Sunday, November 3, 2024
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Every Sea-mergency on Doctor Odyssey

Two eps in and Doc Odd’s already diagnosing broken hearts. Photo: Tina Thorpe/Disney
Have you climbed aboard? Have you hoisted the sail? Have you checked into your stateroom? Have you, like the greatest television-viewing minds in America, watched the show that is perhaps single-handedly keeping network television vital in 2024: Doctor Odyssey? Professional madman Ryan Murphy’s latest joint premiered on September 26 and combines the blue-sky good vibes of an aughties USA procedural with the batshit weekly emergencies of his 9-1-1 series. Murphy’s recent shows at his legacy home base, FX, have been muddled and baroque, but on ABC, he’s got the goods, as evidenced by the premiere episode of his new show set on a luxury cruise ship. It stars Joshua Jackson as a doctor (Dr. Max, but people literally call him “Doctor Odyssey”) with a less-than-mysterious backstory (he got COVID and decided to devote his life to having fun at sea) and Don Johnson giving off radiant Love Boat vibes as the captain.
This show is immensely silly, sunny fun, and the whole thing is refreshingly low stress, even if this one cruise ship is the site of more than enough emergencies to hold its own in ABC’s Thursday-night block, sandwiched between 9-1-1 and Grey’s Anatomy. It would really be a floating death trap if Doc Odyssey weren’t so gosh-darn good at doing elaborate medical procedures at sea. As each episode brings aboard a new cast of guests with their own slate of problems, we’ll keep track of every disaster that goes down on deck (and over the edge) all season long.
Singles Week
Lady Fight in Giant Hot Tub
Like one hour into Singles Week, a hot-tub brawl between three lovers of an unseen man named Jeffrey sends all three women to the sick bay. Doc and the crew patch them up while they hurl insults: “nasty, dirty-lookin’, triflin’ girls,” “pirate-lookin’ bitch” (because one of them got her eye scratched and needed a patch), and “womb like a haunted house, just dusty.” They can all agree on one thing, though, and that’s Jeffrey’s “D,” which makes NP Avery go, “I’ve never had D like that.”
Skinny Juice Make Hot Girl Heart Go Stop
Passenger Kelly passes out on top of Nurse Tristan while hooking up with him, so the gang rushes her to the sick bay and shoves a camera on a tube down her throat while she’s awake, which causes her to crash, making them do defib on her. It was worth it for the shot, though, because it shows them she doesn’t have a hole in her heart. Later on, while Avery hooks up with the man whore (more on this in a moment), he mentions taking diuretics when he’s trying to get into the “shred zone,” which helps Avery solve the mystery. Kelly has been drinking a “health powder,” a.k.a. thiazide, a.k.a. “water pills,” a diuretic for weight loss that has the unfortunate side effect of interrupting electrical signals to the heart. “I spent so much money on this trip, I have to look pretty in a swimsuit!” says Kelly. They put her on potassium and electrolytes and the day is saved.
Man-Whore Syphilis
This cad who doesn’t use condoms (latex is bad for the turtles) has a nasty rash that Doc Odd misdiagnoses at the pool as possibly just eczema. Turns out it’s syphilis and he has spread it to like a dozen people on the ship so far, guys and girls alike, leading to a fabulous montage of Doc Odd calling them into the sick bay to get penicillin shots in their bums like it’s the hottest nightclub at sea.
Captain Heartbreak on Oyster Date With Shania Twain
As a recent widow who’s new to the whole being-single thing, Shania Twain is worried she’s the oldest person on the ship. That is, until she shares a slow dance with Cap’n Don Johnson, who lost his beloved wife last year. He takes her back to his gorgeous cap’n quarters (which has a fireplace! At sea!) and wines and dines her with some oysters. She leans in and says, “You’re flush, I think the oysters are doing their job, Captain,” but actually he’s passing out. The gang slices him open and does a catheter to the heart, but his angiogram comes back normal, like a “heart attack without the heart-attack part.” Ah, so all the problems at Singles Week are STDs or matters of the heart. Once the cap’n’s shipshape, Doc Odd tells him he has “stress cardiomyopathy, better known as broken-heart syndrome.” It’s triggered by emotional stress brought on by the loss of a loved one. The cure? Takin’ it easy. “You know what the worst thing for our heath is?” Doc Odd asks. “Being alive.” But you gotta muddle through anyway. Beautiful words of wisdom from the doctor.
Life Raft: Lisa
While the captain’s under on the night of his medically urgent heartbreak, the ship’s radar picks up a floating figure at sea that could be a life raft. But it’s actually a human, so the Doctor and Nurse Tristan hop a speedboat (I hope they do this every episode) to rescue Lisa, who has gastroenteritis from saltwater exposure, heatstroke, dehydration, confusion, and, yes, needs the defib. She took work on a fishing boat off the coast of Mexico, but there was an accident. When she was stranded at sea, she was all “It’s okay if I die because at least I found true love in my life.” Turns out her true love, her fiancé, also gets found on a different life raft as he went out to sea to try to save her. They bring him in and it’s a beautiful reunion, proving that True Fishermen’s Love is more valid, beautiful, and legitimate than all these silly dirty singles aboard the ship. I felt very attacked by this episode.
Emotional Emergency of the Ep
Avery hates Singles Week because relationships are not her thing. She has put her life into her job and helping others, which leads to an emotional breakdown where she cries under the stars about how she deprioritized everything else in her life to be a cruise NP. “And at the end of the day, I’m alone, adrift, with nothing to show for it. I’m never gonna be a doctor. This is all there is for me. Pumping people’s stomachs when they eat too much shrimp and flings with loser douchebags on singles cruises.” Shout-out to the shrimp OD mention. Nurse Tristan makes her feel better by kissing her.
Pilot
Too Much Shrimp
Rachel Dratch and her husband, Frasier’s boss at the radio station on the original Frasier, end up in the sick bay after the sailing-away dinner. He’s presenting with an allergic reaction to antibiotics, only he isn’t on any. It’s Doctor Odyssey’s first night onboard and he is stumped. Nurse Practitioner Avery Morgan (Phillipa Soo), however, has worked aboard the Odyssey for years and sees this all the time: Dratch’s man’s got iodine poisoning from eating too much of the unlimited shrimp at the seafood buffet. This happens so often on the boat they’ve got a name for it: seal disease. These people are why Red Lobster went bankrupt, but then again, if I had a nickel for every time I ingested a medically problematic amount of shrimp, you know?
Broke Dick
It’s obviously a Murph joint when you’re only 16 minutes into an episode and a guy says he “snapped my pee-pee in half.” The medical team is called into a stateroom where a guy’s dick has been bent in two while he was, well, rockin’ the boat. It’s a penile fracture, something that normally happens when the girl’s on top and comes down too hard; Doctor Odyssey knows this from firsthand undergraduate experience. The team patches it up and tells the couple they have to lie low for four to six weeks, but Phillipa Soo, NP, tells the couple she knows a tantric-sex specialist in the next port who can teach them alternative ways to consummate their marriage.
Waterslide Throat Kick
Seemingly immediately after OD-ing on all you-can-eat shrimp, Mr. and Mrs. Dratch find themselves in another emergency. The couple went down the waterslide one after another, and when Rachel slid off she throat-kicked her husband to the point that he was knocked out and unable to breathe. Doc Odd does a penknife incision to the man’s neck (hate this) and brings him down to the sick bay to insert a tracheal tube and physically wrench his sternoclavicular joint back into place, which the nurses find very risky. Doc Odd goes against protocol, though, and saves this schmo’s life a second time in one night. When the Dratches disembark at the end of the episode, they say that despite it all they still had the best week of their lives.
Man Overboard!
By emergency No. 4, you start to learn a bit about how this show’s structure will work going forward. Medical situations escalate in severity and grow more serious in tone over the course of an episode. We’ll see how the situations occur, either in flashbacks (waterslide, broke dick, shrimp freak) or as they happen in the moment, as is the case with the young man who, after taking molly with his girlfriend at the on-ship nightclub, sneaks out with her to the upper deck, where he stands on the railing, does the “I’m king of the world!” thing, and immediately topples overboard. Cap’n Don Johnson is alerted at the brig (terminology check?) and orders the ship to drop buoys, informing us that only 15 percent of overboard cases survive. The medical team peels out in a speedboat to find him, and Doc Odyssey does what Male Nurse Tristan (Sean Teale) calls an “epic” dive to save him from hypothermia. All in a sailing’s work for Doctor Odyssey.
Emotional Emergency of the Week
Tristan confides in his new supervisor, with whom he has to work every single day, that he’s had a crush on his co-nurse for years. Dr. Odyssey immediately turns around and makes out with her. In Tristan’s face! While “Despacito” plays!
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated Avery Morgan’s title. She is a nurse practitioner.

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