The Night Shift Episode 2.06 Fog of War

A thick fog engulfs San Antonio, causing TC, Jordan and Paul to crash their car. Stranded on the side of the road, they notice a truck hit a guardrail and toppled down the embankment. Inside the truck, they find a group of human-trafficking victims, most of whom scatter into the fog when they see the doctors. Four, however, remain in the truck - two teenage sisters, Carla and Ana, a teenage boy, Oscar, with a head injury, and a man named Hector lying unconscious in a pool of blood. With the fog ruining any chance of getting the victims to a hospital, the doctors improvise, setting up a makeshift clinic in a nearby store and communicating in broken Spanish. Carla's having trouble breathing, so TC uses a bait hook to fix her tongue in place so she doesn't choke on it. As Oscar cowers in the corner, Ana confides in Jordan that Hector is a coyote who kidnapped them from El Salvador and begs her not to revive him or he'll kill them all. She tells TC and suggests maybe they don't work as hard to help the dying man, but TC says they don't get to pick their patients. While Paul is out looking for supplies, Ana cries out that Oscar isn't breathing. Paul is confused - he was stable a few minutes ago! But there's nothing the doctors can do. Oscar's gone and Paul blames himself.

But there's no time to dwell. Hector is losing a lot of blood internally and needs more. TC recalls an old army trick to determine blood types and realizes he's the only one who can give blood to Hector. Despite Jordan's protests, TC rolls up his sleeve and starts a makeshift blood transfusion. He plans to give blood until the helicopter comes, but who knows when that will be, and TC is putting his life on the line. TC has less than an hour before he loses too much blood and dies. As time passes and no airlift arrives, TC grows weaker and weaker. To distract himself, he tells Paul the story of how he and Jordan met. He was an intern who ran into a burning building to save a man, only to be dragged out, unconscious, by the same man. When he came to, the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen was standing over him: Jordan. TC's story starts trailing off as he loses consciousness, and Jordan makes the decision to cut the IV line. Hector stars crashing, but they can hear the helicopter arriving. They just have to hold out a few more minutes!

Suddenly Carla wakes up and starts panicking that she can't speak because of the hook in her tongue. She pulls it out and cries, "Ana is the coyote!" That's when Jordan realizes Ana is nowhere to be found, and Hector, the man whose life she wasn't interested in saving, isn't the monster she thought he was. When the group finally makes it back to the hospital, Gwen reveals that the FBI has had their eye on Ana, a female trafficker. Cops found a track mark on Oscar and he tested positive for heroin. Ana must have injected him when Paul was outside. They also found a car abandoned near the border with the body of a young man shot to death nearby. Jordan, TC and Paul were very lucky to have escaped unharmed.

Back at the hospital, Gwen rushes in Abby, a 12-year-old girl caught in a flash flood and her older brother Blake, who dove in to save her and is now suffering from hypothermia. Drew starts to warm him up and thinks he's improving, but Topher realizes something is very wrong: the kid is dry drowning! His vocal cords are seizing up from being underwater. Suddenly Topher has a flashback to Afghanistan, where he worked on a war prisoner he saved from dry drowning, only to have him tortured for information. The officers then bring the man back to Topher, but he is already dead. Horrified, Topher asks one of the officers if he was Taliban and if they got what they needed. The officer just shrugs. Topher did what he was told, but he'll never know if he did the right thing, and it haunts him to this day. Luckily, this time Topher could save his patient. At the end of the shift, Topher scrolls through his emails, reading a chain of messages going back years, all from the family of the man who was tortured. Topher's been sending them money for years, and after a painful day of flashbacks, he wires them another $1,000, hoping to somehow make it up to them.

Meanwhile, Krista and Joey operate on Abby's broken pelvis and ruptured bladder. After surgery, Krista tells Joey how impressed she is with how calm he always is, even during an emergency. She asks how he does it, and he admits he used to be a stress case, until he lost his son to cancer. He did everything to save him, but nothing worked and he saw the limitations of Western medicine. That's when he got into alternative medicine, yoga and meditation. He doesn't tell a lot of people his story, and Krista realizes how much it means that he confided in her.