Good Doctor's Glassman Cliffhanger Has Us Playing Worst-Case Scenario

Ryan Schwartz
·2 min read
10

Does Dr. Kalu’s homecoming portend the return of another storyline from The Good Doctor Season 1?

At the tail end of Monday’s episode, attending surgeon Shaun confronted former peer-turned-pupil Jared about his suturing technique. Their patient, who underwent brain surgery, received eight sutures and suffered a small post-op bleed; per Shaun, Jared should have closed with 10 sutures. But according to Dr. Kalu, he wasn’t responsible for the bleed. It was Dr. Glassman who handled sutures.

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Now, unless Jared was lying — and we don’t get the sense he was — Glassman made a mistake. A rookie mistake. The kind of mistake a world-class neurosurgeon would never make. Couple that with the ominous score that played as the camera panned in on Shaun, and we can’t help but assume the worst — which, in this case, would be the return of Glassman’s brain cancer.

It was back in the penultimate Season 1 episode when Glassman first gave us a scare. He was out to dinner with future ex-wife Debbie when he suffered a medical emergency. What followed was a nail-biting finale that saw Shaun’s mentor initially diagnosed with an aggressive, likely terminal, form of brain cancer. A subsequent biopsy showed that he actually had a low-grade glioma, which was treated in Season 2 with a combination of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy — and he’s been in remission ever since.

Aside from a clean bill of health in recent seasons, the poor guy’s never had much luck. In addition to his previous cancer bout, Glassman lost his daughter Maddie to an overdose when she was a teenager, a tragedy that heralded the end of his first marriage to Maddie’s mother, Ilana. A whirlwind romance with St. Bonaventure barista-turned-office manager Debbie culminated in a Season 3 wedding, but Debbie walked out on him in Season 4. More recently, Glassman’s home — the house where he and Ilana raised Maddie — went up in flames, scorching everything he owned. For his sake, let’s hope his post-op oversight was just that, an oversight, as the title of the next new episode airing Monday, April 3 — “The Blip” — would suggest. In the meantime, hit the comments and tell us if you jumped to the same conclusion about what Glassman’s surgical mistake could mean for Richard Schiff’s alter ego.

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