The Good Doctor Review: Irresponsible Salad Bar Practices (Season 4 Episode 9)
When The Good Doctor hits the mark, it really hits the mark.
The Good Doctor Season 4 Episode 9, “Irresponsible Salad Bar Practices” delivers a good balance of entertaining personal conflict, heavy lessons, and diverse stories to make this episode a hit. With satisfying resolutions all around, “Irresponsible Salad Bar Practices” also manages to hold the hospital accountable for their treatment of non-white patients, even if run by non-white doctors themselves.
This episode finally puts Claire at the center of the main plot, after neglecting her for the majority of the season so far. However, the episode fails to incorporate Park, and more obviously, Morgan, in any significant way. The Good Doctor continues to neglect many of its secondary characters and is only stretching thinner as season four also expands its tertiary cast with new residents.
X MAYO, HILL HARPER, ANTONIA THOMAS
The Good Doctor takes this opportunity to examine the biases that people have — not just white people but also people of color within positions of power. Not only does The Good Doctor put a spotlight on this through the assumptions Claire makes when treating Zara in the ER (endangering her life through double-medication) but through Lim’s struggle with treatment as well.
As Lim struggles with accepting treatment, she finally decides to move forward after a small episode in the operating room, one that could have put her patient in jeopardy if Lim didn’t already apply herself so well. Finally, Lim pushes forward past the fear of how veiled racism and ableism could affect her job stability.
“Irresponsible Salad Bar Practices” is so effective not only because of its approach to this topic from the side of treatment and management but it allows our characters to do something about it. Using statistics, Claire is able to confirm the hospital’s poor treatment of non-white patients, letting the hospital identify and address these issues moving forward.
However, when the same approach is used by Glassman to almost bully Zara to stay at the hospital, it has a completely different effect, leading to one of the weakest scenes of the episode.
X Mayo and Antonia Thomas both give authentic and powerful performances from opposite ends of the spectrum which makes this arc particularly emotional to watch.
X MAYO
The other main medical arc involves a patient with a tumor made aggressive by his unplanned pregnancy. This story doesn’t try to make any statement, rather than just tell the story of two people who have to make hard decisions after this hard diagnosis. Of course, Shaun asks societally inappropriate questions, but that’s not much different than most episodes.
The Good Doctor hits a home run with this story as well, showing commonality between Shaun and his patient. Relating his patient’s husband to Shaun’s brother was an effective way to connect people of different minority groups. But as this hopeful, yet complicated, story isn’t enough Shaun, he also endures an entire workplace crush along the way.
Which actually isn’t as bad of a plot as it sounds. While it does start off a bit cringy, this actually strengthens Shaun and Lea as a couple in a way that seems authentic to both of their personalities. And it’s funny.
This is much better than Lea and Shaun’s usual ‘misunderstanding of the week’ as we see how quickly Lea is able to alleviate the stress that Shaun feels in a way that he can easily process. As someone who isn’t necessarily team Lea and Shaun, this week made an actual case for them.
BRIA HENDERSON, WILL YUN LEE, FIONA GUBELMANN
Through and through, despite a continuing issue with some characters’ placement in this season of the show, and a few dialogue misfires or small instances of clunky dialogue, “Irresponsible Salad Bar Practices” is a solid episode of The Good Doctor, and a departure from the quality of content offered in the current season.
What did you think of this episode of The Good Doctor? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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The Good Doctor airs Mondays at 10/9c on ABC
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Amanda Reimer
In addition to working as a freelance writer, Amanda also works with animals and stage manages various live performances. She has an invested interest in the perspective and experience of fandoms as well as anything in the science-fiction genre. She also loves spoiling her cats, Drummer and Kiki.
7 comments
Great episode!
I just want to know what kind of whiskey was on Lin’s desk?
Worst episode so far of any season. There’s always a lesson to learn from the show, that’s part of its charm, but this episode sticks out as over the top in its preachiness. Measure your medicine better, Good Doctor.
It’s beyond stupid for a black patient to call a black doctor a racist. How can you be a racist of your own race? I’m getting tired of all this PC nonsense turning up in my favorite shows. Maybe I should just stick with watching reruns of older shows.
I’ve watched every episode of this show with my wife. This one was the worst. It to me shows that there will never be a solution to racism. It’s a no win. Not as long as some people put forth their greatest effort into finding fault in others as this episode demonstrated.
Worst episode yet, preachy to the point of being insufferable even by The Good Doctor standards.
Worst episode to date, whole episode screams white hate, the president apologizes and she says “that sounds about white” like did you expect to come in and say do die ? And then they call another black doctor a racist and the black lady patient is happy their are only POC surgeons working on her, she sounds like the racist to me
Worst episode, the entire thing screams “white people are evil”. The black lady patient is happy about only being seen by POC doctors, sounds like she’s the racist, then at the end it talks about how they had to “make white people happy” their whole career because they had to be proper, we’ll sorry people don’t wanna hire ghetto surgeons to work on their brain. The whole PC crap that shows are doing now is insane, seen more racism towards whites than any other race the last 2 years
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