Season 2 of the award-winning Peacock original Dr. Death tells the story of the charismatic Miracle Man surgeon, Dr. Paolo Macchiarinni, who promised to revolutionize the way we see organ transplants. The series intertwines with Paolo’s treatment of patients at the Karolinska Institute in 2012 and his relationship with New York-based journalist Benita Alexander across eight episodes, so this in-depth recap will include everything that was unveiled throughout.
Dr. Death Season 2 Recap
Episode 1 – “Like Magic”
In 2013, in New York, reporter Benita Alexander began work on a TV special about the world-renowned surgeon Dr. Paolo Macchiarinni. Paolo is about to perform his innovative surgery, where he uses magic, stem cells, and plastic to operate on Hana, a little girl who was born without a trachea organ.
In her personal life, Benita’s ex-husband is dying from terminal cancer, and the woman is struggling to maintain her composure in front of her 9-year-old daughter. While filming the documentary, Benita and Paolo begin a romantic entanglement, which is as unprofessional as it gets.
A year prior, in Stockholm, Paolo’s promising research landed him a job at the prestigious Karolinska Institute. The institute’s director believes Paolo’s work will earn Karolinska its first Nobel prize. Doctors Ana Lasbrey and Anders Svensson are immediately taken with Paolo and eager to join his team, but Dr. Nathan Gamelli is skeptical about the science behind Paolo’s claims of being able to create a fully working windpipe out of plastic.
The episode ends with Paolo’s first receiver of a donor windpipe struggling to breathe.
Episode 2 – “Worth The Risk”
This episode centers on the worldwind romance between Paolo and Benita. HAnah’s passing from “complications” after her seemingly successful transplant forces Benita to change the direction of her documentary. Eventually, she starts dating Paolo who sweeps her off her feet with expensive trips and five-star hotels. At first, Benita’s daughter is not keen on her mother’s new boyfriend but eventually warms up to him. Paolo proposes to Benita over Christmas and she says yes.
Paolo invites Benita to Moscow, where they meet Yulia, a former dancer left with a damaged windpipe after a horrible accident. Paolo wants to perform his magical plastic trachea surgery on Yulia as she would be his first elective patient.
In the Stockholm timeline, Paolo convinces terminally ill Ph.D. student Andemariam Beyene to become the first patient to receive his groundbreaking windpipe. The surgery is seemingly a success and Paolo’s research gets published in a prestigious journal.
The episode ends with Anders finding that all his lab rats died soon after receiving the plastic windpipes.
Episode 3 – “The Horizon”
As soon as the special about Paolo airs he takes it upon himself to announce his and Benita’s engagement in front of all her friends and colleagues. She’s angry with him at first, but the good doctor gets back on her good side by inviting her on a trip to Italy to meet his mother.
Paolo somehow convinces Benita that the Pope himself is the one who will marry them. However, Benita’s rose-colored glasses seem to fall off when her friends find the Pope’s published schedule doesn’t include her wedding ceremony.
Rattled, Benita asks a private investigator to run a deep dive into Paolo’s life.
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In the Stockholm timeline, Ana tries talking Anders into not making his rat research results public (all the rats that received the plastic trachea died) and suggests he might be at fault for the rodent’s demise. Nate bonds with Chris, an American patient of Paolo’s with terminal throat cancer. For Chris, the surgery was his last hope. Sadly, the young man dies shortly after, but Ana insists his passing had nothing to do with Paolo’s magical windpipe.
Episode 4 – “Tarantela Telaraña”
Benita’s dream wedding turns into her life’s biggest nightmare. The private investigator uncovered Paolo was previously arrested for medical malpractice. She calls her wedding venue and supposed honeymoon hotel; she’s shocked to learn that Paolo lied about booking anything for their nuptials.
When she confronts Paolo about her findings, he tries explaining it away by saying he’s some sort of super-doctor-spy. Thankfully, at this point, Benita has had enough of Paolo’s lies and asks him to leave.
In Stockholm, Anders was close to reporting his study as inconclusive, but a bizarre press conference convinces him to dig deeper into Paolo’s research. Nate and Anders are horrified to uncover that Paolo’s entire body of work is based on a lie.
He never had any successful animal studies. True to the series’s title, Dr. Death is experimenting on people. His first human patient, Andy, is back at Katerinska for a check-up and he’s not doing well.
Meanwhile, Paolo is about to perform his trial on a young Turkish woman, Yesim, who arrives at the institute for a consultation.
Episode 5 – “191”
In the season’s most heartwrenching episode yet, we get to watch the slow and unimaginably painful decline of Yesim Cesir, through Nate’s eyes. She initially goes to Katerinska for a consultation hoping to receive the plastic airway transplant as an elective surgery.
The only problem is that Paolo is only authorized to perform his surgeries as compassionate care for terminally ill patients. Not one to back away from a challenge, Paolo removes Yesim’s lung during what was meant to be a routine keyring surgery, making her a candidate for his plastic trachea.
Nate is tasked to take care of her post-op but poor Yesmin’s complications keep getting worse. By the end of the episode, the young woman has been subjected to over 250 surgeries, is in constant pain and several of her internal organs have failed.
Of course, Paolo blames her decline on Nate, as does Yesim. Nate eventually arranges for Yesim to be transferred to the US, where a team of surgeons agrees to try and remove her plastic trachea.
Episode 6 – “The Fog”
A heartbroken Benita cancels her wedding and begins investigating Paolo on her own. He seems to have lied about everything, even his marital status. In Italy, she speaks to a man who paid Paolo his life savings to get his sick wife closer to the top of the donor list only to be ignored by the doctor when she passed away before he could operate.
In Barcelona, Benita goes to the address she and Paolo were supposed to move to after the wedding, but she ends up at an empty lot. When she eventually finds Paolo’s address, she sees his wife and two children but doesn’t dare to confront him.
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In Stockholm, Nate and Anders start working together to bring Paolo down. Ana becomes disillusioned with Paolo when he insists on continuing the elective surgery on Yulia even if the plastic trachea isn’t a correct match. She goes back to Karolinska, where Paolo’s first patient just died, and his wife agrees to an autopsy.
Now working together, Nate, Ana, and Anders look at Danny’s transplant post-mortem and… you don’t need to be a doctor to see that’s not how it’s supposed to look.
Episode 7 – “Compassionate Uses”
The three whistleblowers work together on a report about the complications suffered by the three patients who received Paolo’s plastic trachea. When their report does come out, Paolo returns to Karolinska to defend his good name. Unsurprisingly, the institution sides with him, while Nate, Ana, and Anders end up arrested.
When Yulia comes out of surgery, she immediately feels something is wrong, but Paolo parades her around the medical board, hoping to gain more funds for his “research.”
In New York, Benita pitches the story of Paolo’s con to several editors. One of her colleagues is mostly interested in her personal story with the doctor, and during the interview, he heavily implies she’s only out for revenge. Even worse, Benita is horrified to learn that Paolo is still in contact with her impressionable daughter.
As Benita is about to give up on exploding Paolo for the dangerous conman he was, she receives an interesting phone alert; The whistleblowers’ report leaked.
Episode 8 – “Surgeons, Bachelors, and Butchers”
While Anders’s wife gets the three whistleblowers released from prison, the Karolinska board of directors summons all three to “defend’’ their report. Instead of showing interest in the published work, board members accuse the three of breaching patient confidentiality and insinuate they’re acting out of spite.
Ana goes to Russia hoping to save Yulia’s life but is heartbroken to learn the young woman has passed away.
After the whistleblower report leaked, Benita used it to get an expose published about Paolo’s misgivings. Thanks to the media attention the case has been getting, the second time Ana, Nate, and Anders meet with the Karolinska heads, they’re pleased to see the institution had no other option but to call in a third-party reviewer.
Paolo continues to operate in Russia but realizes he’s in trouble when Benita’s expose reaches the public eye. However, the Swedish authorities refuse to press criminal charges. He continued to perform his surgeries internationally even after losing his position at Karolinska.
The show ends with Paolo washing his hands of blood after having operated on yet another unsuspecting victim.
What did you think of Dr. Death Season 2? Comment below.
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