ER season finale 5/18 (spoilers)

Cafe Society
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First things first: I haven’t been as faithful in watching this show as I used to be; I think I’ve only caught a handful of episodes this year when just a few years ago it was “must see” TV (so sue me, I totally bought into NBC’s ads LOL). I did watch last night’s season finale, though, and I’m still aggravated by it!

I hadn’t been paying much attention to spoilers and so if there was any backstory about Mary, the supposed EMT trainee, I wasn’t aware of it. But my alarms started beeping when she didn’t seem to know medical basics, like blood pressure and how to take a temp or how to write on a chart. And my god, she was supposed to be -shadowing- Sam, just observing, not actually doing anything. From a lawsuit standpoint alone, the hospital would have been quite clear about that. That was Natalie Wood’s daughter playing Mary, btw – Natasha Gregson (sp?).

Liked the Neela/Pratt scenes at Gallant’s burial–Parminder Nagra is understatedly elegant, especially in emotional scenes. And boy howdy, did she give Gallant’s dad the what-for!! Go Neela! So glad that they weren’t at the ER too …!

I don’t know if Steve (Sam’s ex) was on last week’s show; it seems like he might have had a bit of storyline last week. Anyways, it’s all a set-up to get Steve out (he’s been in prison for a while), with Mary being the girlfriend of Steve’s buddy. Granted Sam -tried- to clue folks in that something was wrong, but by the time Abby finally did catch a clue, it was too late, thus preciptating the shoot out at the ER Corral. And that really was what it was - they shot the hell out of that set. A -prolonged- gun fight too.

So Jerry is seriously injured and now looks like he’s bleeding out; pregnant Abby has collapsed on the floor in a pool of blood outside of the suture room, where Luka is tied pretty securely to a gurney inside–aware of Abby’s collapse but unable to get free. According to observations from others, Abby went down pretty hard on her belly during the gunfight; speculation is that it’s abruption. She looks far enough along that maybe the baby can be saved, but honestly ER seems to want to have either mother or child die.

Oh yes, and Steve and his co-horts make it out of the ER with Sam as hostage — and that’s when we find out that Steve also has Alex (his son with Sam), and they take off in the van, with Mary at the helm.

So I think this may have been the very last straw for me. I’m tired of waiting 4-5 months to find out what will happen, especially when it’s probably going to be something terrible. I’m tired of investing in characters that seem to be interminably unhappy. laughs If I want that, I can always watch a daytime soap, right?

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Heehee! I was thinking the same thing. That place is cursed. The weird psychic ladies did try to warn them.
I was also confused about the whole Luka thing. How is an ET tube going to help him breathe if his diaphragm was paralyzed? Okay, I could see if it was the larynx that was paralyzed but I’m pretty sure she said diaphragm. Also, why did they bother to tie him to the gurney if he was goign to be paralyzed for 30 minutes?
When did Morris become a good doctor?

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How did that work, anyway? Mary kidnapped the boy earlier in the day, then left him unattended in the van for several hours while she went undercover, waiting for her chance to bust boyfriend and buddy out? In all that time, the kid didn’t manage to get free or alert any passing pedestrian?

None of this hangs together well, and I seriously doubt any of it will be explained.

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I’m pretty new to ER (I know, lucky me), so a little help. This Steve guy, he was a regular to County General, it seems. How’d he/they have access to Sam’s kid? Did they used to go out?

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Steve is Sam’s no good ex and Alex’ dad.

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The revelation of Alex being held hostage is the point where my irritation with the episode boiled over into full-fledged hatred.

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Vecuronium would paralyze all of the breathing muscles – the diaphragm and all of the accessory breathing muscles. Intubation would help nothing, except it is a necessary step for two reasons:

(1) If you cannot control your airway, there is a high risk of aspiration of saliva or vomit into the lungs. It is difficult to bag a patient with face mask for a long time, and eventually the forced air will blow up the stomach and then you get into a high risk of aspiration when the stomach deflates.
(2) I thought for sure when they tubed him they would have a ventilator ready in the room. This would solve their problems, and you need to have a stable airway for the ventilator to work (either by ETT, LMA, or something else). Just sticking a tube in his throat does nothing except (1).

Luka’s eyelids were starting to twitch by the time they finished the intubation. This may mean that he was able to move enough air. FWIW, paralyzation without sedation is supposedly incredibly terrifying.

Luka would have been found in like two seconds flat after the shooting. Didn’t they realize that the guarding cops were obviously down? Someone would go check on them, realize the need to do an ER sweep, and that’s it.

We had EMT trainees all the time at the ER at which I worked. First thing is that they were very well trained already, close to the end of their training and quite competent. Second, they were never unsupervised. Third, they never touched a chart. It would be a complete medicolegal nightmare to have them do more.

BTW, Natasha Gregson used to be so adorable. She looks a little worse for the wear, honestly. Or perhaps that’s how they made her up.

Worst. Episode. Ever.

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Terrible. Just terrible.

I occasionally post at an ER board, being a long-time fan of the show. I couldn’t believe how hard the regular posters were on the Darfur episodes, complaining that they weren’t “realistic” and yet they still swallow this garbage from the actual hospital episodes.

Today some of them are claiming that this is the best episode of ER they’ve ever seen. :rolleyes:

I have never missed an episode of ER. When I started having contractions I refused to go to the hospital until I’d seen the show (they were just BH’s anyway). I have defended the show for years.

I think I’m ready to say goodbye.

*Neela was great though. *

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Maybe the explanation is they got some of the dose into him but not all? Would that cut the paralysis time or just the effectiveness of the dose? I too wondered why Sam was relying someone squeezing the ambu bag if she could have just grabbed the vent and hooked him up.

My all-time favorite episodes were

  1. The slow night when it ends with them paging Gant for help only to realize it was his body on the gurney…a friend of mine had gotten bored by the slow ep and switched channels during the last two minutes when the real drama happened! That kind of innocent slow build-up was amazing.

  2. Mark Green presiding over the birth where the mom ends up dying. I’ve never had a baby but even I could feel the pain of him reaching in and trying to fix things around the uterus.

Man, those were a long time ago. Now they just mine old ideas and think that maybe we’ve forgotten.

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    This also raises another question. How did she grab the kid? He looked like he was in a school uniform.Did she nab him off the school grounds? Did no one at the school notice him missing?

Another question that will probably remain unanswered. Did Mary just walk in and say that she was an EMT trainee, and they took her at her word? Wouldn't there be some sort of paperwork that would come with such a trainee?

kunilou:

 Yes for a busy ER, there really do seem to be quite alot of places where people can hide, and bleed out during a crisis.
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Just like Oz, the maximum-security prison with all the neat little cubbyholes for private rape, assault and murder.

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It was a suture room - lots of gloves, needles and bandages, but there’s not much reason to have a ventilator in there other than as a convenient plot device - the machines are kept in the trauma rooms where they’re most likely to be needed at a moment’s notice.

Even the ambu-bag could a bit of an oddity to have in a suture room, unless it’s that hospital’s practice to have one in every room that has an oxygen connection. I was in real suture and splint room last weekend, and they didn’t even appear to have oxygen, much less an ambu-bag or ventilator in there. Presumably, the assumption is that if you’re just needing a few stitches or a splint, you’re not needing oxygen.

I just wish real ERs could be a tenth as exciting as County General - it’d make passing the time waiting for the xrays to come back more entertaining.

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She kind of glommed on to Haleh and then when Weaver came by she showed her a paper which had to be signed at the end of the shift so she would get credit. Haleh then forced her onto Sam.

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That’s right…I forgot she was working on her ex at the time and Mary was in the other room with her man and the vec until they revealed themselves.

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I was glad Neela told off her father in law after the funeral.

I could have done without a lot of the other stuff which has already been noted here. Still, it was better than any of the notorious Darfur eps.

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Well, the one silver lining is that we may never see Sam and Alex again. Good riddance.

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Contrary to just about everyone else… I kinda like this episode.

All your criticisms are valid. The shootout was silly and gratitous. Having the annoying kid in the van was over the top. And more.

But damnit, soap opera is what I watch ER for. It’s one of my only TV guilty pleasures.

And I know who dies. It’s gonna be Abby’s baby. But it won’t die in the womb: it’ll be delivered, and as Abby is walking out the door for the first time with it, a Piper Cub will fall from the sky and crush it, barely sparing Abby.

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  1. Grey’s Anatomy does the soap opera much better.

  2. I hope your last paragraph doesn’t give the script writers any ideas. :smiley:

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It’s funny because it’s (probably) true!

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Too late!