Transplant Season 1, Episode 2 recap: Tell Me Who You Are

Transplant Episode 2 recap: Bash’s first day gets off to a rough start.

Bash’s first day at York Memorial Hospital does not go off without a hitch in Transplant Episode 2. The main problem he faces, even more than rude co-workers and a slew of microaggressions, stems from the fact he needs to procure his original medical school transcripts somehow.

As the human resources employee tells him, they previously had someone relocate to the hospital with a similar backstory to Bash, and he was a leading doctor on a critical malaria study. Even he got the boot when he could not get his transcripts.

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While Bash has the digital copies, getting the originals won’t be easy. He reaches out to a friend back in Syria who informs him that they’re muzzling the universities. It’s a tricky situation all around. His friend, Khaled, the one who got him the cell phone for Amira in the last episode and dislocated his shoulder, offers to procure forgeries.

Bash seriously considers letting Khaled do it, but ultimately decides to be upfront with Bishop. The chief doesn’t give him much of a response. Still, when a detective comes sniffing around later in search of Khaled for a supposed “immigration violation,” Bash is put on the spot and forced to lie to protect his friend.

It’s probably a good idea he didn’t accept the forgeries.

Beyond his transcript dilemma, his first day begins with all of the doctors stupefied by his hiring. They’re shocked to see someone who was a patient a few weeks ago waltz in and get hands-on with a patient.

Bishop introduces him to the staff, informing Bash he’ll need to redo his entire residency and start from scratch as he learns the high-tech processes facilitated at the hospital. It’s jarring for Bash, who comes from an analog approach. They didn’t have imaging machines or state-of-the-art devices during wartime; he honed his skills in the dark.

He doesn’t receive a warm welcome from anyone, except Theo, who seems friendly enough. Mags is the next best thing, although she’s still wary of Bash and wants to get to know him better before she sincerely begins trusting him.

Worst of all is his attending, Wendy Atwater (Linda E. Smith), who is all ice without a hint of warmth. Even Claire isn’t exactly kind to Bash, automatically assuming he’ll get fired after fumbling a patient case.

All in all, his first day has its rough patches, but as he later tells Mags, both of his parents were doctors, that’s all he was ever going to be, no matter what.

Transplant Episode 2 recap: Wild mushrooms wreak havoc on a family.

Mags and Bash are assigned to patient Irene Harper (Brittany LeBorgne). She’s trembling, jaundiced, has strange bruising on her arms, and can barely keep her eyes open for more than a few minutes at a time. They’re forced to intubate Irene early on. When Mags struggles to get the tube where it needs to go, Bash suggests using a light wind to light the way between her vocal cords, literally. Atwater is not pleased to see his method and reprimands Mags for letting it happen.

It won’t be the first time she shows her displeasure with Bash’s unorthodox way of doing things. While Irene rests in the hospital, her husband Robbie (Anton Koval) and daughter Layla (Lilou Roy-Lanouette) arrive to visit with her. Staff social worker Vivian Barnes (Grace Lynn Kung) stops them from their meeting.

Bash wrote that Irene had “suspicious bruising” on her chart, which led to Vivian needing to investigate to ensure no abuse was happening in the home. To make matters worse, the Harper family was previously flagged after Layla had an accident in which she fell down the stairs. Despite being cleared of all wrongdoing, Robbie will always be viewed with suspicion first.

Vivian has to take Layla away from her distraught father to investigate their family life further, and Bash is horrified that one simple word on a chart could potentially cause a family to split apart. Robbie is one of several people to make a racially-charged comment to Bash in the episode, although he does try to apologize to him later.

In the middle of his apology, he starts to get sick and collapses, showing similar symptoms to his wife. As they try to revive Robbie, Bash orchestrates yet another old and forgotten technique to save him. It works, getting Robbie into the ICU. But he’s banished from the room by Wendy and rebuked for breaking protocol.

Still, the fact both Irene and Robbie are suffering from the same thing rules out abuse. Mags and Bash start investigating other details of their life, wondering what they ate. Eventually, Bash realizes he noticed Layla picking something off of her pizza. Irene runs a healthy household, so Layla and Robbie sometimes pick homegrown vegetables from the community garden.

They accidentally chose several wild mushrooms, which Layla doesn’t like. The doctors finally realize it was the mushrooms that made Robbie and Irene sick. They orchestrate the proper medical treatment and Layla’s parents being to recover.

Transplant Episode 2 recap: June takes a stand against Dr. Singh…sort of.

June’s patient this week is a young woman named Cassie (Sabrina Campilii) with endometriosis that has been struggling with increasingly terrible chronic pain. Every time she goes to the doctors, they dismiss her because they can’t find anything immediately wrong in her scans. They chalk it up to her endo flaring up, tell her to take painkillers, and send her home. Yet it’s evident that what she’s experiencing is something more serious.

Her pleas for help encourage June to confront Dr. Singh (Sugith Varughese), requesting that he allow Cassie to go into surgery so they can take a look inside and see what’s going on. He dismisses her request, and even worse, patronizes her as he explains what endometriosis is like…TO A WOMAN. So infuriating.

June backs down and sends Cassie home, telling her to come back if it gets worse. Well, she doesn’t make it very far when she’s back, claiming she threw up. All they did was give her a bucket and sit her in a chair. June takes Cassie back into a room, encouraged for surgery when she notices a massive bloodstain on the chair.

Cassie pleads with June to fight for her, and she tries again to tell Singh she needs surgery and that she’d like to be in the room to follow through for her patient. Singh finally relents, as her new symptoms sound like signs of a ruptured cyst, of course, he says it’s great that “we” discovered it, and June lets him! When the surgery is all said and done, June visits Cassie so she can hear from someone that she was right all along, that she knows her body and should trust her gut.

Cassie isn’t as forgiving, telling June that she has no idea what is has been like for her, feeling “dismissed” and “ignored.” As someone disrespected continuously by Dr. Singh, and as a Black woman, June likely understands these feelings well, but again, she’s silent.

This storyline frustrated me because it felt like the writers didn’t let June grow at all. I kept waiting for her to stand up to Singh, and she never did. Maybe it’ll happen in a future episode, but her arc in this specific episode didn’t go anywhere, which was frustrating.

June had a lack of dialogue despite the entire plot centering around her and Cassie. It just felt weird and half-baked. The patient-of-the-week had more to do and say than the series regular.

Odds & Ends from Transplant Episode 2

• Speaking of Theo, we don’t know much about him as a doctor yet. He’s working at the hospital on a fellowship while his wife and children live in another city. Each week he has to say goodbye to them, and he admits to Bash it’s hard for him.
• It seems like Claire and Jed might have had a relationship at some point. She’s frustrated with him for returning to work so early after such invasive surgery, especially since he keeps getting nauseous and having headaches. She also reveals that he has a son, who he appears to be estranged from since he didn’t even tell him about the accident.
• Bash and Mags share a tender moment as she removes his stitches, he tells her about his parents and how they died in the war, hence why he doesn’t like rehashing it all often.

What did you think of Transplant Episode 2? What will happen to Khaled? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

New episodes of Transplant air Tuesday nights at 10 p.m. ET/PT on NBC.