The Resident Season 5 Episode 21 review: Cade’s gunned down and the docs at Chastain must race against time to save her life

3/5

Story: After deciding to stay back in Chastain and help the FBI crack down on the mafia’s medicare fraud, Cade changes her mind and packs up and leaves. Unfortunately for her, the mafia gets wind of her plan and sends a hitman to take her out. In the resultant shoot out, Cade’s badly injured and keeping her alive is going to be tricky for her friends at Chastain because she has a very rare blood type.

Review: It’s just cruel that the showrunners of The Resident decided to put Conrad (Matt Czuchry) in such an impossible position twice. First, he had to watch his wife Nick (Emily VanCamp) drift away despite their best efforts to save her life and now, the woman he had feelings for, Cade, is gunned down and barely clinging on to life.

As a multiple gunshot victim, Cade (Kaley Ronayne) needs emergency surgery to stem the blood loss, but to cut her open, the doctors need to pump her with several units of blood. In her case, though, that’s a no go, because she’s got a rare type that isn’t available anywhere in the neighbourhood; her dad, who is a match, is in the other end of the country and the units she’d stored of her own blood became unviable after being frozen for too long. It’s touch-and-go for Cade.

Luckily for her, Devon’s (Manish Dayal) now the master at suggesting experimental treatments and he’s asking them to use a blood substitute that’s still in testing, which could give her a fighting chance until they can actually lay their hands on actual blood. Their efforts pay off and Cade makes it off the operating table, but she’s got a long recovery ahead. The silver lining is that she’s got Conrad to help her navigate these difficult times.

Amid all the drama surrounding Cade, AJ (Malcom -Jamal Warner) and Devon also had to deal with a podcast celeb, who is anti-vaccination, which doesn’t allow him to get on to a transplant list as per government rules. He needs a pair of lungs, as soon as possible, but the docs at Chastain cannot bend rules for him, irrespective of the optics of the case. So, will they let him die instead?

Okay, so we’ve got two more episodes to go and going by the track record of earlier seasons, there’s bound to be a cliff-hanger finale. Cade’s out of trouble now as far as her physical health goes, but her gunman is still at large and the FBI’s not gotten to the bottom of the fraud yet. While the surgeons fought to keep her alive, Conrad and Billie had a moment, as she asked him about what was holding him back from opening up his heart to love again. For a while, it has seemed that the showrunners were pitting these two friends together as potential love interests, especially during Billie’s fight with Dr Porter and Conrad’s support at the time. But then they introduced Cade and now she’s in the crosshairs of the mafia. The writers have something up their sleeves and we should know soon enough.

Verdict: Although it seemed that they could lose Cade on the operating table, the tension never felt intense enough. It’s almost as if it was a given that she would pull through. Also, we still have to figure out the deal between her and her father Dr Ian Sullivan, who’s just flown in from Seattle to ‘save his daughter’s life’. Well, we’ve got to brace ourselves for that now.