Wait, Did Vivian Just Completely Disappear From ‘Doctor Odyssey’?
The back half of Doctor Odyssey Season 1 is going full steam ahead for the baby drama. Unlike the goofy, steamy first half of the season, the current episodes have Max (Joshua Jackson), Avery (Phillipa Soo), and Tristan (Sean Teale) dealing with the consequences of their one-time threesome hookup. Avery is questioning how difficult a future in med school would be with a baby, while Max and Tristan attempt to prove they can be good fathers when a paternity test is done. Even Captain Massey (Don Johnson) is part of a separate pregnancy reveal. In trying to make this into an interesting storyline, Doctor Odyssey seems to have tossed one conflict overboard with very no impact or resolution.
Back when Tristan realized Avery was interested in Max, he looked elsewhere to find a good time, and it saw him get close to wellness chef Vivian (Laura Harrier), who soon became the new chef on the cruise ship. This growing romance between them had the promise of adding complications to the show’s central love triangle, or at least so it seemed. Since the midseason premiere, that relationship has been dropped, and Vivian is missing from the ship’s characters who have appeared. It looks like she’s been cut without explanation, despite the role she could have played in the baby drama.
Who Was Vivian in ‘Doctor Odyssey’?
Guests come and go on The Odyssey, but someone hasn’t been seen onboard for quite a while now as the cruise sails into “Casino Week” and “Spring Break.” As Tristan’s feelings for Avery return to full force, his previous love interest has been left behind. It’s not the first time a show has written out a character without a mention of their absence, but for a show like Doctor Odyssey that liked to get a little messy, it feels like a wrong move. Back in “Wellness Week,” a new romance started when Vivian met Tristan. She arrived as the personal chef to a bogus wellness guru, a boss from hell who forced Vivian to serve raw organ meat.
Competing with the song that plays during Max, Avery, and Tristan’s hookup in Episode 6, is another needle drop that brings sexy vibes when The Doors’ “Riders of the Storm” plays as the ship rocks from the waves of an approaching hurricane, causing Vivian to stumble into Tristan’s arms. By the end of the week, Vivian is hired as the new chef of The Odyssey, but she doesn’t just stick to the ship’s kitchen. The fling continues into “Halloween Week,” where Vivian saves Tristan’s life from carbon monoxide poisoning and in “Quackers,” things start to take a serious turn. As part of the ship’s event, they paint each other a duckie with a personal backstory and Tristan decides to open up to Vivian about his past with the hope their fling can become a steady romance. It seemed like the pregnancy reveal in the midseason finale was then going to get complicated with the Vivian-Tristan relationship.
The Second Half of ‘Doctor Odyssey’ Season 1 Hasn’t Brought Vivian Back
The chemistry between Laura Harrier and Sean Teale helped make their characters’ romance become a plot point to invest in. They got together without any hurdles, a big difference from how Avery rejected Tristan’s feelings (at first). Doctor Odyssey had everything in place to see how he would reexamine his relationship with Vivian, considering, unlike Max and Avery, he had another love interest at the time of finding out the baby news, but that’s not the direction the show went in.
On IMDB, Harrier was credited for the three episodes she has appeared in so far, and if that’s the end of her time in this medical drama, it’s a major loss to the story possibilities. A short-term fling isn’t new in Doctor Odyssey, but it has also shown it can reintroduce past characters for new stories. Shania Twain reappears as Heather, a previous flame of Captain Massey, who reveals she is pregnant with his child. Even as circumstances want to put everyone on a family-oriented path, the show isn’t above getting messy.
The two-parter where sharks and orcas go on the attack brings in the quick connection Max forms with Dr. Brooke Lane (Adrianne Palicki) to cause friction with Avery, who gets a spike of jealousy. On Tristan’s side of things, he is on a journey of wanting to better himself, and in “Spring Break” he realizes he has been ignoring his abuse of alcohol. He doesn’t want to be a carefree, party boy anymore. While it’s character growth, one can’t help but wonder why the show didn’t include Vivian in any of this, perhaps as a way to view Tristan’s maturity in how he discusses where they stand after he learns the baby news.
The Baby Storyline in ‘Doctor Odyssey’ Could Have Gotten Complicated with Vivian
There is proof the show wouldn’t have simply made things petty if Vivian had still been around. When Brooke looked like an obstacle between Max and Avery, “Shark Attack! Part 2: Orcas!” set some time aside for the women to chat, not about Max, but about Brooke’s medical school experience, which becomes helpful for Avery, who is struggling with doubts about her future in med school. For a show like Doctor Odyssey that likes to put hookups and love lives as the top priority in the writer’s room to base episodes around, this second half of Season 1 is missing the fun drama of the first eight episodes. Vivian sticking around on the ship could have complicated the love triangle that is now more or less confined to the paternity mystery involving Max and Tristan that needs to be answered sooner or risk getting stretched thin and (pun intended) sinking the ship.
