The Good Doctor (4×03) Newbies Review

For our review of the last episode of The Good Doctor, click here.

Synopsis: Lim tasks Shaun, Claire and Park with mentoring the top first-year resident contenders. Andrews discuss a difficult surgery scheduled for a minor. Shaun inadvertently insults Lea. Morgan seeks out Claire and Lim’s help on a consult. (IMDb)

This third episode sees The Good Doctor attempt to move into a post-COVID world, starting with a PSA from series star Freddie Highmore. While this will take some getting used to, it did offer some decent escapism as the series comes full circle, repopulating the hospital with new residents to be trained by the others. However long they stay remains to be seen but they definitely made an impression.

The aptly named Newbies began with the aforementioned resident applicants being interviewed by Murphy, Browne, and Park. Dr. Olivia Jackson (Summer Brown), Dr. Asher Wolke (Noah Galvin), Dr. Jordan Allen (Bria Henderson), Dr. John Lundberg (Michael Liu), Dr. Enrique Guerin (Brian Marc), and Dr. Will Hooper (Sam Robert Muik) had the chance to impress in the hopes of scoring one of four potential openings. Meanwhile, Reznick was still adjusting to her new role as a passenger to the action but she was still on a short leash. Her patient, a man named Josh Bunker (Samer Salem), had a tumor on his heart. The other case saw the doctors tend to a 17-year-old girl named Monica Torres (Sophia Bucio) looking for help to reconstruct her malformed breasts with the help of implants.

The applicants were put through the ringer while consulting on both cases to test them in high pressure situations and working with others and also so the other doctors can take turns grilling them. Hooper was an easy victim based on his looks, arrogant personality, and cavalier attitude towards women (and Lim’s building up of him). Murphy also got in trouble with Lea as he took his honesty a little too far in front of the applicants (what he believed was a compliment seemed more like an insult). This of course lingered with him. With the lessons her learned, Murphy eventually made it up to Lea.

Both surgeries saw complications as Josh’s heart was hard to access safely therefore the solution there was to remove it and work on it outside his body before transplanting it back in while Monica suffered from cardiac arrest before falling into a coma. Once work was over for the day, it was time for a party so that everyone could learn more about each other. It was interesting until Murphy went a little too far with some personal questions towards Wolke, a gay Jew who no longer believed in God. Meanwhile, Lim and Andrews debriefed on their own.

Lundberg figured out that Monica had a clot in her brain that was keeping her in a coma and Murphy figured out a solution as he often did. Reznick’s backseat driving got a little too much while the doctors had to reconstruct part of Josh’s heart before putting it back in. Wolke’s initiative got him the chance to watch from a closer position, That surgery was ultimately successful as was Monica’s.

The hyping up of Hooper was a test of the others’ honesty thus eliminating him while Lundberg took himself out of the running as a result of the unprofessional nature of the others and the drama behind the scenes. With the new residents set, it was up to the senior residents to shadow them and teach them the trade.

We are just scratching the surface with these new residents, this episode featured flashes of what they could bring. Hopefully the upcoming episodes will allow them the opportunity to prove their worth and to add to the series’ solid dynamic.

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Keith Noakes

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.