff to figure out as well. As a B-story of the episode, we learn that Dr. Andrew and his wife are trying to conceive. The two seek help from a fertility expert. This action causes a rift between the husband and wife when they start to point fingers about the delay of their family life. Then we find out Dr. Andrews has a fertility problem. We see his issue bothering him when it came to Quinn’s surgery. Hearing the family argue about what to do with Quinn’s case, he weighs in saying the child might want to conceive one day. Andrews was obviously voicing out something he wished he’d considered a long time ago.

In the end, Quinn’s surgery was fast-tracked when her testicles twisted, cutting off her blood supply. The doctors had to do whatever was “medically necessary.” Dr. Andrews had to tell Quinn he couldn’t, in good conscience, cut off both testicles if one of them was perfectly healthy.  He tells her that perhaps in the future, she may want kids. Then she said something that caught him off guard. Quinn told Dr. Andrews that if you wanted kids so much you can still adopt. Because kids are yours, biological or not.
It looks like it wasn’t only Shaun who needed a lesson to learn on this week’s episode.
“The Good Doctor” continues Monday, February 26th with “Heartfelt” at 10/9c on ABC.