#The Good Doctor Season 5 Episode 1 Review: New Beginnings

Wait. What?

Just when I thought The Good Doctor Season 5 Episode 1 offered us a silly patient storyline to try to offset the ridiculous amount of time spent on Lea and Shaun’s engagement, the patient turned out to be the new owner of the hospital!

I did NOT see that one coming. Well played, The Good Doctor.

The ADHD/potential kidney cancer storyline was easily one of the most irritating — until it wasn’t.

I didn’t like that this patient was so impossible. It felt as if her constant popping up everywhere like some sort of bizarre poltergeist was supposed to be comic relief and that ADHD was the butt of the joke.

It was an odd thing for a series that’s centered around taking its lead character’s Autism seriously to do, so in retrospect, I should have realized there was more to this woman than met the eye.

But still. Nothing about her seemed particularly realistic other than the initial set of symptoms she presented the doctors with.

Besides the fact that she was a walking stereotype of untreated ADHD, I also found it odd that she had free reign of the hospital. Patients shouldn’t be able to get into employee-only areas or disappear when they’re supposed to be getting biopsies.

Did Glassman or the other board members know she was undercover while she considered purchasing the hospital? That’s the only way her ability to show up wherever she wanted made any sense.

It was a brilliant twist that got my attention after sitting through all of that wedding silliness.

Now I’m interested in what happens next, which is no small feat after how much the Lea/Shaun stuff bored me.

Maybe if I was a big Lea/Shaun shipper, I’d have been thrilled with this episode.

But I never particularly loved this couple and was disappointed when Shaun broke up with Carly, who I thought was a far better match for him, and reconciled with Lea.

And the 70 percent or so of the hour that was devoted to Lea’s fears surrounding her engagement party didn’t help me feel better about this couple, either. It felt like a giant waste of time that could have been devoted to a third medical storyline.

About the worst part was Glassman’s drunken toast.

It was entirely inappropriate, and I expected better from him.

This was not the time or place to philosophize about how most marriages fail or to announce that Debbie left him, and it was so out of character and unprofessional that I thought the board meeting’s “one agenda” was going to turn out to be to remove Glassman for his behavior at the party.

Andrews’ dilemma over inviting multiple dates also was not amusing, and I doubt anyone was surprised that he ended up sleeping with the bartender.

I guess this season, Andrews is going to be jumping into bed with one woman after another now that his wife is gone. I hope this arc ends quickly.

The one good aspect of the engagement party silliness was Lea’s backstory about why she wanted it all to be perfect.

Lea: My first wedding I decided to be spontaneous. We thought it would be romantic and fun. The DJ was an hour late, we ran out of booze, and somehow there were no napkins, not a single one. The wedding was a disaster and so was the marriage. So I really need to get this one right.

Jordan: If you’re not willing to risk little things go wrong, you’ll never get the chance to have the big things go right.

It made sense that Lea equated the disaster of a wedding party she had with her first marriage ending badly, and I could empathize with that.

I was glad that Jordan convinced her not to get caught up in perfectionism, but it didn’t seem reasonable for the doctors to all drop what they were doing at the last minute to go to the party.

Shaun and Park were dealing with a potentially life-and-death situation, and it might have been easier for Shaun to make it to the party if he’d had more than five minutes’ notice.

Many autistic people have trouble with sudden changes to their schedule, too, so The Good Doctor missed an opportunity here!

This has been an unfortunate trend over the last few years.

The Good Doctor started off being about an Autistic doctor,  but the Autism angle has mostly disappeared now. It’s sad because that’s what made the series unique, as well as what drew me, as an Autistic person, to it in the first place.

Anyway, Shaun’s case was far more compelling than the engagement party was.

It presented a dilemma with potentially life-threatening consequences and demonstrated nicely some of the ways problems with social safety nets intersect to deny people the ability to get the health care they need.

Sarah must have had decent insurance, as the surgeries not being covered never came up, but she didn’t have access to child care, and that was causing her to delay putting off a surgery that could literally mean the difference between life and death for her.

Not only did her older son have cancer that might have been prevented had Sarah been able to have regular cervical cancer screenings, but he had to be more like an adult than a little boy because she had no one else to help her take care of her younger son.

The Uncle Nick story was touching, though I wish that there’d been time to go more into depth with this entire story rather than spending the bulk of the hour on the engagement party stuff.

This could have been a powerful story, but it got short shrift because the writers’ focus was elsewhere.

Finally, Mateo returned to The Good Doctor!

I figured he would, and I’m glad Lim has found some happiness after the way she struggled on The Good Doctor Season 4. (By the way, what happened to her PTSD? It seems to be gone!)

As soon as Mateo showed back up, though, I knew he was going to end up working at St. Bonaventure, and I’m not sure that’s a great idea.

It throws us right back into all the problems with Lim dating Melendez while one of them was working for the other, and no one needs a redux of that.

Your turn, The Good Doctor Fanatics. What did you think of the season premiere?

Hit the big, blue SHOW COMMENTS button and let us know!

Missed the episode?

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The Good Doctor airs on ABC on Mondays at 10 PM EST/PST.

Jack Ori is a senior staff writer for TV Fanatic. His debut young adult novel, Reinventing Hannah, is available on Amazon. Follow him on Twitter.