Doc has a new chief, and new series regular Felicity Huffman debuts as Dr. Joan Ridley, taking over the position, in the second episode of Season 2, airing on Tuesday, September 30 (there was a special premiere on September 14, and that episode will rerun on September 23). Fox has now released photos from “Delusions of Grandeur,” showing Huffman at the hospital, alongside Molly Parker — Joan was Amy’s mentor — and Omar Metwally, as well as a look at one of the patients.
In this episode, Fox teases, “Amy grapples with having memories while treating a mother-to-be with a mysterious condition. Also, Dr. Joan Ridley, Amy’s mentor, visits Westside.”
Joan arrives with “her eye on the job,” executive producer Hank Steinberg told TV Insider ahead of the season. (Prior to the accident that took years of memories from her, Amy was chief, then Scott Wolf‘s Richard was interim chief.) “Joan is a tough, old-school feminist, big believer in female empowerment and self-made, and a really interesting, eccentric personality. She is double boarded in internal medicine and surgery and has traveled the world doing Doctors With Borders type of medicine, so she’s been all over the world, she’s extremely adventurous and sure of herself. She’s tough and exacting on the other doctors in a similar way to how Amy is, but she’s smoother with how she does it. So, she’s a bit more carrot-and-stick, whereas Amy was kind of all stick. Amy learned and watched Joan, but she sort of took the stick part and didn’t take much of the carrot part in terms of how she worked with her staff.”
In the premiere, Amy had memory flashes amidst a hostage situation. She then decided to enter a sensory deprivation tank in hopes of having more.
“It’s a process, and it’s an interesting process. Amy will do things proactively to try to get her memories back. She will instant results. Like anything else, results are not always instant, and with the brain, you can’t dictate, it does. So, I think she’ll be surprised along the way to see that maybe she doesn’t remember anything initially, but then the brain can surprise you when you least expect it and go, ‘Here’s something,’” executive producer Barbie Kligman told us.
Scroll down to check out the photos from this episode, then let us know what you’re hoping to see from Felicity Huffman’s Joan Ridley in the comments section.
Doc, Tuesdays, 9/8c, Fox