Though she’s not afraid of her carriage turning into a pumpkin and her gown turning into rags, Alex (Erica Durance) has something much larger to lose when the clock strikes midnight.

Twelve o’clock marks the three week period of her fiancé Charlie’s coma, after which he’ll enter “a persistent vegetative state.”

“You ask any surgeon, they'll tell you, the hardest part is the waiting,” Charlie says at the beginning of the fourth episode.

Alex begins the episode by sitting vigil, and though she’s skeptical, she gives Coma Arousal Therapy a shot, trying to stimulate Charlie’s senses. Desperate to find a way to fight for him, she decides to rely on what she knows best – medicine. “She finds crackly lungs (through her stethoscope) and she knows she’s going to have to fight for his life right from the get-go,” says Durance

To keep herself occupied, Alex decides to pick up a shift in the E.R. There’s no waiting there, as her first patient is a victim of a stab wound and her second is a hockey player (and we find out that Alex is a hockey fan!).

“He’s a fighter, that’s what (the hockey player) does and she tries to get him to look at himself and what he’s doing to his body and that he’s causing so much physical damage that he could die,” Durance says.

While Alex tries to convince hockey player Todd Fahey that he has a concussion, she finds out that Charlie does in fact have pneumonia, and his fever peaks at a dangerous 105 degrees, as the clock keeps ticking down to midnight.

But it’s not all stab wounds and concussed athletes, and gunshots (!) – the rest of the Hope-Zion team is at a drag show for Shahir’s birthday.

(Because nothing says socially awkward neurosurgeon like a “Best Ass Competition” with drag queen, Dyna Thirst…!)

“My boyfriend Victor wants to surprise me and take me to this drag show,” says actor Huse Madhavji, who plays Shahir. “It’s the weirdest thing, not because it’s a drag show, it’s just that there’s a lot of people and lights and it’s too much for him. He wants his hospital – the surgery room and his office. He wants his iPad and to just research things. That’s what he really wants.”

And he gets what he wants and ends up having to head back to Hope-Zee to perform brain surgery. A happy birthday, indeed.

Alex’s E.R. shift finishes and though midnight comes and goes and Charlie doesn’t wake up from his coma, his temperature finally breaks.

And for the briefest of moments, Alex sees Charlie in his tux out of the corner of her eye.

“From every angle, everybody’s fighting for what they love most,” says Durance.