Episode 104 (Commericals 13-15)

"Hit and Run"

Original airdate: 5/30/94 (10/6/94 Eastern Standard Time)

Happy Memorial Day. Today, Chicago pauses to remember the episodes have come to pass, “Previously on E.R.” Should you choose to ignore them, that marvelous wench History will be bound to repeat herself. In a mocking tone.  Like did History stutter?

Who did the voiceover on this week’s “Previously On,” by the way? No doctor I recognize. They must be letting CNAs intro the show or something. Healthcare reform indeed.

Let us pay Memorial Day tribute by beginning in the on-call room. We always begin here, remember? We all of us, serving god and country, waking up Carter? Carter, wake up! First day of the rest of your life. Time to do rounds or go home, suture fast die young, time to use some forceps like you’re serious. 

Time to acknowledge that I’ve been spelling Mark Greene’s name without the final ‘e’ up until now. Alright? I fixed it. Remember that tomorrow when you wake up and face the world again.

Even with an extra vowel to bear, Dr. Greene is light as air today because Jen is out of town! He can cheat with abandon as Dr. Ross-Clooney charitably points out, aiming his permaboner at Susan Lewis. Excellent suggestion, R-C. Greene’s into her, she’s into him, soul-shaking orgasms all around! But godfuckit, How unbearable will it be when Jen gets back from Detroit? Stifling their romance. Still “on island time,” not shutting up at all about anything. 

Doug-George and Carol treat a patient together, in ceremonial remembrance of when they share every patient. This one is a kid named Ozzie, and we pause again to remember when Chicago ran out of names six years ago today. Ozzie’s mom has a case of bipolar disorder that could be diagnosed from space. She puts on a show of pacing around the room and yelling at Princess Di, just in case any astronauts or at-home viewers happen to be dim.  The docs call down for a psych consult, and Ozzie looks at Dr. Ross-Clooney with pleading eyes. 

“Will I still be allowed to live with my mom?,” he asks from some distant place beneath his bowl cut. 

Dr. Ross-Clooney can’t lie to this poor kid, already so wise beyond his years. He just can’t and then he does, promising Ozzie that he and his mom will stay together. Carol and Ozzie both sense that he’s being dishonest and hunky.

All of this is of negligible consequence compared to this new patient named Vilma, who has her own minipaddles living inside of her! The Paddles, but tiny! Slow down! I hardly can!

What I’m saying is that Vilma appears to be having a heart attack. She’s one Russian, large enough to be several, and she has an eensy-weensy defribulator implanted right into her heart. While most Chicago hospitals do not allow you to BYOD, County is pretty liberal about this, especially on holidays.  

For seven eternities, no one addresses whether or not we’re going to use Vilma’s Paddles Within, or how we’d even go about doing so. Borrowers-sized physicians? Jumper cables? Goal-oriented journaling? Nothing is clear, except that what looks like a heart attack is surely not one. The docs keep scrambling for a diagnosis until…

Until…! 

Vilma opens her mouth and lets out the sound of Pangaea re-aligning.  It is a burp.  It’s tremendous. It replaces the air supply of the entire hospital, and everyone learns what the inside of Vilma smells like. Once the rubble settles over this massive geological event, Vilma has been cured entirely and Chicago has become an isthmus. 

Down in the County General basement, Dr. Benton was left in a Petri dish overnight and underwent meiosis. He is now two joylessly ambitious black surgeons. We’ll call one of him Dr. Sarah Langworthy. Dr. Benton and Dr. Langworthy is in fierce competition with himself over something called the Starzl Fellowship. May the best him win. 

Dr. Cvedic has completed his evaluation of Ozzie’s mom, and R. Clooney asks whether or not she’s Bipolar. It’s the question on everyone’s mind, and Cvedic is proud to announce, “Oh floridly, yes!” 

Here, we stiffen. We watch and wait. Bitch, this Chicago. Original gangland. Tryna drop vocab like it be a single, shit. If there’s a deed that will never go unpunished by street justice, by god Cvedic it’s vocab.  

Cue music and the Running of the Trauma Nurses as a hit-and-run victim is rushed in. Benton and Langworthy race to be first to treat him with lifesaving one-upmanship. During the entire course of the trauma, it’s neck-and-neck! Hard to say which doctor is keeping him alive more deliberately. Dr. Langworthy eventually gives up on administering some extremely on-purpose CPR, and the boy is pronounced dead. Carter, who had held exactly one tube during the entire ordeal, is positively crestfallen.

It turned out to be a total stalemate between Benton and his spinoff, but so get this: Langworthy, you know the chick one? She makes this sick power play where she makes Carter figure out the kid’s identity and notify his grieving relatives! It’s baller because Benton, you know the bummer one? He gets pissed because Carter is actually his intern. Fuckin’ A. I love sports, bro, and any simulacra thereof. 

Dr. Lewis has been given a Jew. Not as gift so much as a patient, and he is fat. She walks into his room and only to find him taking a business call on his hulking early model RAZR. Consummate fridge salesman that he his, he makes no move to hang up the phone. Lewis walks out as quickly as she came in, fully intending to return him for store credit.

Now hold on… this re-gifted Jew came in just moments after Vilma “The ‘Quake” Zevallo. Two fat patients? Two mind-boggling instances of wireless technology? On all fronts, threats to County’s core values: svelte-ness and pagers. Something is definitely going on and the government is definitely behind it! Or aliens.

Ozzie goes missing. Carter walks by a power-scooter scootering on its own accord. VING RHAMES SURFACES. VILMA’S MINIPADDLES GO HAYWIRE. Chaos around every corner; frightened doctors clutching at their pagers and prominent collarbones. The earthbound emergency staff tilt their faces skyward, lit greenly, hair windblown. The aliens are surely getting closer. Or the government!

Or maybe all of this is the cosmic consequence of Dr. Cvedic’s earlier vocab-drop. Chicago’s planetary axis leaning just slightly this way under the weight of its thesaurus.  We revisit him in his follow-up examination of Ozzie’s Mom, where fate patiently awaits him. 


“This is redress for your patois!” screams the bi-pole, clamping down on his forearm with her teeth.

Blood drawn and justice realized, bizarro-Chicago resets itself. Vilma cools it with the defribulation as soon as Harry “The Fridgadier” Stopak turns off his anvil-sized phone. Carol finds Ozzie. Carter picks up where the Memorial Day observance left off.

In a moving paean to his fretful incompetence, he misidentifies the car crash victim from earlier and convinces the wrong set of parents that their son is dead. Fretfully.

Greene and Lewis, lovers always of camp and spectacle, decide to keep history alive by mounting a full-on reenactment of episodes past in which they don’t fuck. Theatrically, they don’t fuck. After the performance Lewis reveals to Greene that she’s involved with Div Cvedic, whose first and last name is that.

Benton doesn’t get the Starzl fellowship, pouts, and absorbs Langworthy back into his amniotic sac. Morgenstern invites him to assist on a Whipple, which is called that. Benton does, and the procedure ends in Ving Rhames angry. No further explanation is required for the ultimate anger of Ving Rhames.

All in all, it’s been a successful Memorial Day. We remembered how things Once Were and have thoroughly ensured that it’s also exactly how things Now Are. The doctors, nurses and patients of County have stood united in patriotism to foil progress, learn nothing, and change little.

It’s not easy either. Carol comes frighteningly close to seeing Doug-George Ross-Clooney for what he is: America’s Last Great Asshole. But instead, R-C finally admits his fib to young Ozzie, explains the end of his childhood with the phrase “Presbyterian Home,” and gives that boy a big handsome hug. He looks up at Carol over Ozzie’s shoulder, and all is forgiven by decree of her yearnin’ loins.

Even Carter teeters on the brink of self-worth when he safely delivers a baby in the back of a taxicab. He immediately nullifies his newfound dignity, however, by appearing to perform sloppy cunnilingus during the delivery.

In a gesture that he hopes will lead to something similar, Ross-Clooney dons a suit and brings a bouquet to Carol’s apartment. Then! Her fiancé answers the door despite the overwhelming fifty percent chance that he wouldn’t. R. Clooney backs off, apologetic, and an incensed Carol chases him up to the El station. She confronts him there with actual anger, in spite of the handsome! She looks right into his face and rather than render it in marble, yells at it. In no uncertain terms, she tells him that showing up drunk and horny at her door was an unsavory choice. She tells him she won’t let herself get hurt again. I never thought I’d say this, none of us did, but Doug-George Ross-Clooney has been snubbed this night.

The flowers he bought lay strewn across the pavement. They reek of decisions made and progress realized. The unholy stench makes us yearn for the burps and farts of yore.

County, Generally, Briefly #2

Are you allergic to candy? If I may be candied with you, this is candy-containing candy.

Episode 103 (Commercials 13-16)

"Going Home"

Original Airdate: 9/19/94

If you ever do visit the Windy City, and you see a lady dressed for bed in luminescent white draping things, well first of all she’s a damsel.

One such lady fair, Her Serene Highness Carol Hathaway, is staring out of windows in the middle of the night, having moods. She tried to kill herself once you know, and so she now dons her traditional Weeping Robes. They signal the kingdom to take her moods seriously as they rustle in the City’s Windy.

Dame Carol’s Mom is appropriately concerned about her daughter being awake after sunset, and during their exchange we learn that it’s Carol’s first day back at the hospital tomorrow. Her kingdom awaits! But is she ready? Carol explores this question by laying out her uniform on her bed in a person-shape, complete with stethoscope and name tag. She does not burn incense, which I have no explanation for. It’s like she has no idea how to properly reanimate Voodoo Scrubs.

Back at the hospital, it’s Benton’s turn to be rudely awoken in the on-call room, by some cool nepotism. It’s Rosemary Clooney, hey now! She’s wearing that one nightgown all old ladies share with each other, and she’s singing a spirited rendition of “Nice n’ Easy.” Benton, utterly reactionless, becomes history’s most appropriate audience to a Sinatra cover.

Carol’s here, ready or not.  (She seems to have given up on scrubs-based necromancy and simply worn them into work.) And hey: in lieu of emotionally expressive sleeping garments, her angst will now be voiced by some signature tunes whenever she appears. Oh that? It’s just the sound of County’s recently installed “suicide tryer warning bell.”  To you it may sound like music from a lost VHS tape about creepy puppets in a moody attic.

She bumps into Carter at the vending machines and kicks things off with a little brunchtime suicide joke. Because if you can’t laugh at yourself! We’ll just have to see if Carol’s still smiling after this FLASHBACK TO WHEN SHE ALMOST DIED VOLUNTARILY.

...she isn’t. In case you’re wondering though, she remembers her own suicide exactly in show-clip form. She's a fan of the program.

Rosemary Clooney keeps singing, but refuses to give her name, or speak non-musically. Benton tries futilely to figure out where she belongs, which is obviously the psych ward (show), or Game Night on George’s yacht (life).

Dr. Ross-Clooney himself has yet to see Carol, and he’s visibly nervous about her return. He even asks the rest of the staff be a “little sensitive today,” because his mom’s in town. Or because of you know, the unknowable suffering that Carol lived inside of for a sec there. He is just a square who hates fun! Ignore him. Jerry, the receptionist who gets it, has some of his best brain death jokes lined up.

How much more before the day’s bleeding competition starts? Just two quick things: First, we must learn that Carol’s shrink wanted her to transfer to a private practice post-overdose. This is some kind of Jen bullshit, which Dr. Green corroborates. Secondly, Rosemary Clooney stops singing and starts sobbing in the presence of Dr. Carter. Mentally unstable, or beside-herself Crooked Hearts fan? Find out after the break.

Okay, it’s finally time. Intro the Bleeding Games, Green and Malik!

“Gun shot wounds coming in!”

“When?”

“Now!”

GONG! And we’re off.

As the shooting victim is rushed in, I pray and pray for someone to say “GSW.” It’s an abbreviation for “gun shot wound” that Chicago doctors use, and I know it. I know these things. I’ve learned this entire language, and here I am in the mother country and everyone is speaking English just to appease me.

The bleeding contest will be GSW vs. MI (myocardial infarction, come on), although everyone just says “gun shot wound” and “heart attack” like I’m some kind of pussy. So far the guy with the torso-bullet  is easily winning. He’s bleeding so much he gets the paddles! The deal with the paddles is this: You never want them, but if they’re out they’re going to touch you.

MI Guy is just lying there losing this thing, barely even trying to bleed. He makes up for it by not breathing either, and pacemakers are failing, and Dr. Lewis is “prepping a dose of TPA just in case.”  She administers it at a musical climax, the guy lives, and TPA seems like a good three-letter call that Lewis made. That is until the patient’s primary cardiologist shows up and scolds her for it. In a suit. Who is he trying to impress, some kind of Jen Green? What a sad show this MI turned out to be; let’s rejoin GSW guy and his team over in Winner’s Circle. He bled the most and survived, and he was Carol’s first trauma of the day. She really aced it in there as far as Dr. Green’s concerned, and maybe she’s ready to be back after all! Once she’s done being praised, Carol is free to find a moody elevator down the hall, where she can be alone and listed to “Carol’s Theme” once more.

After the break, Green treats an “I fell down the stairs” abuse victim who doesn’t speak English. She gets caught in her own lie when her son and translator admits that they live in a first floor apartment. A stair-free living arrangement, ha! Joke’s on you, abused spouses.

The joke is also on Dr. Carter and the rest of Crooked Hearts’ incendiary cast, because Rosemary Clooney does not recall seeing that film! Dr. Svedic coaxes her into speaking words, and we find that she’s an Alzheimer’s sufferer who thinks it’s 1948. Boom. Crooked Hearts was only showing in the festival circuit back in 1948, and Rosemary Clooney has never been a festivals gal. Has she? Please email me if you have convincing evidence of Rosemary Clooney being a festivals gal.

William H. Macy is going to have a scene now, because when he wants that to happen, it does. Reality itself bends to his droopy charm. Carol walks with him because he says “walk with me,” and then she goes back to work because guess who told her to. That’s it! That’s all the Macy you filthy people get for now.

At last, it’s noonish - that charged hour during which Midwestern mating dances are performed in and around various daytime errands. Dr. Ross-Clooney finally gets a moment to ask Carol out for a burger or something (line segment....) while clumsily denying his attraction to her (line segment...), and then Carol’s fiance shows up (TRIANGLE!). Dance away from the fire pit, Clooney. Tag the Fiance will not be cuckolded by a slider special today.  Lewis stomp-claps around Dr. Green while chanting about which SUV she might buy, but she too is ordered silent by a tribal elder: It’s Macy this time, interrupting to tell Lewis that she must present at the Morbidity and Mortality panel later. He’s not saying she made a mistake by administering that TPA, just that she’ll have to defend that mistake before the afternoon Circle of Doubt.

You know it’s never easy here at County, especially after noonish. Carter and Benton have to wait on the rooftop for a helicopter to drop piles of failing organs onto them. Lewis, who has so far treated a disproportionate number of cancer patients (Correlation or causation, am I right?), deals with an elderly Leukemia-haver who refuses life extending treatments. All the gore and mortality, it must be particularly tough for Carol on her first day back. I wonder how she’s coping, what with her recent-

Hey. You know who has looked impeccable this whole time? Dr. Ross-Clooney. Dr. Green and I were just about to wonder how he’s feeling about Carol, what with her recent not-dating-him. "Not that great Mark!," it turns out. Not. That. Great.  

Cue “Carol’s Theme” as she finally realizes how attractively bummed Dr. Ross-Clooney is and how selfish she’s been, dwelling on things not related to his side part. From a distance, she catches him comforting a sick black baby, and she just kind of stands there musicing at him. This overwhelms her, and she has to music over to the water fountain just to music for a second.

On her way out of the hospital, Lewis’ patient Leukemically recognizes the Singin’ sounds of Singin’ Rosemary Clooney. She identifies her as the legendary 1940s songstress Mary Cavanaugh (show) and then asks whether SAG offers family plans (life). Then she passes out, cancerously, and has to be readmitted.

Elsewhere, Frank and his stairless mom make their exit. Before they do, Frank admits his father is abusive, then redacts his statement, fearing more abuse. This seems sad, but know this: where there is sadness there is Nurse Halleh to pronounce it. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen such an old little boy,” she regrets to say.

Halleh, everybody.

The Leukemia patient eventually leaves, still having it.  But she’s not going anywhere before giving Carol an important talk! About going to the Christenings of grandchildren and about how life is a gift.

Give it up for Leukemia guys, come on.

Carol and Doug-George talk about their separation, still separate. Turns out, they broke up because things were going badly!

Relationships, put your hands together.

Okay, if you’ve enjoyed our anticlimaxes so far, you’ll simply turn your knees inside out* for this next scene. The M&M. Lewis on trial. Fatalities: none. Anger level: mid. TPA: what is that. The doctors of Tribe Pagong circle up and briefly discuss the merits of using TPA as Lewis did, versus doing an angioplasty. Then it’s time to vote. Casein: angioplasty. Benton: angioplasty. A superfluous African-American: angioplasty. Dr. Green, what say you? Torches burning and tensions high, he votes... angioplasty.

So that scene was neither here nor- hold on. He voted against Lewis? And she had thought him a bald ally!  The dynamic of their relationship has shifted from Lewis not being angry at Green, to her now being precisely that! I apologize for this actual progress story-wise. I’ll wrap things up just as quickly as I can.

Having been properly identified, (Rose)Mary Cavanaugh-Clooney finally gets picked up by her worried granddaughter. If you thought “I smell a duet,” just then, congratulate yourself.  You are a regular truffle hog of musical interludes. Oh, and since Mary spent most of her time at County with Dr. Carter, the two of them exchange “I love yous” as she boards the elevator. This may strike some viewers as “odd,” and others as “porn,” but really it’s quite benign. “I love you” is one of the many expressions Chicagoans have for “Keep narrow objects out of your ear canals!” Standard parting words. This is a normal show.

For our closing number: Lewis runs up to Carol and says, “Come quick, Mark’s hurt!” and they hurry to the Doctors’ Lounge as if there might be blood in there. Something’s fishy though. There's no Trauma-indicating music underscoring this, no crescendoing cries of agony as they approach the doorway. I almost think this could be a

SURPRISE! Everyone has gathered around a cake to celebrate Carol’s return. There are party hats, even. Party hats that ultimately relate back to a near-suicide, so work that into your sales projections, iParty execs. At long last, a reprisal of Carol’s Theme kicks in as she gives a speech and has a few more slow-mo flashbacks of episode one. Thank you all for coming to Chicago: The Musical. Please consider purchasing a full-color program on your way out.

*A phrase I made for you!

Episode 102 (Commercials 9-12)

"Day One"
Original Airdate: 9/22/94

Let’s all talk about our feelings regarding the E.R. docs drinking Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. This is something I never took note of before my re-watch of episode 102, and personally, I feel I’m being pandered to. As a native New Englander, there’s a weird sense of local pride associated with Dunkin’ Donuts. Pride in not knowing where better coffee is, I guess.

It's product placement, and it's a cheap way of making Northeasterners feel as if Chicago is just another place to live. Like, “Hey look, it’s not so bad! A chain expanded here from a whole four states over!” Well it IS so bad, and that’s probably why New Englanders went there. We do shit we hate and then we act like we had to, and that’s how you create a blue-collar identity.

This Dunkin has me thinking about how proletarian we’re supposed to believe these doctors to be. They work in the gritty COUNTY hospital where people bleed and puke into their stab wounds, as opposed to the flouncy Christian hospital down the way, where heiresses go to have smelling salts administered. Arguments about staff shortages and lack of funding are standard fare at County, and oh, there was that whole story in the pilot I never mentioned.

Here’s what it was: Green’s wife begged him to leave the E.R. and take a more lucrative job at a private practice. Then he didn’t, because I said I won’t do it, Jennifer! You hysterical bitch! Ask me again. Ask me which side of my hand you want your bruises to look like.

Jennifer, why did you even ask? You saw that your husband anchored the entire episode, and that Anthony Edwards had top billing in the credits. He was never going anywhere. We at home knew this. You were the only one in suspense. JEN.

That actually abuse-free and boring story did have one perk: we got to go with Green to his job interview. And we learned that in Chicago, private medical practices are actually wormholes to Beverly Hills talent agencies! This best explains all of the marble and the water walls, and allusions to exotic foods. (Italian foods, that not even the downtown Dunkin serves.) Doctors treat no more than one patient per week here, usually a bikini model with cramping in her areola. Once they massage that pain away with their soft soft hands, the resident physicians collect their hundred dollar bills from the money fountain and mince along back through the wormhole, smelling of rosewater.

But Dr. Green? He loves the E.R., Jennifer. And flannel, and coffee on a flavor spectrum of burnt to known carcinogen. So Private Practice: put your dandy ass in reverse with your “cafe au lait” or your “rim job” or whatever you call it. Right, Sox Nation? RIGHT JEN?

Back to the present though. You’re surely wondering how Chicago’s doing after it discovered suicide and endured an anthrax hailstorm.* Don’t worry, everyone’s fine here. Invigorated even! It’s been a whole eight weeks since Carol got all asystolic up in this piece, and anyhow, intense shit like that is what theses crop planters live for.

Oh they’re PhDs, you’re right. Not crop planters. I lose track!

Wait though... it’s been eight whole weeks?

Yeah. Because listen, you can’t apply temporal measurements as you understand them to a place like County. That’s cultural imperialism first of all. Secondly, quartz-based watches don’t hold up in the Chicago atmosphere. The mineral simply combusts upon entry, as do most other semiprecious formations (amethyst, pyrite, Sacajawea dollars…). Without the steady pulse of oscillating crystals, the Time in Chicago becomes little more than an expression of mood.

“Time of death? I’m feeling like 14:52, and I’ve decided I hate feta.”

This is how eight weeks go by. Dr. Lewis feels that eight weeks have passed because she’s changed toothbrushes twice. (“I’m sick of this REACH™ FlexClean, oh now I miss the multi-level bristles of my REACH™ FlexClean!” Women.) She emotes it, and so it is. Green’s five year old, Rachel, will be able to legally consent in about six seasons, doctors work fortnights at a time without meals, and marriages unravel in minutes. Time is all a matter of how mature/exhausted/over it certain characters feel. You can’t change it so don’t try! One time Nurse Chuny got drunk and turned ninety!

So during these eight weeks that we’ve actualized, Carol survived and everyone got over it. The whole ordeal was less sad than Dr. Ross-Clooney is watchable, so let's focus on his side of things, shall we? We find out he’s been afraid to go and visit Carol ever since her recovery, and he gets so overcome with self doubt that he also attempts suicide! Just the first part but still!

No one hands over specifics about why things are so fraught between Carol and Doc R-C. They’re exes, sure, and kind of friends, and he still has a thing for her.  But when you stop and think about it: We’re all exes. We all have things and friends and sex. It’s universal and also a socially constructed slippery slope that is all a matter of perception. Don’t you think? Grad students? JEN?

It really is an extremely vague hesitation that Ross-Clooney seems to have… unless you pay close attention. I’m talking about the introductory “previously on E.R.” package at the beginning of the episode, in which we cut from Ross-Clooney and Carol exchanging witticisms about their romantic history, to Carol coming in on a stretcher, to Green saying “It doesn’t matter why she did it!”

Oh, but it does Mark! And the promo editor will ask with his clip selections what you refuse to with your Jewish face: Did Carol OD on some cocktail of sleeping pills and expired Colatta syrup because of DR. ROSS-CLOONEY? Find out later tonight, when Green delivers the line, “It’s not your fault Doug,” with his fingers crossed behind his Jewish back.

There is no bad way to introduce a character’s religious persuasion. Learn this now or perish.

I for one, am ecstatic at the new possibilities unlocked here. Entire plot points created in the opening recap package! At some point, someone’s going to say “Holocaust.” And then, Promo Editor, it’s your task to go back and find instances of “the,” “I,” and “survived.” Then a few copy and pastes later: a compelling explanation for Benton’s off putting stoicism.

The semi-told story of Dr. Ross Clooney is echoed in the trials of our main patient of the week. She is a very dying old woman whose loving husband would rather put her on life support than say goodbye for good. We know this is selfish, but also that he’s doing it out of an abiding love for his wife and best friend. The actor conveys as much with great pathos. He gives quite a performance actually, and this threatens me. I don’t really believe in old people having “abilities.” I can’t wait for him to get off screen.

But what about the ills facing larger society, like drunk driving and mistreatment of psychiatric patients? All on the syllabus! Four car crash victims are admitted in various states of banged-upedness. The major injuries all belong to an innocent family of three while a fourth patient, the drunk driver, sustains barely a scrape. The injured mom dies in surgery while the repeat DUI offender drunkenly laughs to himself in an exam room. To sum this tragedy up, two unnamed patients chinwag about there being “no justice in the world.” Safe choice. Imagine if a main character had taken that position on such a hot button issue! “Drunk driving is wrong.” Well you and I may think so, but Chicago was still a young Libertarian Oligarchy in 1994, quite undecided on whether DUI should be classified as a criminal offense or an intramural sport.

Elsewhere, Lewis struggles to get a senile homeless man admitted to the psychiatric ward, but Dr. Svedic, whose name tells us to root against him, coldly refuses to give him in bed.

There’s good news over in the Big Balding World of Mark Green: His wife passed the Bar exam! For this, she runs into the E.R. with her scores in hand and throws herself a little congratulatory flashmob. In a jumper.  I refuse to believe that anyone would have ever called what you’re wearing fashionable. Jen. Oh Jenn. Everything about you is abrasive.

The Greens hustle over to an exam room to make out and then get caught comically in the act, jumperless! These are two of the least sexual people on television though, so it seems plausible that they were just playing cat’s cradle in close quarters. This in spite of the fact that Lewis will later admit to glimpsing Green’s penis.

For those of you familiar with later instances of Dr. John Carter, do you not find it amusing to see him used here strictly as a clown with a dirty index finger? His only dimension so far is ineptitude, and his fatal flaw is that he has to give so many rectal exams to this hoard of German Tourists (They got sick from some tater salad at Hoffbrau’s German Fooden Poisenhaus). In time, Carter will battle crippling addictions and yell romance things from rooftops. But for now, he’ll be relegated to scenes in which German people wear actual lederhosen.

Later, feminism explodes onto the airwaves as two minor female characters demand sex from men. One is a batshit Cabbage Patch co-ed who gets her vaginal rash examined by Dr. Carter, then breaks into his car to coyly suggest that they fuck. The other is obviously Jen, who wants to be re-boned back at the Green homestead.

Keep dick tickling those feisty ones guys, or they’ll surely try to off themselves. Ask Carol!

Oh, and guys. The other thing is that you can boss-slap your girl around all day and still do the naked tango come nighttime. Ask Svedic! He’s actually Lewis’s boyfriend, big reveal.

Was there a chance that this episode would not end with Ross-Clooney’s long delayed visit to Carol’s apartment? When he arrives, her mother answers the door, and boy has she seen the “Previously On” this week! She treats Ole R-C with utter mistrust, telling him he isn’t welcome and shooing him out the door. Seriously, what is all this about? Did he dump Carol while one of them was on the toilet? Did he dump her at the National Holocaust Museum? These are absolutely the only two things that would merit so much aftermath.

Carol eventually silences her vaguely foreign mother so that she and Doug can have a vaguely pregnant moment together. He thinks she looks “beautiful.” She says she’s been “okay.” He gives her flowers, and then a smile that’s probably supposed to convey longing, but seems weirdly self-satisfied. He leaves her contemplating her bouquet, and then the show is over. It was “beautiful.” It was “okay.”

*I’m not going to help you out if you don’t read this crap in order. Walk the Path with me here.

County, Generally, Briefly #1

A medical terminology lesson from episode 101:

Dr. Green: "She got a Bobinsky?!"

Translation: "She friggin kiddin me?!"

Episode 101 (Commercials 1-8) PART TWO

"24 Hours"

Original Airdate: 9/19/94

Onward then. If you’ve been tracking the number of times Dr. Green and Dr. Lewis have met eyes over the beds of ailing patients, you’ll have a total of three tally marks etched into your fleshy area of choice here at the start of act three. That’s a 1 to 1 ratio, which speaks to the incredible pacing of the thing. Are you guys like complete pacing geeks or what?

So sewn are the seeds of Green having a thing for Lewis, but being conflict-creatingly married.

On similar turf, we gotta lay down the law about Dr. Ross-Clooney being in love with Nurse Hathaway, but Nurse Hathaway being conflict-creatingly engaged. Interesting, no, that Green’s wife and Carol’s fiance are both minor/unseen characters? Who could be dispensed with quite easily? These are flimsy triangles, for romance and bridge building alike! Are you guys like total structural integrity nerds or what? 

The Carol/Clooney tension is just lukewarm for now, but I did genuinely enjoy the conversation about fidelity between Green and Ross. In it, the only reason Green can cite for being faithful to his wife is that he’s too exhausted to cheat. Genuine enjoyment of that line, you hear?! I half-smiled. Be sure to tell your friends that this recap “has heart.”  

It takes the rest of the act for Lewis’s patient to get diagnosed, probably, with cancer.

Which patient?

This guy.

Who’s this guy?

Lewis’s patient.

Oh, of course. Mr. Tautological Nobody.

There’s the shortened-life epiphany and then the hugging of Dr. Lewis. So wrought is this scene with themes of mortality, it is almost too much for us to imagine an actual person with traits having cancer. When this show gives a terminal illness to a character with backstory? Man oh man. We’ll be distraught for weeks... unable to move, sustaining ourselves on a stew of cushion crumbs and hot tears. I hope your La-Z-Boy has a magazine pouch, because that’s your new depression toilet. 

The final two acts really culminate the tits off of everything. Green and Lewis meet for actual coffee (notorious scabs, props people are) and start to just be so comfortable with each other. However, their tryst is cut short by double-whammy emergency pages...

...Trauma ensues back at the hospital, and this is no garden variety life-and-death situation! It’s Carol Hathaway, with a stomach full of suicide pills.

Many associated with E.R. claim that this was a to-the-letter portrayal of the first ever Chicagoan suicide attempt. Others charge that egregious “artistic liberties” were taken. The historical accuracy is not for me to judge here, but I will say that, embellished or not, it’s a compelling execution.

As Carol is brought in on a stretcher, the entire staff stop in their tracks and whip their heads around two or three times before staring slackjawed. 

“She’s a nurse!”

“She knew that much would kill her!”

“Why did she do it?”

“Sweet Mary, she tried to die on PURPOSE!”

The nurses behave like they’ve just woken up drunk and with a complete understanding of String Theory. “No, like I get it. But Christ’s cock on a stick if it isn’t FUCKED UP.”

Carol’s life hangs in the balance for the rest of the episode. The other nurses retreat to dark supply closets to stare at the blades of scalpels and contemplate their own newly realized capacity for self-slaughter.

Elsewhere, Benton takes a big risk by starting a lifesaving operation without the necessary supervision of Dr. Morgenstern. When he ultimately gets a nod of praise for his bold effort, he takes a private moment to victoriously punch the hallway. YOU KNOW THE SHOT I’M TALKING ABOUT HERE.

Carter is still overwhelmed, and he has to go outside for a minute so that he can rest his head on a folded stethoscope. YOUKNOWTHESHOTI’MTALKINGABOUTHERE. Green shows up to mentor and reassure him, committed to keeping inept youngsters like Carter in the business of slicing people’s innards. Green appears cinematically, reflected in the wet ambulance bay pavement. Y.K.T.S.I.T.A.H.

These closing scenes strike me as poignant only because they feature those shots, the imagery that will appear in the opening title sequence for the entire life of the show. I’m convinced too, that the actors sensed this while performing. “When I do this scene,” Noah Wyle said to himself one time during the nineties, “I am going to sigh the sigh of a thousand cancer patients. The world will watch me do this every week for years to come, and they will see their own woes evanesce into the air that escapes me. I and the masses will sigh during primetime, and in syndication. On DVDs of all seasons, we all of us, will sigh. And whenever a sigh is breathed in a private corner somewhere? It will be a sigh that was once mine. I will collect royalties for all of this, and they will be tremendous.”