Must be a statement of our time when the self-centered, competent guy without a social conscience...

...is the sympathetic character among a bunch of do-gooding liberals.

This Io9 review of "A Gifted Man" speaks truth to power:

In this episode, Good Mike Holt decides to treat all the people in his waiting room except for the person who actually made an appointment and has some idea that Mike's specialty (neurosurgery) applies to his problem. Bad Mike decides to ask the Clinica Sonando not to refer people who aren't in his area of expertise and don't have appointments to his extremely expensive private neurosurgery practice. Good Doctors decide to rope Mike into the room with a boy who a doctor is already treating for a bruised elbow. To repeat that, a neurosurgeon is asked to be the second physician diagnosing a boy with Sore Elbow.


When they take blood samples from the boy and Good Mike finds out that it takes days to get lab results back, he roots around in the clinic store room, finds and cleans a microscope, and then looks at the samples to diagnose the boy with Sickle Cell Anemia. Now that a neurosurgeon has performed the functions of a family physician, a lab tech, and an intern, the Good People complain when he leaves to go to his practice, since presumably they have some floors he needs to scrub. I imagine the clinic has a nuclear physicist in there, too, but she's busy cleaning out the rat traps.

The next round of stellar decision-making skills are showcased when the boy's father comes in, and the doctors learn that he's not biologically the boy's father. All the Good People, including Anna's Ghost, want to quietly deceive the man and hope that during the course of treating this painful and incurable disease, the father never works out that his wife cheated on him and his son isn't biologically his. (The fact that they're banking on the dad not finding out because he's an immigrant with no medical knowledge really puts the scoop of ice cream on that little slice of virtue.)


Finally Bad Mike, much like the audience, can bear no more of this and takes over, to the consternation of everyone. He tells the dad the truth straight-out, and then yells at him until he accepts that he has a responsibility to the child, biology or not. In the end, Bad Mike decides that the top neurosurgeon in the world abandoning his specialty to be a family practice director/microscope wiper-offer would not be a benefit to him or the medical world. He turns down an offer to run Anna's clinic. Again, the Good People are disappointed because unfocused virtue is always the answer to practical difficulties.

And:

To be fair, Mike knows he's worried about money, but doesn't say anything about it, so he's acting the ass here. The pilot's a different story. Anna reminds him that the FAA will penalize her for not seeking medical care for a known condition. While everyone who has ever been in a plane says, "Good! That's what they should do! No one wants a seven-mile screaming fall of flaming death because their pilot's nervous about doctors! Ground her! Ground her now! Ground her forever!"


Mike looks hangdog and keeps it quiet. Eventually he clears up her little problem via massive neurosurgery during which everyone who had been in her plane in the last few months should have gotten the chance to spit on her unconscious face. Mike pauses his post-op treatment to run across town and blindly sticks a needle in the man's heart to save his life.

Basically, Mike is a competent, highly skilled person who manages to employ about a hundred people and pay 90% of the taxes needed to keep the City of New York afloat. 

Let's cut him some slack.