Editor’s note: The below recap contains spoilers for Doctor Odyssey Episode 16.
What could possibly be the perfect chaser to the shot-to-the-heart that last night’s 9-1-1 proved to be? Obviously, a healthy dose of Doctor Odyssey! After last week’s twintastic episode, which added more complications to the would-be throuple of Max (Joshua Jackson), Avery (Phillipa Soo), and Tristan (Sean Teale), Episode 16 pushes the limits of just how far audiences are willing to go with this will-they-won’t-they and… it’s starting to lose its charm!
The episode opens with Avery issuing a reminder that she will be leaving the Odyssey in approximately one month to attend medical school, and she doesn’t want to start anything that she’ll have to break off, which is a pretty easy way of handling their dueling confessions of interest in her. “Dueling” is an apt word to use here because much of “Double Booked” is focused on dueling ideologies — particularly for Avery who, once again, displays a shocking amount of indecision and flip-flopping desires. The entire season has been spent with her bouncing back and forth between the dilemma of having two hot guys who want her, and having a shocking lack of motivation to decide either way. Even by the end of the episode, Avery still hasn’t really made a decision that she isn’t willing to walk back.
In the same spirit as the couple who accidentally booked their babymoon during “Gay Week,” corporate has inadvertently double-booked a pair of authors with very different views on sex. While Avery is a self-professed fan of the sex-positive guru, Mona (Whitney Cummings), she is surprisingly cool about the tradwife influencer Penny (Kelli Berglund) and her picture-perfect traditionalist fans, too. She claims throughout the episode that it’s because women should be free to make their own decisions about their lives, but the sentiment falls flat when the only decision Avery has made is that she can’t make decisions at all.
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Image via ABC

After Captain Massey (Don Johnson) calms the clash of differences of opinion between the two starkly different subsets of guests, Mona and Penny embark on their lavish book tours, speaking to their fans. Avery sits in on Mona’s talk, where she issues a challenge to all of the attendees: have a “blazing” orgasm by the end of the day. Meanwhile, Max catches the tail end of Penny’s back-to-the-basics speech about committed relationships. Surely this can’t possibly be an allusion to the fact that Max wants a serious relationship and Avery just wants to have fun.
After the small groups wrap up, Penny and her husband (Cameron Deane Stewart) visit the infirmary to get her checked out over a stomach ache. He mentions that they’ve been trying to have a third baby, but she insists that she couldn’t be pregnant. With pregnancy mostly ruled out, the focus turns to their diet of raw milk, which is riddled with bacteria and causes a variety of foodborne illnesses that could be causing her stomachache. There’s a lot of meta commentary about how “traditionalists” balk at medical science and the FDA, which speaks to a lot of the current trends across social media presently. They do eventually rule out food-borne illnesses, much to her husband’s chagrin, but that amusement is short-lived for both of them. Max discovers a mass on her bladder and, after a CT scan, discovers that the reason Penny was so insistent that she wasn’t pregnant is that she has a secret IUD.
Like any tradwife doing something without her husband’s knowledge, Penny panics, but Max and Avery ensure that her secret is safe. After all, HIPAA laws still exist! Their con is short-lived, as her condition rapidly deteriorates, forcing them to have to get her husband’s permission to operate on her and by that point, she’s already admitted to what she did. Luckily, her husband isn’t a complete bonehead, and he doesn’t want their last conversation to have been an argument. Penny makes a full recovery, and their story ends quite happily. They agree to talk things out and actually plan what their family will look like together, and Max even provides them with a complimentary box of condoms for the road.

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Meanwhile, Mona confides in Avery about struggling with vaginismus for two years, which has left her feeling like a fraud who preaches about sex, but isn’t having any herself. After a series of tests and a little probing, they discover that she’s actually in premature menopause and her condition is completely treatable. By the end of the cruise, Avery pushes Mona to indulge in a little flirtation with an interested passenger, and it’s smooth sailing for Mona after that. This subplot seems to very much mirror what Avery experiences throughout the episode, which is a lot of wild, fun, and free sex with Tristan.
In contrast to Avery’s week of liberation, Captain Massey is having one of the worst weeks of his life. It’s a fascinating contrast, given the character growth and dynamics that the series played with just a few weeks ago when Avery discovered she wasn’t pregnant. Massey eventually confides in Max and reveals that prior to embarking, Heather (Shania Twain) called to tell him that she lost their baby, and she refused his offer to come to be with her. Since then, she has ignored all of his calls, and the whole thing has forced him to really reconsider love, his future, and life after the Odyssey, with a particular emphasis on the fact that you can’t make someone want the things you want. It’s a particularly poignant sentiment for Max to hear, given Avery’s insistent attempts to make him want what she wants.
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Avery takes Mona’s challenge to heart. After getting hot and bothered watching Tristan jog around the upper deck shirtless, and getting all wound up staring at Max’s tush while talking about condoms, lube, and dental dams, Avery decides to take matters into her own hands and blaze a happy trail for herself. But, when that proves to be lackluster, Mona gives her a follow-up challenge: bed both of her hunky suitors. However, that isn’t a challenge she can win when Max is entirely disinterested in just having fun.
She tries her best to convince both men to join her in bed (separately, tragically), but Tristan is the only one to take her up on the offer. The first time they wind up in bed, Avery seems to have a lot of fun and says as much. Tristan makes it clear that being alone with her like this is quite literally a dream come true for him, which leads me to believe he cares for a lot more than he’s letting on. When Max refuses to take her up on the offer of completely low-stakes sex, Avery makes her way back into Tristan’s all-too-willing arms, and this time she shows a certain degree of hesitation. It’s almost as though she’s thinking about Max, or perhaps she’s thinking about when she had both of them — which she was thinking about during Mona’s talk about remembering the “best sex of your life.”
With two episodes left in the season (and potentially the series), it feels like a waste of potential not to just make everyone kiss and be done with it. Ryan Murphy has explored so many different relationship dynamics during his television reign that it feels almost obscene that this is the show that he’s showing restraint on. At least if the throuple got back together, Avery might have a chance to develop a personality beyond worrying about which man she’s going to end up with. And that is where this seems to be headed. Despite her claims of wanting to be a strong, independent baddie heading off to medical school, she knows that neither of these men is capable of no-strings-attached — least of all Max, whose attention she seems desperate to get.
As the episode draws to a close and everyone’s plotlines are resolved, Max and Avery share a look across the room, which leads to them having a quiet conversation on the upper deck as the sun hangs low in the sky. Despite already knowing why Max wouldn’t take her up on her offer of a fun fling — something he’s made clear for numerous episodes now — Avery once again tries her luck. She wants to have fun before she leaves, and she wants that fun to be with Max! Max, once again, reaffirms the fact that he isn’t built for casual, even if he would love nothing more than holing himself up in her room for the next four weeks. He tells her that it would break his heart to have to say goodbye to her after spending that kind of time with her, and then he admits that he loves her, which just might break Avery’s heart right then and there.
Doctor Odyssey retreads a lot of familiar ground with the throuple in its pre-penultimate episode, which makes the prospect of next week’s two-part finale quite daunting, considering it looks like the trio will be split up during a tsunami. If we are staring down the final two episodes of the series as a whole, audiences are going to be left feeling like Avery and her unsatisfying afternoon alone.
New episodes of Doctor Odyssey premiere Thursdays on ABC and next-day on Hulu for another two weeks.

Doctor Odyssey

Avery faces yet another dilemma with the throuple in Doctor Odyssey Episode 16.

Release Date

September 26, 2024

Network

ABC

Pros & Cons

Doctor Odyssey wastes an episode retreading familiar ground and resetting every dynamic.
Avery continues to be Doctor Odyssey’s weakest link, despite Soo’s excellent performance.
With two episodes remaining, Doctor Odyssey has walked back a lot of the progress made in the previous episodes.