The Resident 's Emily VanCamp Talks Nic's Recovery After Getting Stabbed and Nearly Dying
Fox's The Resident just took us all on one hell of a roller coaster ride.
After it was revealed in last week's episode that the hospital had been sold by Red Rock and would be torn down, this week's episode began with everyone's last day. Patients were being transferred and doctors were working on getting new jobs, but the city was not adapting well to losing a huge hospital. Every other hospital quickly ran out of beds, and one man who was turned away from another ER became very agitated.
He got so agitated that he wandered into Chastain and started harassing Nic (Emily VanCamp) and Mina (Shaunette Renée Wilson), and he pulled out a knife. Mina got slashed on the arm, but the pregnant Nic got straight up stabbed in the side. She fell to the floor and was soon surrounded by a terrifying amount of blood.
Everyone feared that something "catastrophic" had happened when Nic wouldn't wake up after being treated, but in the end, some recent bloodwork showed that her thyroid was to blame. That was an easy fix, but Conrad (Matt Czuchry) spent a lot of time fearing the worst about his wife and baby before that fix was found.
Not only was Nic saved, but so was Chastain. The county stepped in and bought the place, making it a public hospital run by its own doctors. All is well, and the annoying, villainous Red Rock is now out of the picture.
So what does this mean for the doctors, and what does Nic's ordeal mean for her and her baby? We got VanCamp on the phone to find out.
"Inevitably, I think there's a lot of trauma associated with this kind of attack," VanCamp tells E! News. "Plus the extra layer of already being concerned about the pregnancy and having her own personal fears about that. But I also will say that Nic is a strong, tough girl. As much as we see her kind of going through it and still struggling, her focus will become really the health and well-being of the baby. I think there will be ups and downs, which is to be expected."
Nic spent the majority of this episode unconscious in a hospital bed, so it was really Conrad who bore the brunt of the emotional trauma. Not only was he about to lose his job (or so he thought), but, for a minute, there was a real fear that Nic might not wake up, and he was understandably distraught.
"We've never seen Conrad so vulnerable and helpless, and I think that's really interesting," VanCamp says. "There isn't much that he can do, and he has to rely heavily on his friends and colleagues to pull Nic out of this. There's a lot of weight to this episode and I'm sure everyone will feel that, but then I think once they hear the heartbeat again, there's hope."
VanCamp describes the upcoming episodes as "a little bit of a roller coaster" for Nic and Conrad as they deal with what happened.
"We'll definitely see both of them being a little bit more protective and then having sort of different moments of feeling OK about everything and trying to help the other one along through that," she teases. "They both have their good moments and their bad moments, but they're pretty solid in their relationship so you know they're getting through it as best they can."
As for everything else that happened in this episode, VanCamp describes it as a way to "shake things up" and teases that it will allow for everyone at the hospital to make some changes of their own.
"It's kind of an opportunity for everyone in a good way," she says, and we'll have to wait to find out exactly what that means. At the very least, there's no reason to worry about the hospital any longer (or ever). As VanCamp says, "I think The Resident without Chastain would be a strange thing."
The show made a very deliberate choice to set the season in a world after COVID-19, though it has occasionally flashed back to scenes that took place during the pandemic. Now, VanCamp says the show is pretty firmly moving past it, though it will be "ever present."
"It's definitely still there...but it's not like the focal point of everything, which in a sense I think is nice," she explains. "It allows for a bit of escapism. I mean, that's all we hear about in the news and we're all focused on it every day, which is important, but when you want to tune out from that it's kind of nice."
Next week's episode of The Resident will bring in Nic's childhood friend Bilie (Jessica Lucas) to help with her recovery and will also feature the return of How To Get Away With Murder star Conrad Ricamora. It airs Tuesday at 8 p.m. on Fox.
Peacock is live now! Check out NBCU's new streaming service here.
Solve the daily Crossword
