Tuesday, October 24: “Conor McNamara”

This episode starts with the return of Mrs. Grubman, Christian’s long time patient who suffered from a stroke during surgery two years prior. She has returned with her caretaker, Yvetta, after two years of constant rehabilitation and total isolation. Mrs. Grubman tells Christian that, even though her rehabilitation has been a long and hard-yet-successful struggle, she now has stage 4 lung cancer that has metastasized to nearly every part of her body and is living on borrowed time. She tells Christian that since she is dying, she wants to die looking beautiful and wants more plastic surgery so she can have a “coming out” party to celebrate her successful rehab. When Christian tells her he cannot perform any surgery on her under these circumstances, she says then she wants him to perform the surgery on her posthumously so that she looks fabulous at her funeral.

The scene cuts to Julia breast feeding Conor when Marlow enters the room and begins to tell Julia how he is impressed by her – as a woman and as a mother – when Sean walks in the room. There is clearly tension in the room, and Marlow leaves when Sean starts talking about Conor’s upcoming surgery to fix his birth defect. Julia expresses her frustration about feeling like she cannot ask questions about Conor’s surgery because one of the surgeons involved is Sean. Sean says that he understands Julia’s frustration, and he will schedule an in-office meeting so she can have all her questions answered. During this conversation, Sean has a flashback to a scene when he was a young child sitting in his living room with his parents arguing in front of him about a procedure that his mother believed Sean should have that his father believed he should not have and that the family could not afford the procedure anyhow. He snaps out of it and tells Julia how lucky they are to be able to help their disabled son. Sean tells Julia to take the morning off and he’ll take the kids for breakfast.

Sean, Annie, and Conor go to a pancake house for breakfast. While Sean is getting a table, a child sitting next to Annie starts taunting Conor about his deformities. Sean gets defensive and protective, implying the taunting kid is ugly, fat, and not a nice person. Sean gets into a fight with the kid’s father when the father does nothing to set his kid straight about taunting Conor. After he clocks the father in the nose, Sean takes Annie and Conor and leaves the pancake house.

We cut to Christian going to visit Mrs. Grubman at her home after Yvetta calls him begging for his help when Mrs. Grubman won’t eat. Mrs. Grubman says that she is too busy planning her funeral to eat, but Christian knows this isn’t true and tells her that she is giving up. She begins to open up to Christian, telling him that the only two regrets she has are not sleeping with him when she had the chance and never singing at the Rainbow Room in New York. Christian didn’t know that Mrs. Grubman was a singer and she tells him she was going to have a big career in music before she met her husband, but her life just took her in a different direction. Christian makes a deal with her, saying that if she eats he’ll give her a botox shot the next day. Mrs. Grubman tells Christian that she loves him – but in a caring friendship way, not a romantic way – and he feeds her some soup.

Sean tells Julia about the incident at the pancake house and she pleads with him to go find Mr. Thompson, the man he punched, and apologize. She is worried because she doesn’t know where Sean’s aggression is coming from or what it is really about. She also wonders whether Sean is performing Conor’s surgery for Conor or for himself. Sean goes to see Mr. Thompson at a little league field where he is warming up his son before a game. Sean tries to explain to Mr. Thompson why he erupted and how he just wants a normal life for his son – the kind of life Mr. Thompson’s son has. While Sean is at the baseball field, he has another flashback to when he was a kid at a little league field with his father. They are playing, and Sean asks his dad when he can join a real little league team. His father gets upset at him, and says that he can’t join a team because all the kids will laugh at him.

Julia is in a conference room at McNamara/Troy meeting with Christian, Sean, and a third surgeon about Conor’s upcoming surgery. While they are talking, Marlow comes into the room and everyone except Julia looks confused. Marlow starts asking questions not about the surgery but about the potential pain that Conor may experience during the rehabilitation and recovery process, and how he has been reading about some new age theories about infant pain post surgery. Both Sean and Christian respond to Marlow in a sarcastic tone, questioning his place and position in this meeting and the appropriateness of his questions. Sean blows up at Julia, and Julia leaves the meeting.

Mrs. Grubman and Yvetta are sitting with Christian in his office. Mrs. Grubman is there for her botox shots that the doctor promised her the day before. While he is preparing the shots to give her, she dies.

Marlow comes to see Julia to tell her that he will be leaving his position as their nanny. Before he can get the words out, Julia starts telling him how much she appreciates him and how he was right to raise the questions he did in the meeting, and she plans to tell Sean that she wants to postpone Conor’s surgery. When Marlow finally tells Julia he plans to leave, she becomes visibly upset, and they kiss. It is apparent they are both attracted to each other and have feelings for each other. He says that the kiss is exactly why he needs to leave.

Christian is in the O.R. prepping to operate on the deceased Mrs. Grubman fulfilling her wishes to look fabulous at her funeral. Sean joins Christian in the operating room, and they start talking about how Mrs. Grubman never accomplished everything she wanted to in her life because she was too obsessed with looking good. Christian was asked to give the eulogy at the funeral, but wishes that he had more of a positive influence on her life that he could talk about as opposed to feeling like her drug dealer. In a thoughtful moment, Christian asks Sean how he would feel if they couldn’t fix Conor’s hand, and Sean explodes. As Sean leaves the operating room to go home and talk to Julia, Christian starts the surgery set to the back drop of Mrs. Grubman singing with Burt Bacharach (with a guest appearance from Burt himself).

As Sean walks in the door of his house, he is holding a rain-soaked box filled with some of his old things including a baseball glove. He has another flashback of his mother driving him to sign up for little league on a similar rainy day. Sean says that his father will be furious, but she says she’ll take care of that and he should go so he isn’t late. Snaps back to the kitchen, and Julia walks in. As Julia tells Sean that she is not ready to sign the release for Conor to have the surgery, he admits to her that he hasn’t told her everything about him or his life. Another flashback – of Sean having his photo taken for his little league baseball card, and as young Sean faces the camera for the first time, we learn that he had a cleft lip. Snap back to Julia and Sean – he explains that his mother used his college fund for the plastic surgery on his lip and went behind his father’s back to do it. His father left shortly after the surgery and never came back. Sean tells Julia that he never told her about it because he wanted to forget that pathetic kid and leave those memories behind him. She says that, in so many ways, it was that little kid who she fell in love with so many years ago.

Christian enters Mrs. Grubman’s funeral. There are hundreds of empty seats, and Yvetta is sitting by herself in the front row. She tells Christian how she sent the invites, but not a single person showed up. Even Mrs. Grubman’s own daughter wanted nothing to do with her mother’s funeral. As Yvetta leaves, she tells Christian that Mrs. Grubman left him every dime she had to start a fund at the practice for people who wanted plastic surgery but could not afford it. Christian starts to deliver the eulogy he wrote, but can’t get through it – starts getting angry at her for how she lived her life, but says he’ll miss her and kisses her cheek as he says goodbye.

It is the day of Conor’s surgery – Sean and Julia are both nervous. Julia waits in the waiting room during the surgery, and Marlow comes in to be with her. The surgery was a success, and afterward Sean has a final flashback of his father standing at his hospital bed after he had his lip fixed. His father left him a teddy bear and walked away forever. The final shot is Sean holding Conor after the surgery and feeding him in his arms.