Summary
“This Is All I Need” puts several characters (and the audience) through the emotional wringer as they discover that the world has changed quickly and perhaps irrevocably in their absence.
This recap of New Amsterdam season 3, episode 4, “This Is All I Need”, contains spoilers.
There’s a compelling argument to be made that nothing will ever be the same after the Covid-19 pandemic, and that seems especially true for the characters in New Amsterdam. After battling the virus on the frontlines, the hospital, and indeed all of their personal lives, are no longer as they remember them. This is a concept most obviously explored through Floyd Reynolds, who has returned to his former position only to find that there doesn’t seem to be a place for him anymore. He wasn’t gone long, but now, just like that, it feels as if he was never there at all. He spends most of “This Is All I Need” trying to figure out where he belongs now. Max thinks it might be a step down, but to him, he needs a hand up.
It certainly didn’t help that Floyd officially returned just as everyone else was too busy with personal matters to help him get settled back in. Helen, for instance, was dealing with “family stuff”, which mostly amounted to her playing phone tennis while trying to get the body of her half-brother, Farhan, to where it needed to be following his untimely death. Keeping this subplot at one end of a phone sapped some of its emotional power, but it also allowed Shin to really bond with Helen, offering her help and understanding when she needed it. Since they ended up in bed together by episode’s end, his tactful approach was obviously appreciated, and their relationship seems a bit stronger as a result.
While Helen and Cassian shared welcome snippets of their personal lives, it was Iggy, of all people, who had the high-drama case of New Amsterdam season 3, episode 4. His patient this week, Linus, was a young man who had been thrown out by his mother for reasons that turned out to be unique and tragic. Thanks to lesions on her brain, she no longer recognised him and, contrary to the show’s usually neat and tidy storytelling, never would again. While Iggy managed to finesse a way in which they could both be part of each other’s lives, it was far from a happy ending. But it also allowed Iggy to work with Agnes in the absence of Vijay, who remains on leave.
“This Is All I Need” also gives Lauren a compelling dilemma in the ED, one that gives Casey more of a voice. When one of the doctors is attacked by a patient, Lauren demands that their safety is better maintained, which manifests as a police presence that, ironically, makes Casey and many others feel much less safe than they did before. And that’s without even taking into account the patients who’re addicts, undocumented, people of colour, or any other disenfranchised group who might have very good reason to be wary of the police. Lauren meant well but didn’t consider her own privilege in the solution. What she eventually comes up with, giving the role to unemployed bouncers, felt very much like her channelling Max all the way from Connecticut.
Yes, as intimated at the end of last week’s episode, Max travelled to Connecticut to retrieve Luna from Georgia’s parents, and blimey, was this a heartbreaker. What should have been an emotional reunion turned out to be a man looking at a daughter who scarcely recognised him, who had changed so much in his absence that she was basically a different person. Just like that, Max had to grapple with not just the reality that he can’t spoil Luna in the same way her grandparents can, but that he now wouldn’t even know how to even if he could. He doesn’t even know what she likes to eat.
But Luna at least appreciates the effort. After a quick visit to Georgia’s grave, he and Luna return to his modest apartment, which he spent an earlier part of the episode readying for her return, and it was like she never left. Anyone who didn’t well up at this scene isn’t to be trusted. The downside of Luna returning home is that we might all be in for a level of cuteness that I’m not sure we can take.
