When “Chicago Med” Season 10 wrapped in May, it ended with a huge question: Who is the father of Hannah’s (Jessy Schram) baby? While it appeared she was on her way to tell her ex, Dr. Ripley (Luke Mitchell), that she was pregnant, the finale faded out with her showing up on Dean Archer’s (Steven Weber) doorstep instead.
With Season 11 debuting in less than a month, the question of who the father is remains — although Weber continues to hint that Archer is, despite the fact that we’ve never eve seen Hannah and Dean kiss.
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“There’s a degree of ambiguity that is a kind of a writer’s trick in a sense,” Weber said of that ending during a recent panel in Austin, Texas. “I don’t think it’s an honest thing to do. It’s a bit of a prank to play on an audience who are expectant and want certain things. I have to say that it’s pretty clear, at this point, that I’m the father.”
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In Season 10, Allen MacDonald took over as showrunner and has been “instrumental” in changing up the storytelling, Weber explained. “[He’s] giving the show more texture and more of a kind of grounded, human approach for the characters — less soapy, which isn’t bad in itself, but they wanted to take a different kind of approach,” Weber said. “Part of it was charting an arc between Hannah and Dean that was a little more realistic, less sentimental. But nonetheless, it appears that they hooked up at some key moment earlier in the season, and he might be a daddy or Zaddy, as the kids say.”
While they’re in different power positions at work and nearly 20 years apart in age, “it’s perfectly legal and moral” if they do want to be together, he added. “But we might not take that road. I mean, the writers have proven that they can take expectations and flip them and make them more complex and nuanced. We’re pretty sure that’s what they’re going to do with this, too, because the audience is smarter than studios give them credit for being.”
In fact, “the hope’s that it doesn’t become lazy and lovey and sentimental. It should be difficult, especially for these two characters,” he added.
“Chicago Med,” produced by Universal Content Productions and Wolf Entertainment, premieres Oct. 1 at 8 p.m. on NBC.