Emily Owens M.D. Series Finale Recap: Who Did Emily Choose?

Emily Owens M.D.

Emily gets Tyra to help her practice what she’s going to say to Micah about the kiss the other night. When she runs into him later, before she can launch into her planned spiel about him being her boss and the confused feelings therein, Micah stops her and takes her to her office where they can talk privately. Except Will’s already there – and Micah gets paged before anything can be said. Emily does inform Will for the first time that she likes Micah (and means it), although their status remains unclear.

They do manage to get a moment alone, though, where Micah asks her how she didn’t know that he liked her (she didn’t think of him in that way and when she started to, she suppressed it) and asks her out on a date. Although she’s hesitant about going on a date-date, Emily agrees to go on a lunch date in the records room to talk about their status and any questions/concerns they may have going forward. At the lunch date, Micah’s laying on the floor, stressed about his mother and looking to drain the negative energy before he had to go back out there. Emily joins him and tells him about her family: a father who she’s only met once and a flighty, complicated mother who bounces from man to man and goes through a number of mistakes. Growing up with a woman like that has made Emily into the Type-A control glacier that she is, as she’s terrified of making the wrong choice. When she does like someone, she tends to latch on like a barnacle; Micah doesn’t mind that and goes over the worst case scenarios if they decided to date.

They could either break-up and be stuck in the same ER, with Emily never getting picked for procedures, or they could have something great professionally and personally, only Emily is terrified that she’ll be hated for receiving special treatment. He asks her why she cares about other people and against all odds, she takes the leap.

He does pass over her for a triple A repair assistant position, but he later admits to having overcorrected in an attempt to not show her any special treatment and would keep things balanced from here on.

Micah Mouse Mama
Micah’s mother has finally told her troubled daughter Liz about the cancer and she’s agreed to come visit that day. Micah doesn’t have a great relationship with her, but ever since the surgery, and due in part to her daughter’s newfound stability, his mother thought it time. Liz arrives and is pissed off about not being told and that her mother won’t agree to undergo a new clinical trial set to begin in two weeks; rather than undergo another round of chemo, she wants to go home, spend time with her children, and live out the rest of her life as she pleases. Once Liz gets to see her mother, she tells her about being 11 weeks along with the child of the man she had been dating; he didn’t want a part in its life and demanded she end the pregnancy. She couldn’t – but not because of any moral conviction against abortion. Liz lied about being pregnant to give her mother something to live for and plans to drag out the lie long enough to get her mother into the clinical program before “losing the baby.”

While Micah’s not okay with that, once he sees his mother’s renewed sense of hope, as well as her new wig, he doesn’t object to her heading into the clinical trial.

Maggie May
Cassandra has been taking the break-up with Will much differently than he expected. Rather than being angry (or even a little sad), she’s all smiles and peace, as she feels like he made his choice in “picking” Emily and there’s nothing she can do about it now. That tension spills into their work with their patient Maggie, an older woman accompanied by her partner Julia and tales of their children, who has been experiencing heart palpitations and possible pneumonia. Will orders chest X-rays and an EKG that come back fairly positively; he prescribes her a medication and she’s to be on her way. However, as the two are leaving the hospital grounds, Maggie has a heart attack in the car and is returned with no pulse, slumped over in her seat; she’s loaded onto a stretcher, Will straddling her and giving her chest compressions, and taken back into the hospital, only to be declared dead 25 minutes later.

The reason for her death?

Maggie had Long QT, meaning that her heart didn’t repolarize (or reset) itself quickly. The medication that Will prescribed lengthened the QT and caused her heart to short-circuit; it’s a rare syndrome that even a lot of cardiologists don’t catch right off and with Maggie’s antidepressant use not on her chart, it caused her to have a fatal arrhythmia. Julia leaves to comfort their children, while Cassandra tries to get him to lie about what happened. The medication isn’t on her chart and the EKG is fine, so in her mind, it’s better to not have a misdiagnosis/death following him around for the rest of his career, particularly for a patient that couldn’t be brought back. However, Will informed the administrators, due to Emily seeing him as the stand-up guy who always did the right thing – the type of man that he wants to be.

Later, when the two are at the bar, he admits to having chosen her over Cassandra (and being confused about his feelings for her), while Emily informs him that he lost her when he ran after Cassandra after she lost the research position. Emily wanted to be chosen and Will didn’t do that then, even though it was a choice that broke him and Cassandra up.

Here Kitty Kitty
At the coffee shop, Emily and Tyra treat a dehydrated woman (Mrs. Bednevik) who collapsed in line. When they take her to the ER to get looked at, she’s angry and quite hostile, calling people names and throwing water on doctors. She also has a fever and an infected hand that needs to be treated, but she bolts out of the hospital while nobody’s looking, ripping the IV out and making her hand even worse. Her daughter brings her back to the hospital and tells Emily that her mother is a hoarder, her home in such a shape that the Department of Health and the local Animal Control had been called. When Mrs. Bednevik finds out that she may lose her animals, Emily administers a Code Gray, administered for combative patients and resulting in the woman having her hands tied down.

Bednevik’s daughter informs Emily that this behavior began 7 years ago when she went away for college; to keep her mother from missing her too much, she bought her a cat. When she came home for Christmas, she had seven. Emily concludes that the erratic behavior comes from toxoplasmosis, an infectious disease that can be caused by material found in cat feces and that can manifest in symptoms resembling schizophrenia. Mrs. Bednevik apologizes for her behavior and agrees to undergo therapy to get back to her old self.

Do I Know You?
George is a 35-year-old man in the ER for numbness, headaches, vomiting, and fainting. He doesn’t sleep much since losing his young son around a year ago and blames his ex-wife for his death; she left him alone playing with his toys and he choked to death before she could save him. He initially seemed to be okay and to have stood up too fast while being tired, until he had a stroke trying to stand up and collapsed on the hospital floor. It turns out that there’s a golf ball sized tumor in his temporal lobe that’s caused the bleeding that made him have a stroke. He wakes up from surgery in a decidedly better mood – only, he’s lost the last four years of memory since the last time he was conscious. In addition, he lost the bitterness he had for his wife, replacing it with the love he felt for her before their divorce and their son (who was completely wiped from his memory).

But Who Did Emily Choose?
Once home from the bar with Will, Emily’s alone in her apartment and hears a knock at the door. It’s Will and before they can say a word to one another, he kisses her and they end up in the bedroom.

Additional thoughts and observations:
-I actually don’t have a problem with Emily/Will…if there were more episodes coming. I don’t think his feelings for her are as genuine as they could be and for the series to end with the two of them in bed, even if the theme of the episode is mistakes, made me a little sad.
-That being said, everything in the records room between Emily and Micah was beautiful, insightful, and romantic. You felt the emotional connection, the fact that these two people liked each other and wanted to be together.
-No Dr. Bandari, which I’m pleased with. Very little Tyra, as well, but her arc was sewed up last week.
-Thank you guys for reading all the Emily Owens M.D. articles posted this season. I’m sorry that we won’t be able to chat anymore about the show, particularly since it had been in a little groove recently and it felt like it could hit its stride if given a little more time. You can check out creator Jennie Urman’s Twitter for information about where everyone would have ended up had the show ran longer.

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