Spoilers for last night's "ER" coming up just as soon as I drink some mushrooms..."It's like Bizarro ER." -CarterNo, John, it's exactly like "ER," in that they had to go and give you a serious illness (requiring dialysis) so you can continue your transformation into the new Mark Greene, sufferer of a thousand tragedies. Sigh...
I was actually rather enjoying Noah Wyle's return until then. His last few years on the show came during the period when I had kicked the "ER" habit (I had to go to Wikipedia to figure out that Joshua Carter was his and Kem's stillborn son), and unlike some of the other returnees in this victory lap season, Carter was around long enough to have relationships with several of the main characters and not just the nurses or Jerry and Frank. The scene where he and Sam briefly commiserated about Luka and Abby finding happiness without them was very nicely-done, I thought. But if they just brought him back so we could watch him die slowly, well... that's the sort of thing that drove me from the show back in the later Carter years.
The rest of the episode was fine, in that almost shockingly understated style "ER" has adopted over the last few seasons. (Kind of hard to believe we used to call this show the medical equivalent of an action movie, isn't it?) I'm always glad to hear my old high school classmate Pete Yorn's music in a mainstream show (his "Crystal Village" was the song on the CD Ray burned for Neela), and both Brenner and Banfield are both much more appealing after the inevitable softening of their characters. If the show was going to be around longer than this year, it might give me hope that the producers would finally figure out that it's not optimal to introduce a new character as a complete jerk and hope the audience grows to like them later.
Of course, after that final scene, it looks like you can't teach an old "ER" new tricks.
What did everybody else think?
No comments:
Post a Comment