Warning: spoilers are ahead for the Season 2 premiere of Doc, called “Her Heart” and available streaming now with a Hulu subscription.
Doc returned to Fox in the fall 2025 TV schedule to pick up almost exactly where Season 1 ended in the spring. The second season premiere quickly revealed the fallout of Amy and Michael’s kiss after Jake witnessed it, and then raised the stakes sky-high with a hostage situation. None of the doctors died by the end of the hour, fortunately, but it also might have spelled the end of the Michael/Amy/Jake love triangle… for now. The amnesiac physician may have somebody new to focus on at the hospital, with the upcoming arrival of Desperate Housewives’ Felicity Huffman as a doctor from her past.
As it turns out, the kiss in the Season 1 finale wasn’t the start of something new – or even the restart of something old – for Amy and Michael, but Jake witnessing it was enough to dishearten him from continuing to try the romance with Amy. Gina was still upset with Amy in the beginning. Throw in Nora going into labor, a cop turning his daughter’s wait for a heart transplant into a hostage situation, and TJ (new series regular Patrick Walker) getting shot, and it was no surprise that the status quo was very different by the end of the episode.
The roots of the hostage situation go back to when pre-amnesia Amy talked the father out of his daughter getting a heart transplant years earlier, causing him to snap in “Her Heart” when it seemed like his daughter had lost her chance to get a life-saving surgery. Amy could have communicated better back in the day, and the amnesia meant that she didn’t recall right away why she’d talked him down in the first place. The daughter tragically died despite Michael and Jake bending the rules to get the heart, and Amy’s romantic prospects don’t seem great by the time the credits rolled.
That didn’t seem to bother her too much, however, as remembering a moment from before the accident shifted Amy’s priorities to wanting to recover her memories, mending fences with Gina and taking a dip in a sensory deprivation tank. The stage is now set for the introduction of a new character: Dr. Joan Ridley, played by Felicity Huffman.
Huffman’s casting as a series regular for Doc Season 2 was confirmed over the summer by Deadline, with the outlet reporting that Joan is a double board-certified doctor of internal medicine and surgery. She was Amy’s med school professor, and enters the season when Michael recruits her to the position of Chief of Internal Medicine at Westside.
The casting does potentially solve the problem of Doc wrapping Dr. Richard Miller’s sketchy subplot at the end of Season 1 and seemingly cutting Scott Wolf from the ensemble. The actor’s performance made Richard’s story one of my favorites of Season 1, even while Richard himself was not one of my favorite characters. Perhaps bringing in an actress already well known for shows like Sports Night, Desperate Housewives, and (more recently) Criminal Minds is a sign that the Joan/Amy story will be juicy this fall.
The promo for Episode 2 provides the first look at Felicity Huffman as Dr. Joan Ridley, and it seems clear that even if Amy was a standout student of hers back in the day, she won’t necessarily be cut more slack than any of the other doctors on staff. Take a look:
I take some issue with Sonya telling Amy that she almost got TJ and Jake killed, since the hostage situation wasn’t really post-car crash Amy’s fault, but the promo also makes it clear that TJ isn’t just going to be back on his feet right away, and Jake in the MRI scanner may indicate that his head wound in the premiere was a bigger deal than it seemed at first. What a time for the staff to meet their new Chief of Internal Medicine!