State of the #SHEA Part 39: Aquí Sigues Dentro (Here you are, still inside)-- "Vamos" Pt. 1

This whole Lea-did-the-proposing curve ball reminds me of the time I was in AP English in my senior year of high school, and we were assigned to 1) read an exceedingly well-done essay, and then 2) write a paper about all the ways our own writing didn’t measure up said exceedingly well-done essay. (Aren’t English teachers fascinating people?)

Apparently I was pretty good at pointing out my weaknesses, for I got an “A” on that… in a class where I was a solid “B” student. It was like being told Yes, I agree that you suck as a writer in all the ways you articulate! Well done!

(And then that student went on to write a book and get it published 26 years later… so kids, let that be another lesson for the file on People Whose Opinion Doesn’t Have To Matter To you!)

ANYWAY… technically speaking, I got it wrong about #Shea. Shaun didn’t ask Lea to marry him; Lea didn’t say yes. You know what this means? It means I have to eat ice cream.

Wait-- no it doesn’t. The important thing is that there was a proposal and an acceptance! Who said it doesn’t matter… you don’t have to--

Yes, yes it does. I said if I got it wrong I’d “eat my words, along with some ice cream and a big ol’ spoon.”  A deal’s a deal.

(crickets) 

WHERE IS MY ICE CREAM?

Dammit, I forgot to put some for myself on the list this week.

OK, here’s what we’ll do: For anyone who anticipated Shaun proposing on The Good Doctor season finale, treat yourself to some ice cream while reading today. I’d also love it if you share what brand and flavor you’re enjoying-- either in the comments or on Twitter. If you don’t have any right now either, get some for next week’s post.

For anyone who anticipated Lea proposing… eh, you’re too smart. No ice cream for you.

And for the fence-straddlers who simply said THERE WILL BE A PROPOSAL AND AN ACCEPTANCE… you can grab one of those little bitty spoons and see if someone with ice cream will give you a taste. OK?

🍏🏎💍🍏🏎💍🍏🏎💍

Everything about Lea being the one to break tradition and propose to her man made sense: she’s a bit of a non-conformist; a free spirit who doesn’t often do as other women do (drive a vintage car, change her own flat tires, thrive in the men-driven STEM world). She’s taken on cybersecurity demons, towing company scammers, and the impossibly daunting challenge of performing emergency surgery in the middle of nowhere. The very relationship she’s in (NT/ASD) is highly unique, for crying out loud! How does anything about Lea Dilallo scream “traditional”?

Except for one, huge caveat: Lea hadn't been herself of late. Crushed with sorrow and turned inside out by grief, she’d reached a point where separating from the one closest to her heart actually seemed like the solution-- or at least the start of one.

How could this version of Lea-- the one who found herself telling Shaun she couldn’t look into his blue eyes without missing their baby girl terribly-- find a way back towards happiness itself in a week’s time, much less a proposal? 

I think it all comes back to that concept of keeping their coordinates closely aligned, as introduced by Shaun in “The Uncertainty Principle” (4.7) after learning Lea had an ex-husband. They’d done a pretty good job of navigating their world as a team this year, but the pregnancy is what raised the stakes significantly. Every step on this new course strengthened their bond exponentially, from the very decision to embrace their new future to the highs and lows of prenatal development.

As for the abrupt tragedy that left them brokenhearted (as one), they got through the early phases of it together-- but a situation so complex and emotionally fraught can remain an all-hands-on-deck kind of thing indefinitely. That’s the part they learned the hard way.

It’s easier to see how couples can unravel over such losses-- a miscarriage, an infant, a child at practically any age-- when you think of all the ways they need to be strong before the loss to weather everything that happens after it. 

But those coordinates… that alignment! Shaun and Lea had it all going for them all the way up until the weeks leading into Guatemala. These were weeks we couldn’t really see, other than the camping trip of “Forgive or Forget,” but we knew they were coming and we knew they’d be difficult. Head-back-to-Hershey difficult? Maybe not. But that’s because those are the words of a woman who’d strayed off course. (In opening up to Shaun during the Guatemala trip, at least he was spared the sound of that cowbell ringing… had she opted to ring it at all.)

My point is that Shaun and Lea hadn’t drifted far enough apart yet to make reconnecting the Herculean task it is for others. As you likely know by now, it all came together in relatively little shared screen time, and with very little dialogue…

(As I’ll break down now)

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PART 1: Shaun/Lea in their hotel room, getting ready to head to the hospital the morning after Lea’s revelation (making this the fourth of what was supposed to be a 10-day stay)… 

LEA: How are you feeling?

SHAUN: I want you to feel better. So if going home might make you feel better… it’s a good thing.

Lea’s face in response to Shaun’s words was a puzzle to me. She's spent the past year getting more attuned than ever to Shaun’s ways of communication; nonetheless, she still must have plenty of “I don’t know what you’re thinking” moments such as Claire alluded to in her final moments with Shaun. I think this was one of those times. Unless she was simply stunned by the selfless nature of Shaun’s words, that is...

PART 2: Lea is back at the nursery, learning about Bella’s low oxygen levels. (I loved the way Sofia and Lea worked through their language barrier throughout their acquaintance, didn't you?) When Lea fully realizes Bella’s problem, I presume her “I’m so sorry” is punctuated by the realization this sounds like the very problem that caused her miscarriage. Or similar enough.

Even though that power outage emphasized in the PR release for "Vamos" was surprisingly short… at least, to me... I still expected that to be where Lea’s “tech support” role might kick in. (Shore named this as her role there in some of his interviews so I just went with it.) Not sure why I’d think that…! 

I suppose her real role could have been as simple as, say, helping with a video call connection gone wrong. Guess it’s a good thing Shaun’s connection to Glassman’s office was crystal clear…

Otherwise, maybe it was primarily a volunteer effort on her part, e.g. getting blankets for patients, getting a nurse’s attention when someone needs it… 

But then came the reason that emerged by circumstance: Sofia and Bella. And Shaun.

PART 3: Lea/Sofia/baby Bella. Bella’s in trouble; the nurse brings in a ventilator. Meanwhile, Shaun has his conversation with Glassman.

What can be said about Shaun and Glassman’s conversation that hasn’t already been said? The mentor retreats,  as Andreas noted on Twitter. Partly inspired by his own dry well of Good Relationship Advice, and partly by careful observation… Glassy handed the wheel right back to Shaun and gave him an encouraging nudge.

PART 4: Lea returns to the nursery the next day and finds Sofia working with a handheld ventilator because the electric one had to be used elsewhere. The nurse had to be elsewhere too. Lea vows to stay and help “as long as it takes”.

It’s not that I ever really doubted Lea could be so utterly selfless…but if she had panicked and run off to find someone, anyone other than her to help in such a dire situation, who could’ve blamed her? But Sofia didn’t know quite what she was asking; knew nothing of Lea’s past few months of heartache-- she just knew she was a kind American who’d gifted her with tiny baby socks a day or so earlier. 

When push came to shove, though, Lea didn’t need much time to mull a decision. She was needed, so she was in.

PART 5: Lea’s working the ventilator. Sofia is exhausted but wants to take over…Lea convinces her otherwise. Lea keeps going. 

This is a long night for every St. B-vite on the trip, so for solidarity reasons alone, it’s nice Lea had her own critical job in those wee hours. Sofia’s desperate need for shut-eye lets us know just how late in the night/early in the morning it was getting… 

...All of which made Shaun’s coming on the scene in the 11th hour (technically 3 or 4 AM) all the more touching.

PART 6: Lea w/baby… Shaun comes in and silently takes over for her.

Really, they could have scripted this a little differently and made it even more poignant; I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a deleted scene of Shaun coming down the hospital corridor yawning, sees Lea through the nursery window, and straightens up and walks towards her. As presented, though, we assume he’s just come over from the OR (still has his surgical cap on), spotted Lea, thought of her well-being immediately, and came to help.

The looks of quiet compassion between them speak volumes. They have to. Lea’s primary reason for even thinking of returning to Hershey was that Shaun had an ability to move past their collective grief that she didn’t have. Was it because his ASD has kept him from fully accessing his feelings so far? The jury is still out on that I guess; I’ve seen some viewers speculate that Shaun might not hit his fullest moments of grief until next season but it seems quite possible that Lea was correct.

But the point is not where Shaun was in his own grieving...it’s where THEY are. If she’s still struggling, then they’re both struggling. As I reminded in the last post, it was absolutely crucial for Lea to keep communicating her grief to Shaun for him to even try to understand it. Now that she’d done that, Shaun’s job as he saw it was to support her in every way possible. His way of saying that-- “make her not sad.” His way of doing that was to remind her that they’re in this together (working through the night to manually ventilate Bella).

Such a lovely irony in that this crucial scene was played out without a single word… Ironic because we’re used to Shaun and Lea needing the words at times (see previous statements about communication), and because it’s typically very difficult to follow Shaun’s lead if it is based on something like eye contact. But one year into their coupledom, the eye contact isn’t just there for Shaun and Lea where it isn’t with Shaun and others… it’s everything. It’s you’re not alone; we’re in this together. It’s I know what assisting this baby means to you and I want to help make this happen. It’s nothing matters more to me right now than being with you.

PART 7: Shaun and Lea w/Sofia. Shaun listens to the baby's lungs and, with his encouragement, baby Bella is soon breathing on her own.

Did you catch the steroids parallel? It was steroids that were given (in utero) to Shaun and Lea’s baby girl with the hope that they would foster her lung development when it became necessary. It was also steroids that were needed to help baby Isabella breathe on her own/get enough oxygen. So, again, it wasn’t just about helping save a baby girl but about helping save a baby girl struggling in a way similar to their unborn baby girl.

By this scene, another hour or two has passed from the time Shaun joined them in the nursery (judging from the daylight in the background of the Park/Morgan scene ahead of this). I don’t know how long it takes for steroids to take effect, but it must’ve been at least 10 hours of doing the handheld ventilator alone, and a day before that when she got on the electric ventilator. 

Shaun surely knows Bella’s chances for success at this point, but Lea’s still hesitant-- it takes five long seconds for her to “stop bagging” and place the little ventilator into Shaun’s outstretched hand. Perhaps guilt continued to linger in her mourning; that fear that she’d done something to cause the miscarriage making her worry that if she stopped helping a moment too soon with Bella…?

But it doesn’t take long before Bella’s little gurgle fills the room like a symphony. Shaun is pleased, and Lea is delighted-- as is mama Sofia, of course. But she has one more request of Lea…

When she first offered to let Lea hold Bella a few days earlier, it was an effort of friendliness/politeness that was ultimately declined with Lea too heartbroken to say yes. (It occurs to me now that Lea would have probably been around 30 weeks along during the Guatemala trip if not for the miscarriage-- still a ways from full-term, but the this-could-have-been-her factor must have been very strong… sigh.)

This time, though, it’s like Sofia is offering all she has as a thank-you to the woman who literally stood by her on the longest, darkest night a new mother can have. And “all she has” is this beautiful, precious bundle of life that she now senses Lea can appreciate almost as much as she does. 

She’s right, too. Lea still looks a little fragile and scared when Shaun translates Sofia’s request, but you can see her take a little breath of courage as she faces Sofia, her eyes saying Ok-- for you, I can do this. 

Holding Bella is a transformative moment for Lea. What she thought would shatter her just a few days earlier lifts her to a new place of peace instead. It’s not permanent. We all know that. But it’s the crack in the clouds-- that glimpse of light, of hope-- she needs so desperately.

To Be Continued... next week! Along with:

Cool observations and well-said summaries that you guys have made, either already on Twitter or soon in the comments

Thoughts on all the other non-#Shea happenings of "Vamos"

Some recognition for the two Spanish-language songs used at the end of 'Vamos"... (Hint: the title of this post ("Aqui Sigues Dentro") is a lyric from one of them.)