What’s ‘Doctor Odyssey’ really about? Some viewers see dead people.
On an episode of “Doctor Odyssey,” the new ABC drama about a medical team working on a luxury cruise ship, the main characters frequently gather on balconies and gaze down upon the passengers. This should not be a significant fact, except … those camera angles, plus their white uniforms, could be a hint that the medical staff members are actually guardian angels.
Because the Odyssey, as the ship is named, might really be heaven.
Possibly purgatory.
Maybe some other in-between place?
Or, you know - it could just be a steamy-sudsy show about a hot doctor saving boat passengers from their medical emergencies.
Therein lies the conundrum of watching “Doctor Odyssey,” the latest case study in whether high-concept series such as “Lost” and “The Good Place” - fueled by speculation on social media and message boards - have forever warped the minds of TV fans of a certain generation. If even the slightest thing about a new show seems off-kilter, viewers are now primed to expect a game-changing and/or supernatural twist, and people wind up parsing through every scene for Easter eggs that may or may not exist.
But also? It really does seem like something weird is happening aboard the Odyssey. As in, do the characters actually exist, or is this a “St. Elsewhere”-type “this is all in someone’s imagination” situation?
On the surface, the premise is straightforward: A small medical team, led by Joshua Jackson as new doctor Max Bankman, along with nurse practitioner Avery (Phillipa Soo) and nurse Tristan (Sean Teale), provide on-call health care on a ship filled with demanding and wealthy passengers. But take a closer look, and a suspicious amount of glowing light pours out of the windows. A bright, poppy haze settles over scenes to give it all a dreamlike quality. The passengers enter the boat on a moving sidewalk through a trippy tunnel that makes it look like they are floating underwater.
The plot is often unhinged, leapfrogging from surreal to serious: In the Sept. 26 premiere episode, Jackson’s character competes in a dance battle and then follows it up with a somber monologue about how he was patient zero during the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020 and almost died. Five episodes in, the characters talk about death quite a bit. (The first season has 18 episodes and returns with a new one Nov. 7.) Granted, they do work in medicine, but the references pile up almost ridiculously. At one point, Max has a conversation with the captain (played by Don Johnson) where he stares at him meaningfully and says, “Know what the worst thing for our health is? Being alive.”
“If this is not all death-coded, what is happening here?” Carlye Wisel, a theme-park journalist and podcaster, asked in a recent interview - rhetorically, of course, because there have been no answers. (An ABC publicist said no producers were available for an interview.) Wisel, who lives in Los Angeles, was intrigued when she saw billboards featuring Jackson, who pivoted from his beloved-to-millennials “Dawson’s Creek” days to prestige TV such as “The Affair.” Wisel assumed that if Jackson were taking a role in a network drama, it would have to be something special.
Then she started watching, and “special” was one word for it. She was so weirded out by Jackson’s character’s backstory and the bizarre tone and the look of the boat (“Why is everything so gilded?”) that she started asking around to find out whether she was the only one who felt that way. A friend pointed her to a recent TVLine article headlined “Doctor Odyssey Feels Like a Fever Dream Because It Is a Fever Dream - Here’s Our Not-At-All Crazy Theory.” The piece argued that Jackson’s character actually never recovered from the coronavirus and “he’s stuck in a coma, hanging somewhere between dead and alive. The Odyssey is heaven, beckoning him to cross over to the other side.”
Suddenly, everything clicked. “It just fueled my obsession, and it has not stopped,” Wisel said, joking that this was now her version of being a Taylor Swift superfan and looking for possible clues and hidden meanings: Is the ship’s medical crew actually a heavenly workforce helping people over to the great beyond? Jackson actually calls the ship the “great beyond,” so does that mean he is actually clinging to life in the hospital? Wisel posted a TikTok about the theory and the video has since been flooded with comments from other viewers who noticed the same thing. One compared the show to “The Twilight Zone.”
“I think in my bones, I’m expecting to see a Season 1 finale banger with Joshua Jackson opening his eyes in the hospital,” Wisel said. “And I also see a world where we learn nothing for 10 seasons and just get endless wacky themed cruises.”
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True, it could just be a strange, cheesy show. After all, “Doctor Odyssey” is the latest offering from TV titan Ryan Murphy, who is the writer-director-producer behind six series now streaming and airing on various platforms. His series are known for dark humor and disturbing imagery as well as a surreal quality in general - one of them, FX’s “Grotesquerie,” recently unveiled a wild twist of its own.
Samantha Macke of St. Louis is a fan of another Murphy show on ABC, the first responder procedural “9-1-1,” which airs right before “Doctor Odyssey” on Thursday nights; there’s a lot of crossover viewership. People familiar with the Murphy oeuvre have seen how the producer can move between the realistic (“American Crime Story”) to the fantastical (“American Horror Story”) to the more mainstream (“Glee”) with ease. But if something appears off, there’s usually a reason.
“We know his shows can sometimes have weird, supernatural elements or there’s more to them than it seems,” Macke said. She does think there is something to the limbo theory, because of the “heavy-handed” references to death and how all the main cast members have unfinished business that can only be resolved off the boat: The captain is struggling to move on from losing his wife; Soo’s nurse practitioner character dreams of becoming a doctor; Teale’s character has abandonment issues with his mother.
Michel Ghanem, the TV Scholar on Instagram and a freelance writer from Vancouver who writes predominantly about television, loves a good medical drama and was intrigued by this unusual offering. “I think the show does have this fever dream quality to it that is so palpable,” he said, noting how many times they refer to heaven or paradise. “And it’s very unclear at times where the ship is going … it does give this ‘floating in the middle of nowhere’ vibes.”
Still, he said, it’s hard to imagine that a network drama would take this pivot, particularly because it is set up to have such a straightforward structure: With the faintest sonar ping of “The Love Boat,” each episode features a new set of passengers and a different cruise theme, from Singles Week to Plastic Surgery Week to Halloween Week, which could easily carry the series. Plus, there’s a new prominent guest star every week, from Shania Twain to Margaret Cho. “I would be shocked if they would turn the tables on the viewer that way. … I think it would be so confusing to them not to fall back into that rhythm,” Ghanem said. “Unless it’s some sort of ‘Lost’-esque finale moment, I can’t really see them shifting the show that dramatically.”
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Ah, yes, “Lost” - the reason the “Doctor Odyssey” theories wound up here in the first place. Jessica Siler of Florida, one of the many millennials who originally tuned into “Doctor Odyssey” because of Jackson, is one of the many viewers who used eagerly watch every episode of ABC’s early aughts castaways saga, where the twists and turns spawned a subculture of message boards and communities that dissected every scene.
“I was very much that person who, for two days after it aired, was looking at theories,” Siler said. “I was fully immersed in that whole thing, so there’s no way it didn’t alter my brain chemistry in some way. I can’t imagine that it didn’t affect my future TV viewing experience.”
Even though “Doctor Odyssey” might not be on the same level in terms of quality - would “Lost” have a storyline in which a woman’s nose literally falls off while doing drugs after plastic surgery? - the added speculation can only boost its profile. According to Deadline, around 4.1 million viewers saw the premiere the day it aired in September and nearly an additional 10 million watched over the next week across platforms. It remains a staple in Hulu’s list of Top 15 shows, and ABC reports that “Doctor Odyssey” ranks in the Top 20 broadcast and cable series this season with 5.75 million total viewers per week.
Claire Franken, the editor who wrote the highly cited TVLine piece about the coma theory, said she has seen a very positive response from readers. “People seem to think it adds a layer of complexity to this frothy show,” she said. The outlet has interviewed the stars of the series, including Jackson, who said he “loved” the idea. “I cannot tell you what goes on inside the mind of Ryan Murphy, but we also had a similar theory operating on set. Only Ryan Murphy knows,” Jackson said.
Murphy’s shows are also known for storylines featuring LGBTQ+ characters, which may account for another theory that has taken a strong hold on social media - that Jackson’s character, Max, and the nurse and nurse practitioner, Tristan and Avery, are destined to wind up in a throuple. At first, it looked like Max and Tristan would just fight over Avery, but there have been hints about Max and Tristan’s bond as well.
So if there are no other big reveals in the works, that would certainly set the show apart from more typical love triangle storylines.
“I really do think the dynamic of the three of them is really interesting,” Siler said. “I feel like a good way to entice viewers to stay or to bring in new viewers is to just do something that’s not done on network TV and to throuple those three up.”
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