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Three young doctors have been recruited to a remote village Somewhere in the South American Jungle, where western medicine gives way to the healing powers of rubber tree sap, but western modes of Freudian drama endure. Do our doctors have highly specific personal traumas that are driving them? They sure do! Tommy's unsure if he's got what it takes to quarterback the Dillon Panthers, tchotchkes talk to Lily, and Mina's mom is Meryl Streep. Or: Tommy's a fratty plastic surgeon, Lily's a pie-eyed girl scout with a dead fiancé, and Mina is an overachiever and perfectionist who overworked herself into fatally misdiagnosing a kid back in the states. They join the medical practice run by Dr. Ben, Dr. Ben's meandering accent, Otis (and his disdain for these punk kids) and Zee, whose Latina identity really gives her a leg up on judging the gringos.
The doctors all meet, work themselves up to bluntly revealing their various back-stories, and enjoy the pleasures of an oscillating fan in bajillion-degree heat.
There are also patients! One is Michael McKean, who tore his arm up but NASTY on the wheel of a zip line and gets freed only to have all his internal organs explode on him at once. Good thing Lily and Dr. Ben are able to run out and rustle up some coconuts for the COCONUT TRANSFUSION, after which he survives and lives to scatter his wife's ashes in a bioluminescent pond. Mina deals with an old lady who seemingly has a cold but really has asthma, and after puffing on Mina's own inhaler, she's so happy to be able to breathe (for the first time) that she gives Mina A CHICKEN. And Tommy treks out to a nearby village where he struggles to get a man to accept TB vaccines for him and his family. Things are resolved!
And just as Lily is staring into Dr. Ben's eyes long enough for you to write out the words "Meredith Grey" and "Derek Shepherd" in calligraphy, that crazy redhead from Twilight shows up as Dr. Ben's girlfriend. AND it sounds like Dr. Ben has a dead/divorced wife/girlfriend in his past. In summation: these doctors bring death and heartbreak wherever they go -- RUN, LOCALS, RUN!
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!Our story begins "Somewhere in South America"! See, it's "off the map," so we can't say if it's Brazil or Peru or whatever. (And from the looks of it, it's from that area of Uruguay known as "Oahu.") We zoom in on rescue workers trying to help out a distressed kayaker, while three doctors look on from the cliff above, casually talking about how the rescuers are going to fuck this up. The doctors: Dr. Ben: scruffy/cute guy from The Ring whose New Zealand accent shows up when it damn well pleases; Dr. Otis Cole, played by Jason George, who has been on every ABC show possible for the last three years and who I always end up liking despite the fact that it always seems that he should be playing the down-low husband in a Tyler Perry movie; and nurse Zitajalehrena Alvarez (who we're calling Zee, because: come on), played Valerie Cruz, who I'd thought was a show-killer but mostly because I was in the shit with her and Hidden Palms. So the three of them are clucking about the rescue in this really detached way, which combined with the overlook and the island setting is making me think Wings of Desire crossed with Jacob and the other guy from Lost. But then, Wim Wenders never had his mopey angels bitching about the new batch of young doctors about to arrive today. Ben's looking forward to the influx of new blood; Otis has no patience for these resume-padders; Zee -- who is Latina, with an accent and everything -- rolls her eyes at the cocky white saviors about to ride in and save them. Get used to that. For a show that is basically about cocky white people rolling in to save simple brown people, Off the Map sure likes to talk about just that. Meanwhile, the rescue below is going bad, so naturally Dr. Ben hands Zee his stethoscope and LEAPS off the INSANELY HIGH cliff into the water to go help out. After a moment making eyes with Zee, Otis follows suit. EXTREME ISLAND DOCTORS, y'all!
Elsewhere, a super shabby taxi rolls up on the dirt road in front of the "Clinica Cruz Del Sur," and out steps Lily, played by that girl who talked to tchotchkes in Niagara Falls on that one show once. ...Oh, I'm just kidding -- I watched almost two episodes of Wonderfalls, I know what's up. Also, I guess after a decade of TV characters naming their babies Lily, now we're seeing them show up as the protagonists. I guess they'll all be in romantic relationships with dudes named Parker eventually. The cab driver hands Lily his card, all "You'll need me when you decide to leave after a day in this place, Gringa," et cetera. Lily says she'll be staying, but all of a sudden that redhead from Twilight with all the hair comes bounding up to take the cab. "He's right," she proclaims brusquely, "you should definitely take the card." She tells the cabbie to take her to the airport.
Lily wanders into the clinic, which is teeming with all sorts of people, including Zee putting a little kid's arm in a sling. When Lily can't pronounce Zee's billion-syllable name quickly enough, Zee rolls her eyes at the "great white hope" in front of her, then tells her to put her bags down and go pitch in. This leads Lily to the partially cordoned-off area that's being used for an ER, where Drs. Ben and Otis are trying to remove a sting-ray from the kayaker's Achilles tendon. The guy is pretty dedicated to screaming and thrashing around in pain. Lily joins two other onlooker docs: Mina, played by Mamie "Daughter of Streep" Gummer; and Tommy, played by Zach "Matt Saracen" Gilford. Kayak Dude is screaming for painkillers, which gives Otis a nice opportunity to establish that this clinic doesn't have much in the way of drugs, because they "survive on donation." Lily steps forward to pitch in, and Dr. Ben instructs her and the other two to hold this fucker down while he tries to extract the ray's stinger from his heel. Ben tries to count to three, but Screamy Kayak thrashes and knocks Lily over, at which point Ben goes for plan B: punching Kayak in the nose and then yanking the stinger out while he's distracted. You know, like your mom would do when you had a tooth that needed pulling.
After the title card, Dr. Ben leads our three new docs around the facilities, giving us a bit of exposition along the way: they're the only medical facility for 200 miles; their surgical unit is located on the patio, so "sterile" isn't the first word that comes to mind; no high-tech equipment, no "Big Pharma," basically medicine like it was practiced in 1952, but with the bonus of a crazy selection of jungle herbs and potions. "We have plants that cure viruses," Ben says, "tree sap to heal wounds, insects that stop gangrene." Possibly moss that will help keep your accent from fading away? (It's the craziest thing -- Martin Henderson is FROM New Zealand, but there are full scenes where he speaking with an American accent. And then it's back to Kiwi Surprise in the .) "Out of hundreds of doctors, I picked you three," Ben tells them. "So don't screw it up," Otis grumbles as he enters the potion room. See the dynamic! Tommy asks Otis if, since they've been traveling so far, they can catch some beach time before they start actually being doctors. "You know, get our swim on?" So Tommy's that guy. Otis looks at him with barely restrained contempt, then leaves.
Later, Tommy keeps Tommying it up, though, telling the "ladies" how psyched he is about this remote setting: "Not only are there no malpractice suits here, but there's surfing!" Meanwhile, Lily and Mina are gawking at Dr. Ben changing his shirt, giving us that "admiring his credentials" moment from every commercial we've seen for three months. I have to agree with Mina, though: ain't nothing wrong with those credentials. It's enough to make her take a puff of her asthma inhaler. Tommy's still bouncing around about the beaches -- topless ones, of course. He hands Lily and Mina free sunblock samples, because it's be a shame for "those ones to shrivel up prematurely." Yes, he's all sorts of That TV Guy, but Zach Gilford's keeping him on the right side of adorable. For now. He bops out on his way to a house call that Otis is sending him on. Mina notices that Lily brought her own trauma kit, calling her a "girl scout." Lily: "So guilty."
Tommy ambles on out of the clinic puzzling over a map. Silly Tommy. Don't you know we're OFF THE MAP? A local kid named Charlie tells him he must've pissed off Dr. Cole something serious if he's being sent out on a house call on his first day, but Tommy maintains that this is a vote of confidence in him. Charlie tells Tommy he'll need his services as translator, especially once he tells Tommy he's "trece" years old and Tommy has no earthly idea what that means. Tommy isn't about to bring a little kid into a TB-infected village, but he relents when Charlie explains the trek to the remote village is a bitch. You guys, I'm super glad the show's giving us a cute kid as a way to win our support for the native population. Kind of like the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi.
Zee finds Lily and Mina and is haranguing them about her 40 patients and being short a doctor (Twilighty cab-stealer from earlier) when Dr. Ben interjects his fine self with news that there's an emergency out in the jungle. Both Mina and Lily jump at the chance, but it's Lily and her already-packed trauma kit that get the nod. Mina gets a handful of charts as consolation prize. Meanwhile, it should surprise you to the degree of zero that Dr. Ben gets around on a motorcycle and that Lily hesitates to grab him around his waist until he tells her to. What it lacks in originality it makes up for in its evocative portrait of grabbing Martin Henderson around the waist.
Otis finds Mina in an exam room, knuckle-deep in some poor man's butthole, not to put too fine a point on it. The patient presented with limb stiffness and numbness, and Mina still hasn't been able to rule out hemorrhagic fever. Otis grabs a bottle of ibuprofen and sends the violated man along his way. He explains to Mina that sometimes it's not hemorrhagic fever, sometimes it's just tennis elbow. Mina's incredulous that in one of the world's hottest spots for infectious disease (her specialty, you'll recall), one could get tennis elbow. She pauses, then gets a flash: "Oh, because of a machete?" Heh. Otis condescendingly tells her no, because of tennis. Oh, sorry, after ten minutes of "You're not in Kansas anymore" pontificating from these doctors she's supposed to feel shamed that she assumed nobody plays tennis in the middle of the rainforest. This show should be called White Guilt Volleyball.
Tommy's still following Charlie, as their trek leads them down a hillside towards the water. Tommy is hardcore whining about how exhausted he is. "This is why Americans are fat and lazy," Charlie lectures. "Because you drive everywhere." Oh, Charlie's gonna be a peach, I can tell. They finally make it to TB village, where they find a man and his two daughters hacking and wheezing, in seriously rough shape. Tommy is alarmed that the daughters are now sick and asks (via Charlie) which family member was Dr. Cole treating. The husband points to a sheeted-off area where his esposa lies dead in her bed. Well this is discouraging.
Lily and Dr. Ben make it to the emergency site, where some tourists and their guide tell them about someone crashing into a tree and blood everywhere. The doctors ask to see the patient, at which point they're directed to the zip line way above their heads, where one man is dangling. So. That.
Back to Tommy, who is agitatedly checking on the daughters, who are coughing up blood, and telling Charlie to explain to the father that he can save their lives if he just accepts the help. The father, see, distrusts Western medicine and actually made his wife stop taking the antibiotics, which he blames for killing her. Which is all totally backwards, and Tommy can't find a way to explain that without it sounding like, "Stupid motherfucker, it's your fault your wife's dead, now listen to us smart white people before you kill your kids too." At some point, Charlie refuses to translate to this poor man that Tommy thinks he's responsible for killing his wife. And Tommy gets frustrated and finally washes his hands of the whole mess, saying there's nothing more he can do.
Back to Lily and Dr. Ben, who are learning that the cables aren't made to support the weight of three people -- maybe not even two. Which means Lily's going to have to go out alone, as she's the lighter of the two. Ben heads out on a parallel line, and Lily gets less than encouraging words from the adventurist who hooks her up. She asks if it's safe, and she gets "Hold with your right, brake with your left" in response. So she heads on out on her line, and of course she can't brake properly so she ends up slamming into the patient which, despite the fact that his forearm is caught up in the roller, is somehow not a catastrophic development. She just stops. Was that supposed to be misdirection. Anyway, this poor bastard -- played by the wonderful Michael McKean -- is catatonic with shock, which is good because his arm looks like hamburger meat and his shirt is covered in blood. Ben yells over for Lily to tourniquet the arm and then cut him loose of the wheel, so they can get him back down before he bleeds out. Too bad Lily keeps trying to get him to respond, then, because once he snaps out of it, he realizes he's hanging over a death ravine with his arm torn open inside a metal contraption. So, yeah, he starts screaming.
Back at La Clinica, Mina is administering to a little old lady with a cold, and struggling to find the correct Spanish to properly convey that she should take these pills and come back if her fever returns. Isn't it kind of monstrously irresponsible to be treating these patients without being able to communicate to them? Can't they find more adorable local children to act as go-betweens? Actually, couldn't they have found three doctors out of the apparently HUNDREDS who applied who had a functional grasp of Spanish -- a not entirely obscure language, even among dumb gringos? Maybe this clinic has to make do with leeches and hoodoo powder because they're a terrible institution and nobody wants to throw good money after bad? Questions for discussion!
At the zip line, Lily's got McKean screaming in one ear and Dr. Ben screaming from the other line that she'd better calm him down if she wants to save his life. She does this by grabbing him by the face and ordering him to stop it. Which works! She then explains to him how she's going to cut into his arm in order to free him from the line, then she's going to strap him to her and get the hell off this God-defying contraption already. She makes him look at her, not at the arm she's trying to cut (carefully, so she doesn't sever an artery) and the pain it's going to cause. He tells her his name is Ed and he came to the jungle 40 years ago with his wife on their honeymoon. "Best trip we ever had." Somehow, the zip line didn't seem so high then. We eventually cut to Ed on a gurney, on the ground, being led to an ambulance. He seems stable, though they want to check him back at the clinic for internal injuries. As Ben and Lily walk back to the motorcycle, he remarks that this must be a hell of a day "back." He says he check her records and knows she took a fairly lengthy leave of absence. Lily hesitates, then explains that she took the leave after she "lost someone," but that she's back now and ready to be a doctor. "Doesn't make it any easier," Ben replies, in a way that supposed to seem wise but really just seems dim.
La Clinica. Zee is one again bitching to anyone who will listen about being short-staffed and surrounded by gringos who don't care. Otis happens by and engages her with a "What's the matter, Loca," that I approve of on rhetorical ground but which can't help but make Otis pale by comparison to my beloved Nina Flowers. Anyway, he gives her a platform to complain about these doctors who come in all idealistic and then flee within weeks. Specifically Twilight Cab-Stealer, whose exit today really seems to sting. Otis needles her that she's a great teacher with a heart of gold who secretly loves shepherding these pale-faced sheep. She can't seem to stay mad at him with his adorable face smiling at hers. She tells him her heart of gold is "only for you." Look, I'm not going to pretend those thousand promos we saw for this show didn't feature these two making out, so I'm asking: are these two together currently or just flirty and they'll hook up later. This shit is vague.
That night, Ed is lying in a bed at the clinic as Ben and Lily use an ultrasound machine to check for internal injuries. Ben says he does seem to have ruptured his spleen, which may end up healing itself. Otherwise, it's looking like surgery. Ed is, understandably, un-psyched about the prospect of going under the knife in the middle of the jungle. Ben heads off as Lily asks Ed if there's anyone she can call for him. He explains that his wife is dead; he'd been putting off their return trip for thirty years, until it was too late. Outside, Lily pesters Ben to find a way to airlift Ben to a real hospital, but he says it'll take too long.
Mina's still trying to make it back to her room with her suitcase when she comes across the same old lady she treated for a cold earlier. Frustrated, Mina -- in English -- tries to explain that it's just chest congestion and she can go home. "Ho-o-o-o-ome? Or not." The lady stares back at her, impassive, and Mina gives up and trudges off.
Speaking of trudging, Tommy makes it back to the clinic under serious nightfall, and he finds Otis lounging on a bench by the stairs. He asks "Plastics" how his field trip was today, and Tommy bluntly replies that Otis's patient is dead. This is not good news to Otis, as he had her on a prescription regimen and she was improving. Tommy explains that the husband refused treatment and that now the whole family is sick. Tommy then produces a note -- for purposes of AMA ass-covering -- in which the husband signed that he was refusing care against doctor's advice. I think the note is written on his luggage tag. Otis thinks this is a joke -- that Tommy himself is a joke. Tommy's all, "You don't know me!" At which point we shift hardcore into "Time to Learn About Tommy's Damage." See, Otis did his homework and learned that Tommy drank his way through med school and partied just hard enough they he could get by and get himself a nice job doing boob jobs in a strip mall. "You're not stupid," he sums up, "you're lazy." Tommy starts to ask what he was supposed to do, at which point Otis yells the promo-friendly "YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE A DOCTOR!" He orders Tommy back to the village at first light tomorrow, at which point he will treat his patients. One would assume with blow-darts filled with medicine.
After the break, Tommy finds Lily standing in front on a tiny desk fan, amid what appears to be a small cabana party. It's 3AM, and Tommy is bitching about how hot it still is. So Lily introduces him to her friend the desk fan. So now they're both swaying with the fan as Mina comes up, griping about losing 50 pesos on the scorpion-vs.-tarantula match they've got going across the way. They're still swaying, which Mina doesn't get until Lily drags her into the fan's path. "Oh my God," Mina sighs, "I just had an orgasm." Lily decides it's all not so bad, with the fan and the fact that she saved a life on a zip line today. Mina -- clearly our Cristina Yang -- is nakedly jealous of Lily. She also notes that the web site for the clinic promised a "perfect beach." Tommy notes that the beach is there, you just have to "kill yourself to get to it." Mina wrinkles her nose: "I wanna live...but I want the beach." She's the one I like, even as she complains about her day full of applying band-aids "like a school nurse." Tommy, meanwhile, is irked that they traveled all this way and they STILL can't escape their records. Lily explains to Mina that the doctors here "did their homework." Okay, enough with the homework metaphor. Point is: Tommy was clearly looking for a clean slate here, and he hasn't found it. Lily grabs them both by their shoulders and starts them swaying with the fan again.
Later, Lily stops in to check on Ed, and they chat for a bit about how he brought his wife on the trip with him -- her ashes, of course. He wanted to take her to Lago de Luz, also known as the firefly lake. Apparently at night it lights up like there are thousands of fireflies below the surface. "That's where you're going to say goodbye," Lily says. "That was the plan," says Ed. "Life sure has a way of changing your plans." This all looks like it's resonating for Lily, with regard to her particular emotional trauma. I guess if Grey's Anatomy is anything to go by, we can expect most of these medical cases to resonate with the doctors' particular emotional traumas. Lily ends up staying the night by Ed's bedside, falling asleep in the chair to his bed. Soon enough, it's morning, and Lily is jolted awake by Ed's monitor blaring. She sees Ed going into some kind of arrest, and then she checks his abdomen ... which is crazy black and blue. More black than blue.
Off in the hills, Tommy is, true to Otis's orders, hiking back to TB Village, Charlie once again as his adorable moppet guide. Tommy says that his strategy will be much the same as it was yesterday, only now he's going to "turn on the charm." Charlie wonders what the plan will be tomorrow.
Ed's in surgery, with Ben, Lily, Otis, and Zee all getting a look at the inside of his mangled abdomen. It's definitely more than just the spleen that's been affected. He starts to bleed out, and Otis tells Ben that they don't have more than one packet of AB-negative blood (they're always short on the rare blood types). Ben instructs Otis and Zee to clamp this and work on that, then he grabs Lily and hauls off for the most ridiculous shit I have ever seen. I mean, "an unknown mission."
Mina checks on her charts and sees Old Lady Chest Cold is still sitting on the same bench she was last night. Mina's too busy rolling her eyes at the stupid old lady who won't just go home to notice that she's wheezing and about to keel over. Once she does, the lady is already on the floor. Mina calls for epinephrine and starts doing chest compressions. This is what happens when you scowl at old ladies, people! They die!
So Dr. Ben and Lily are in the jungle, looking for coconuts so they can use the water in them in place of blood for Ed's transfusions. I AM COMPLETELY SERIOUS. To her credit, Lily thinks this is flatly insane. But Dr. Ben drops some knowledge about how coconut water has the same electrolyte balance as blood plasma, and this totally worked in WWII, and besides, he's already done this one whole time before. Um...okay! This is certainly going to make me feel better about myself time I'm at brunch and I start saying that my blood is 50% piña colada right now. Dr. Ben of course climbs right up the tree (we've already covered motorcycle riding and tree climbing this week -- the show had better pace itself before we get to the vine-swinging and killing boars with his bare hands). He tells Lily she has to catch these -- they're unsterile if they break, and if they hit her on the head, she's probably dead. Because all those Warner Bros. cartoons you watched as a kid were a pack of lies. Lily catches the first, then prepares for number two.
Mina manages to get ol' Wheezy breathing again through a delicate combination of screaming at her and that epinephrine she was asking for. Meanwhile, Dr. Ben and Lily return with the coconuts, place one in a net, tube it, and hang it like an IV bag. So it's gonna be that kind of show.
Tommy's examining Papa TB's kids -- who are, like, a day away from dying -- but he's having no luck convincing Papa TB to listen to him about treatment. So Tommy tries plan B: appeal to this prideful man on the basis of our shared humanity. What that translates to, then, is Tommy telling his story about how he drank and caroused his way through med school as a way to piss off Mommy and Daddy, and when they kept bugging him to quit it with the boob jobs already and make something of himself, he cut them off. And now he's got no family. "I lost my family because I was proud," he says, begging Papa TB not to do the same. It's probably for the best that Papa TB couldn't understand what Tommy was saying, because that's pretty weak sauce. Still, it convinces Charlie, who basically tells Papa, "This is a good doctor, you should listen to him." Wait, was Charlie somehow NOT saying that earlier. Charlie's an asshole, you guys! So Papa TB eventually relents (while I swear to God a knockoff of the Inception soundtrack plays in the background -- the love theme, not the metallic fart sounds) and wants to shake Tommy's hand. He begs him to help his family. Oh sure, NOW.
Back in Margaritaville, the coconut transfusion seems to have stabilized Ed. Dr. Ben removes the spleen, then had Lily shove her hand right on into the abdomen to stabilize a blood vessel. She protests that she's not a surgeon, but Ben tells her here, IN THE JUNGLE, she's a surgeon, a paramedic, search and rescue, and occasionally a mailman. A butcher, a baker, and a candlestick maker. A Madonna AND a whore. Got it.
Lily runs into Mina in the pharmacy (which, it should be clarified, is two big wooden shelves in the middle of a room), still buzzing about her coconut transfusion. Mina's too sour to be happy for her -- which is generally her resting state anyway, but in this particular case it's because she's frustrated that she can't find a steroid on the shelves, only "Ecuadorian tree sap." I'm pretty sure some athletes DO use that as a steroid, so... Anyway, Mina's real problem is that she's pissed at herself for misdiagnosing Ol' Wheezy out there. "I was looking for rare, complicated diseases," she says, "and I almost lost a woman to asthma." To that, Lily responds, "You hear hoofbeats, you gotta think horses, not zebras." Like she just read that off a pillow or something. Mina, for all her bitchiness, is kind of justified at bristling at that kind of condescending remark. She once again calls Lily a girl Scout, which Lily takes offense to. Backing down, Mina decides to defuse tensions with a little taste of her own traumatic backstory. This is beginning to feel like the Canterbury Tales of Self-Pity. MINA'S STORY: Because her hospital back home was too cutthroat for her to actually learn anything, she began moonlighting at County, eight hours a day in addition to her 12 hours in residency. One day, while she was on 72 hours without sleep, she misdiagnosed a kid who came in with a fever. She figured it was yet another kid with the flu. Turned out, he had bacterial meningitis, and he died three hours later. Mina was promptly fired from her residence, but obviously it's the boy's death that weighs heavier on her. "So sometimes it is a zebra," she says, not angrily, then leaves. You guys, I don't know how, but Meryl Streep's daughter is actually a pretty great actress. Who'd have thunk it?
Mina heads right over to an exam room where Wheezy sits, ever-silent. She stays that way while Mina, still in English, tries to explain that she has undiagnosed asthma. She's not even using Spanglish or hand motions, it's like she's just given up! Mina dumps out the contents of her bag and grabs one of her own inhalers. She puts it in Wheezy's mouth and instructs her to breathe when she discharges it. Like she just got tapped by a magic wand, Wheezy starts to breathe better. She grabs Mina's hands and starts to cry in gratitude, while Mina is uncomfortable with all this emotion.
Dr. Ben, Otis, and Lily are helping carry Ed to the helicopter, where he'll be taken to a real hospital. But Ed keeps muttering about the fireflies, which only Lily understands. She begs the doctors to hold off evacuating him until they can take him to Lago de Luz. Both Ben and Otis dismiss this out of hand, essentially saying (without saying) that this is girl stuff. But it's not! And Lily asserts herself with her yelpy little voice! She demands that they allow Ed to spread his wife's ashes at the firefly lake, as that's what he came here to do. He came here to say goodbye -- they have to let him say goodbye. So, yeah, this is all about Lily and her dead whoever. But the bright side is, we're going to the firefly lake!
After the break, we pop in on Tommy in the middle of haranguing Mina over scenarios in which she'd sleep with him. She's holding firm on "never," even if they were lost in the jungle for ten years in some kind of Blue Lagoon scenario where they were the only people around and he was all buff from hunting and gathering. Look, Zach Gilford is pretty buff NOW even before any hunting and gathering, but I gotta respect Mina for playing hard to get. Tommy proclaims Mina not a humanitarian and heads off. Mina then sees Wheezy and her granddaughter, who want to thank Mina for giving Wheeze her first real breath in 80 years. "She said because of you, she finally knows what it feels like to breathe." Maybe you had to be there for the stilted delivery, but that is one hokey-ass line. But we're not done yet! Wheezy reaches into her bag -- at which point I immediately yelled, "Oh, don't give her a chicken!" -- and pulls out a chicken that she gives to Mina in gratitude. You guys. How does this show manage to be so liberally self-flagellating and yet ALSO so Westernly pious? The white lady gives the old brown lady the gift of breath, and the old brown lady gives her a chicken in return! Wocka wocka! Anyway, Mina holds the chicken as far away from her as possible, as is entirely appropriate when you've been handed a chicken.
Ben, Lily, and a semi-conscious Ed are out on a rowboat in the Lago de Luz, which is both less of a Lago than a pond and less Luz than you'd expect as well. Lily gives voice to this disappointment, so Ben splashes some water around, causing the bioluminescent microbes in the water to agitate and glow. Lily rouses Ed to take a look, and he takes Cora's ashes and sprinkles them out into the water, each point of contact sending little "fireflies" out into the lake. The dialogue, again, is soggy as hell ("You made it, Cora! You're with the fireflies now!"), but kudos to Michael McKean for selling the moment.
As the MedEvac helicopter takes off, Lily opens up to Ben about her trauma. LILY'S STORY: She left residency after her fiancé died. That's pretty much it. We may get more later. Dr. Ben, rather than engage her on the merits of this revelation, instead decides to point out a constellation: the Southern Cross. Magellan used to navigate by it, you know. "It gave him the strength to keep going," he says, pointedly. "Keep going." Oh, brother.
La Clinica. Lily, Mina, and Tommy embark on a midnight trek to the beach, while Ben, Otis, and Zee share a beer and a moment of mirth about those crazy kids. Later, Ben returns to his office ... where a returned Twilight Cab-Stealer is waiting for him. "How far'd you get this time?" he asks. She says she sat at the airport for two days and prayed on it, before returning. "God says you're an ass, though." So a whole lot of flirty talking past the subject commences, during which a few things become clear: they're involved with each other, he can't fully commit, she keeps almost leaving because of it, but ultimately stays because of the good she can do as a doctor. She asks him if he's coming to bed, but he demurs. "I know you miss her," she says, "but she's gone; she's not coming back." Thus kicking the lid off a whole other pot of intrigue. But BEN'S STORY will have to wait.
The morning, Tommy finally leads Lily and Mina out to the beach. It's not much of a beach -- just rocky terrain up against the great big blue sea. But it's a hell of a view. "If there was ever a place to start over," Lily says, nailing down the theme of the show, "it's right here." We suddenly realize this is the exact same spot Ben, Otis, and Zee were standing on at the beginning of the episode, because much like her soon-to-be-beloved Dr. Ben, Lily takes a leap out into the water. Followed by Mina. Followed by the requisite "You're all crazy!" from Tommy before he ultimately launches himself to join them. And they frolic in the water! And are then dashed on the rocks.