I’ve always wondered about that; I saw the season finale in which he was clearly on the verge of letting a patient who had been tormenting him die, but someone never found out the resolution. What was the resolution there?
From the Dr. Greene entry on Wikipedia: “Mark and Elizabeth begin a more serious relationship and move in together. Mark later buys a house, and Elizabeth and he are married. Together they have one daughter, Ella. Their happiness is threatened, though, when the abusive father of a patient goes on a killing rampage after losing his son to social workers. In a bid to get his son back, he kills and injures a number of people and even threatens to kill Elizabeth and Ella. After being shot by police, he is brought to the ER. During his treatment, he is being transferred by Mark to the operating room when he goes into arrest. Alone in the elevator, Mark decides to withhold treatment and allows him to die. He later falsifies records to show that he did attempt to save him. Elizabeth suspects what Mark did but lets the matter drop without any further discussion.”
When they were wheeling Pratt in initially, my immediate thought was “he’s crazy to let them bring him to County. He friggin’ works there, so he knows how much of a death sentence that is.”
Even still, I didn’t expect him to die until his neck blew up like a balloon and the tears started rolling out of his eyes.
That doesn’t make him a murderer, that just makes him practical. He saved the state all those court costs and time.
IIRC, at the time there was a HUGE controversy on the ER newsgroup between the people who thought he did what “any father and husband would do” and people who swore they’d stop watching the show if Greene didn’t face some sort of at least in-hospital punishment for what he did, and preferably legal punishment.
Dr. Greene was flawed but I still think he was the most interesting character they had. Not that any of the characters are perfect but I felt in his case his faults were more understandable and sympathetic than anyone else’s. I wasn’t happy about the aforementioned scene either but I certainly understood the character’s motivation.
My favorite Mark Greene story line was the story arc where the pregnant woman had pre-eclampsia but Mark was rushed and treated her as a bladder infection and sent her on her way, then she came back in eclampsia, then went into labor and everything kept going wrong until she died from DIC. It was one of the best and most heartbreaking stories they’ve ever done. Try as they might since then, they’ve never been able to top that. We felt his guilt and pain and frustration. I heard that the shooting of that episode was so intense for everyone that Edwards got hold of an alien baby prop from the series V and substituted it during the birth scene.
That episode was called “Love’s Labor Lost,” from season 1. I still think it’s the best ER episode of all time and definitely in the pantheon of greatest TV episodes ever.
Mark Greene was the doctor who, in the writers words, “set the tone” of the show. He passed the baton on to Carter, but I could never see Carter as anything but smug and whiny. I don’t think anyone anchored the show quite as well, except for maybe Abby Lockhart later on.
I’m looking forward to seeing Greene in the upcoming flashbacks.
Dr. Greene is a douche. Whiny malcontent. Glad when he finally kicked.
Sure, he did what any father and husband might do, but he wasn’t acting as a father. He should never have been allowed to assume care of the pt. Doing so and being in the elevator alone with him were major breaches he should have been disciplined for. Although unprovable, what he did in the elevator constitutes murder.
Close, but it was the carotid artery, the artery which (with its mate on the other side) brings blood and oxygen to the brain. For Neela to fix it, she had to cut off the flow of blood to his brain. His brain didn’t recover the loss of oxygen. One thing they didn’t mention, but I wonder if the strain and sudden inhale when he winced from the pain of the bone removal - he refused local anesthetic, remember? - might have triggered the final rupture of the carotid. Prob’ly wouldn’t have made a difference in the long run, it would have gone sooner or later, though.
The aorta’s in the chest, not the neck. Common mistake, though; they even made a joke in the movie Girl, Interrupted about it.