The Resident Season 5 Episode 18 review: Conrad’s connect to the illegal prescription scam gets murkier

3/5

Story: When a junkie is brought to the Chastain ER with a prescription drug overdose, supposedly prescribed by Conrad, he decides to confront the pharmacist who has been dolling out the meds. But before he can get any information out of her, Conrad gets called in for a go-Team assist at an accident site, only to return to the ER and find that the pharmacist is also near dead after a ‘fall’ down a flight of stairs.

Review: So, Cade hasn’t left Chastain yet, although she’s had to tell Conrad about her ‘situation’ with the mob in the FBI’s case against prescription drug fraud. And the day she decides to resurface, another OD case is rolled into the ER, with prescription drugs bearing Conrad’s name on it as physician.

Instead of going back to the FBI, Conrad decides to do his own sleuthing and heads to the pharmacy that has been dispensing these drugs. The pharmacist, Phoebe, though, says she was just doing her job and promises to look up records that could be of help to Conrad. Turns out that the pharmacy is run by some shady dudes, one of who was still loitering around on the premise and wasn’t convinced by Phoebe’s explanation that Conrad was just another customer.

Then Conrad gets called away on a go-Team mission, after a 17-year-old crashes his Porsche into a store. The young driver has a lot of shattered bones, but it’s more touch-and-go for the woman in the store who was run down, forcing Cade to break protocol with on-field treatment. While it bought them enough time to bring her back to Chastain, AJ and Pravesh figure that it could have done more damage than good and attempt to fix that. The new intern on the block, Zach, though, doesn’t make life easy for AJ, fumbling through the ER and causing more issues to the patient.

As AJ sets out to save his patient’s life, the new in-take in the ER turns out to be Phoebe, near-dead after a ‘fall’ down a flight of stairs. With Cade guilt-tripping Conrad that his interference could have cost Phoebe her life, he does everything in the book to keep her alive. And he almost succeeds, only to have the shady guy from the pharmacy sneak in and ‘finish his job’. On the way out, he gets a good look at Cade and Conrad, and with the mob known to bump off anyone standing up against them, it seems that these two might just be in trouble.

And if all the drama in the OR wasn’t enough, AJ’s also dealing with the fact that he will lose his mother soon. Her cancer has spread rapidly, and even with the best care she’s probably got another two months tops.

Verdict: With only a few more episodes to go in this season, it looks like the showrunners will up the ante with the whole mob angle and the cliff-hanger in the finale could be Conrad or Cade related. Let’s see how this plays out.