TVLINE | I was struck by the choice to make COVID such a centerpiece of this episode. The pandemic has come up in conversation on the show before, but it was a main focus this time around. Tell me why you wanted to go there narratively.
You know, it was not because we said, “Let’s do an episode about COVID.” Obviously, that was a very intense period for everyone, and a tipping point for many people, but it wasn’t like we set out to do that. How it began was, we wanted to have a story in the present that had to do with Jake and Amy, and whether they would get back together in the crucible of his grief over his father. We know that grief can be very clarifying for people. It shakes their priorities and makes them feel like they want to live for today, and that was the underlying idea for why to bring Jake’s father in and have him pass away — to have it be an impetus for [Jake and Amy] finally surrendering to what they both have been wanting.
We just thought it’d be a very cool counterpoint to contrast that with the beginning of their relationship — not their romantic relationship, but their relationship as colleagues. We did the math, and it timed out that that would have been at the beginning of COVID. It just seemed like a really great way to put them into a very intense situation together, where he would see how brilliant she was, and she would recognize his talents and grit and his own determination — start to see him as one of the few people who works under her that’s worthy of her respect. And then, of course, there ends up being a poignance to COVID and how it made our mundane days suddenly feel like life-or-death. Our futures were hanging in the balance, and we didn’t know what would happen with the rest of our lives. It just seemed like a perfect counterpoint to the present-day story.
TVLINE | We saw that Jake made the choice to stay at Westside after he went through this experience of diagnosing COVID with Amy, and he tells Rachel later that COVID was the only reason he decided to stay in Minnesota. Is he being honest with himself? Where does this love quadrangle — Jake, Amy, Michael, Rachel — go from here?
Yeah, it’s interesting. Obviously, there’s an inherent chemistry between [Jake and Amy], but in our minds, Jake stayed because he realized how much he respected this woman who could help him become a better doctor. He watched her fight the administration and be willing to risk her own job and career, potentially, to do the right thing; she respected him enough to include him in the process and go to bat for him because she thought he was right. There’s much more emotional and intellectual connection at that point — mutual respect between two adults.
At that moment, Jake was still very much in love with his wife and had a new baby, and it was Rachel having a fling with a DJ in Cabo — [laughs] — that’s what wrecked them. In the aftermath of that, his friendship with Amy grew over time, and only began [getting romantic] about five months before Amy’s car accident, which was four years after this moment in COVID. In our minds, that’s how it grew. Now, is there chemistry and connection between people that’s kind of always there but is not acknowledged or romanticized? Probably.
But in our mythology — and this will probably come out at some point — if Jake was a doctor working at a hospital for a couple years during COVID, he probably didn’t see his wife very much, right? He would have been quarantining. That would have been a source of estrangement. Right now, Rachel’s being paranoid. “Oh, we stayed because of Amy.” But she’s just being paranoid. She’s the one that cheated on Jake. He did have a change of heart about Amy, because he hated her! [Laughs] But then suddenly, he respected her as a boss, and he felt like, “I could do a lot of good at this hospital, and this is probably not the best time to pick up and move when COVID’s coming and the world’s going to shut down.” It was all of those things — and those things will get unpacked as the season goes on.
This story originally appeared on TVLine
