Talk about tense!

On Chicago Med Season 7 Episode 17, Dylan and Vanessa narrowly avoided being caught in the crossfire of a gang war while Sharon and the cops watched from her office.

The gang war story was almost screaming for a Chicago PD crossover, but that wasn’t the most important point of what happened.

Despite the suspense, the worst thing that happened was that Scott needed a few stitches in his arm.

Vanessa spent most of the hour telling him and Maggie that whatever this was, she could handle it. She walked off upset but physically unharmed, while the bad guys went to jail and life returned to normal.

It’s too bad that she wasn’t the focus of this story. She insisted she could handle whatever was going on and refused to let anyone take her off the case, but that felt like a buildup to nothing.

Of course, this story isn’t over just because the credits rolled. Hopefully, in the next few episodes, Vanessa will have an emotional reaction to everything that went down.

The gang war story likely isn’t over either, even if, for now, the gangs are out of the hospital.

Scott hooking up with the pretty cop in charge of the operation puts more of a target on his back, not less. He was flirtatious when he said that this could be dangerous, but there was truth to it.

This seemed like the perfect time to call in some of the members of the Intelligence Division from PD. They’re dedicated to undercover work, which might have raised the stakes if Will’s brother were involved in the operation.

Med isn’t supposed to be a police thriller. I didn’t enjoy it that much when Will went undercover to expose a Mafia boss, and this wasn’t much better. Still, if they’re going to have stories like this, they SHOULD cross over with PD.

Or maybe I’m just hungry for some Will/Jay time. Will is spending too much time smiling to himself and staring at Asher, and he needs someone to set him straight. Who better to confide in than his brother?

Will: I know it couldn’t be easy being back here after the way things ended between us.
Asher: I didn’t come back for you or for us. I came back because this is my dream job that I’ve worked my whole career to get.

Asher said she came back for the job, not for Will, and that’s the right attitude. As a newly recovered addict, she doesn’t need to jump into the second round of what was an extremely dysfunctional relationship, to begin with.

But something tells me that sooner or later, she’s going to need Will’s help, and that’s going to lead somewhere she doesn’t expect.

Archer already doesn’t like her, and he and Will have never hit it off either. And Asher’s already shown a willingness to go against Archer’s opinion, which has gotten Will in trouble in the past.

So it’s only a matter of time before these two take a stand together and end up going the way of Scott and his undercover buddy.

The uterus transplant case provided the opportunity to explore whether elective transplants should be a thing, but I was distracted wondering whether this was a real-life procedure.

According to my research, it’s new and experimental. It’s also supposed to be a temporary transplant; the donor uses the uterus to have one or two babies, and then it is removed again.

Med could have had a fascinating story about this new option for infertile women. Blake’s concerns should have gone far beyond whether it was necessary to the fact that it’s supposed to be temporary, and the first transplant caused major health problems.

Not that the story they told wasn’t compelling. It was. But it could have gone even deeper.

Blake had genuine reasons for concern that weren’t addressed, and her fixation on it being an elective surgery made her seem cold and uncaring. It also came perilously close to trying to make other people’s reproductive choices for them.

Claire’s heavy blood loss made surgery risky, to begin with, and there was no guarantee that another transplanted uterus would fare any better than the first one did.

If only Blake had voiced these concerns instead of focusing on whether another woman really “needed” to carry a baby to term, she would have been sympathetic.

Her objections were apparently to make it logical for her to confess to Marcel that she had used a surrogate to conceive Avery.

Speaking of which, what happened to Avery and Blake’s anger at each other over Marcel? Not that I mind, since that was an aggravating storyline, but it seems like it evaporated into thin air.

There also seemed to be a parallel between Claire’s insistence that she have a uterus transplant and Ivy’s that she only have palliative care.

In both cases, the patient wanted something that her doctor didn’t think was in her best interest.

Will’s determination to prove that this was “medical neglect” felt like a step backward for him. He seemed, up until this point, to have finally outgrown his desire to impose his will on his patients.

I get that he was concerned because Ivy is young enough to make decisions that don’t consider all the factors.

But her parents’ reasons for agreeing to cease chemo made sense. Chemo made her seriously ill and wasn’t going to give her that much more time to live, so they didn’t see a benefit to it.

That’s not medical neglect. Cancer patients choose not to go ahead with treatment all the time. It’s sad for those who are aware this means they will die sooner, but it’s also a valid choice, and Ivy’s youth didn’t negate that.

It wasn’t like they were letting a five-year-old make this decision. It seemed like Ivy and her parents made it together.

The chemo Ben secretly slipped her made her spit up blood and need an emergency procedure, so it’s understandable why no one wanted to continue with this treatment even if it was shrinking her tumor.

Your turn, Chicago Med fanatics. Hit the big, blue SHOW COMMENTS button and let us know your thoughts on Will’s dilemma, lake’s refusal to do a uterus transplant, and the gang war storyline.

If you need a refresher first, you can watch Chicago Med online right here on TV Fanatic.

Chicago Med airs on NBC on Wednesdays at  8 PM EST / PST.

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