2x11 really rubs salt in the wound of the really terrible treatment of Samira this season in a way that feels...honestly, just really mean-spirited and weird. I've been saying for ages, for long before the season started airing, that I wanted Samira to make a major error. I think there are a million ways that could have been presented in a way that felt believable and compelling. But the way they've handled it? That feels like cheap drama in a way that's actually cruel (and not in a fun way) on top of just being bad storytelling.
Season one Samira is a beautifully established character, one that's clear and coherent. Her entire premise is that she's so extremely thorough that she comes into conflict with her supervisor specifically about paying too much attention to detail and hunting for zebras. She is an excellent teacher – calm, with clear expectations, offering very specific feedback, paying close attention to the students and correcting them immediately when they strayed, both in terms of interpersonal skills and clinical skills. A huge chunk of the season is about her proving to everyone that she belongs there and that even though she can move fast and do what Robby wants, her approach is valuable to providing good quality care, because she's attentive in a way no one else is. Her empathy isn't selective, it's purposeful and studied so she can ensure she applies it evenly to everyone. She's careful. She's observant. She's very, very good at what she does. At the same time, she's realistic and nuanced. She's defensive. She's closed off. She's rigid. She's insistent that hers is the right way. In many ways, she's better than Robby, but she's also exactly like him. And that made their dynamic just spark off the screen! We got both of their perspectives on the matter. Robby was projecting like hell onto her, but we also very much saw how that was affecting her.
Season two Samira feels entirely disconnected from absolutely everything about season one Samira, so much so that it simply cannot be brushed off as "oh, she's under stress" or "oh, we only saw her for one day" or "she's just completely ill equipped to deal with personal issues". The only reference to her interest in racial disparities is a throwaway line about her research losing funding. She doesn't have a single patient that represents what drove her into medicine, and she does get a few elderly patients (none of whom she connects deeply with), seemingly just so that Al-Hashimi's suggestion she go into geriatrics, a field she has never expressed the slightest interest in, felt a little less completely out of nowhere. The first nine episodes completely ignored her relationship with Robby and gave us no insight into how it had changed since season one, leading to him blowing up at her in a way that felt completely unearned and him apparently doubting her place in emergency medicine for an entirely different reason than last season. It's weird and absurdly clunky, even as every single element could have been a part of a really compelling story.
The season has a million callbacks to a million different aspects of season one. We see countless references to the Santos-Langdon situation. We get two extended conversation about Whitaker's burn patient from last season and his relationship with said patient's widow and baby. Every conversation Mel and Langdon have is loaded with callbacks. Even Javadi's presence during the PittFest response is referenced. And yet we see none of that for Samira. Not for a single thing we know about her. We don't see her with a single patient that connects to this fear. The only patient we see her have a personal reaction to is Orlando, and that's for far shallower and less interesting reasons than her reactions to Joyce, to Nandi, to Mr. Pugliesi last season. We have no references to the fact her father died of racist medical neglect even though the season is completely full of situations in which it might make sense to bring that up – Mel is being sued for malpractice! A woman with ovarian torsion comes in and points out that she's experienced medical racism and misogyny! Robby and Al-Hashimi fail to examine a victim of a car accident and that woman winds up needing surgery! Samira has a panic attack and is afraid she's having an MI! And most glaring of all...Samira herself fails to validate a med student's diagnosis. This is a huge problem for portraying a consistent throughline.
Yeah, one could argue that she shouldn't get all the patients that distrust the medical system and have undertreated conditions and all of that. One could argue that she's distracted and more prone to make mistakes this season. One can argue that she's under a lot of pressure, and of course she has a panic attack which revitalizes her conflict with Robby. One could argue that obviously she's Robby's mirror. But think about all of what we've seen with her in season two put together. She's used as a vehicle for exposition, apparently completely ignorant at the concept of people working two jobs and still being uninsured. She speaks without thinking and suggests a prison inmate use a blender. She's not treated like a senior resident for two thirds of the season, right up until she fails to validate a med student's work in an episode where her mom hasn't called her and the distraction is a really frustrating line about her dying eggs, something she would never have done last season and that is in fact the complete opposite of what she was being criticized for then. She hasn't had a single patient that ties to her biggest concern about care disparities. Other characters are observing things and paying attention to the kind of details that were her bread and butter last season. She's had the bare minimum screentime all season, to the point where I'm pretty sure Ogilvie has had more meaningful scenes than her. She's got no traces of the conviction that so defined her last season – that no matter what Robby said, she had these firm principles that she'd hold onto. All of this while Al-Hashimi has completely taken over what was really her role in season one when it comes to representing an alternative approach to medicine and clashing with Robby over what they ought to be doing. The combination of all of this means that season two Samira just doesn't feel like her season one self in a way that absolutely hasn't been sufficiently made believable.
All of this could be both believable and compelling, except there's zero focus on Samira at all. People talk about how her mom is calling her all the time, and yeah, that's happened a few times, but we also have to remember that from our perspective, she isn't! Three episodes passed between the first time her mom called and the second! Then another several before the next time! We didn't get insight into the fact she's trying to find another job for next year until episode eight! There's no emphasis on how she feels about her relationship with Robby being less confrontational than it was, but still not good, and how he's not even paying any attention to her at all anymore, at the same time as he's constantly checking in with the others. There's no attempt at connecting to season one Samira, to her genuine belief she's doing great at separating her personal baggage from her approach to the job, to her longing for Robby's approval, to her careful mask of professionalism. It's not a logical follow through from season one, nor is there anything but the weakest explanations for the change that don't even involve anyone acknowledging there has been a change. No one is pointing out the fact all of this is completely out of character for her!
And it's worsened because of what's going on with the other characters – even as Samira isn't getting any wins due to her attention to detail, Whitaker, Mel, and McKay are. Al-Hashimi has become the sole representative of pushing back on Robby when it comes to medical decision making. Even when Whitaker, Mel, and Santos have all had so much setup for a big fall and a big mistake thanks to overconfidence, distraction, and overwork respectively, it's Samira who does make a dramatic mistake of the kind that should have been meaningful but isn't because there's no effort to connect it to anything. It just comes out of nowhere. And that feels like a really gross way to treat the character whose entire premise is caring about the details, if they're not going to delve deep into her perspective on the matter (which is the part that's really interesting). Like, a sort of, "oh, you know how she proved that her approach was immensely valuable and led to catching things other characters wouldn't? Psych! She's the one to make the mistake and the others are the ones to catch small details". A very interesting story if from her perspective, but really mean spirited the way the show has been presenting it – like, oh, look at that silly woman that cared so much about mistakes, of course she is the one whose mistakes have consequences, now everyone else is just so much better at catching them than her, and no one else's mistakes (failing to manage Louie's withdrawal, not paying attention to anything all day, neglecting to read over an AI generated chart and catch multiple errors) are even treated as mistakes, much less ones with consequences.
Samira and Mel have what's essentially the same plot this season, which has made watching the different ways the authority figures in the department (especially but not actually exclusively Robby) react to them really tough. Like all these other plot points, it could have been exceptionally interesting had the show actually focused on the favouritism and double standards at play, and maybe allowed Samira to react. Even if she didn't get to react, at least something that even hinted at the writers being aware of the inherent racism of this double standard. But nope. Nothing. And even Robby yelling at her in ways that are clearly more about him than about her is falling completely flat because the season has completely failed to follow through on the way Samira is so much more similar to Robby than she is any other character. There's the partially reconstructed skeleton of an interesting story here about the rot at the heart of the department, centred around Samira and Robby, but the show has demonstrated no interest in telling it. Samira is an afterthought, practically just treated as a warning bell, a canary in the coal mine for Robby's state of mind.
All this combines to make everything they're doing with her feel so gross. Season one was largely about her proving that she belongs, that her methods are valuable. Now those methods don't exist. She's lost faith but there's no focus on why she's feeling that way, or what happened to self possessed, driven, determined Samira. The completely collapsed hierarchy of the season, with people straight up not treating her like a senior resident or reporting to her, has meant that even the internal logic of her crisis of faith being prompted by failing to check a med student's work falls flat. She's not making a mistake because she's rushing and struggling to keep pace, she's apparently doing it because...it isn't even clear! Robby blames it on her being distracted by her mother, but she was paying enough attention to ask about the rest of the ultrasound, just not enough to push for the details or look herself, completely unrelated to who she was in season one, and immediately after, she's bemoaning her dying eggs? As I've said before, I had complicated feelings about that line completely on its own terms – it's both a believable thing for her to be thinking about and the grossest possible way of conveying that idea – but to tie that to her missing a detail? It feels so deeply, endlessly misogynistic. And that becomes even doubly so when you think about how no one lectured Shen last season, when he was supervising Ellis and they gave a patient too much blood, leading to clots popping and him starting to bleed out again.
I don't think Samira's going to leave. It'd be an insane storytelling choice to have her start the season talking about the job she accepted and the reasons that's suddenly up in the air and have her talk about alternatives she's uninterested in and have this loss of faith for her to actually leave. But it's all just feeling deeply odd and meanspirited. A thirty year old woman completely defined by constantly caring about the details and errors isn't catching any errors while other people are. Her error isn't linked to anything but "oh, look at this woman that can't handle it". Her mentor is treating it like further evidence she doesn't belong, even though it's the complete opposite of what he was mad at her about last season, and doesn't make any sense as a plot.
I don't know. I just...it sucks. Everything about this sucks immensely, and I'm so frustrated with every single decision made about her story right now, mostly because of the sheer amount of lost potential. I can think of ways to make every single decision with her plot really exciting and rich and meaningful, but they've been so uninterested in doing it and unwilling to give her a fraction of the necessary screentime to make it work. I'm over it.