Episode Report Card Heathen: D+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Chaos Theory
By Heathen | Season 9 | Episode 1 | Aired on 09.25.2002
Carter and Pratt have acquired a soccer ball from the ER Sports and Recreation Closet. Hopefully this is not a soccer ball that had to be removed from inside somebody’s horribly disfigured bowels. “Toe, or finger?” Pratt asks. “Toe,” Carter answers. It would seem they’ve heard about Romano’s accident, and are coping with it as sensitively as two young men playing soccer in a quarantined ER can. Next up is arm vs. leg, and leg wins for both of them. “Deaf or blind?” Pratt asks, thwacking the ball at Carter, who pauses. “Deaf,” he says decisively, and whips the ball past Pratt for a score. There’s probably a comment here about their respective ball-handing skills, but I don’t want to look for it. “Both arms, or your penis?” Pratt asks mischievously. Carter giggles and can’t choose, so Pratt helpfully points out that he could at least still have sex if he left his package intact. “Tough to get chicks without arms,” Carter counters. Pratt chews on this and decides he couldn’t date a girl without all her bits. “What if she had a great personality?” Carter says lightly. “What, and really big tits?” Pratt snorts. Can we say “tits” on network TV? Pratt isn’t sure, so to distract the censors, he belts the ball through a window and shatters it noisily. Then he and Carter run away like two little boys off to peek up the girls’ skirts before recess ends.
Abby moseys out to the scene of the crime and encounters Stan, who makes a big show of commenting on her hair. Yeah, okay, she’s no Aniston, people. Let’s not have Abby’s hair be a plot point. Ever. I do not want it in a bar, I do not want it in the OR. “It frames your face better,” Stan observes of her perfectly sleek, blown-out, shiny, highlighted hair, courtesy of the County General Crisis Makeover Team: Turning Evacuations into Beautifications.
Weaver enters Romano’s hospital room, where Joe Gunn: Needle For Hire is tending to the broken Rocket’s reattached arm. The One-Armed Bandit is no more. I’m so annoyed that they went to the trouble of making Romano do something stupid to get his arm lopped off, and then totally ignored what might’ve been some really interesting -- technically and story-wise -- scenes involving the reattachment surgery. It’s like, why bother? Why have half the episode play out so excruciatingly slowly and use the second half to gloss over everything it set up? Lordy. Anyway, Joe Gunn frets about Romano’s fingers looking “dusky,” and sure enough, they seem a little purple. Weaver medicine-for-dummies that this means he’s not getting enough blood flow to the hand and his antibiotics aren’t fully penetrating. Apparently, one way to fix this is to return him to surgery, but Joe Gunn says such an act could end up impeding proper recovery. “And if not, he’ll lose the whole hand,” Weaver says ominously. Romano wakes up and groggily announces that he’s thirsty. Taking a page from The Book Of Rosie Perez, Weaver slurs, “I too know what it is like to feel thirst,” and then they have hot one-armed sex. Or, she feeds him water from a straw while fretting over his condition. Whichever you like. Joe Gunn gently asks Weaver if Romano has any family, and she looks genuinely troubled for a split-second. “I don’t know,” she admits. “Has anyone else visited?” Nope. “You know him,” Joe Gunn presses. “What would he want?” Weaver stares at her greenish-blue colleague with the once-severed hand, a limb that, as TV and movies have proven, most likely will become autonomous and develop a murderous personality. “He’s aggressive,” she says. “I’m going to say, the arm at all costs.” Joe Gunn: Itchin’ For Stitchin’ wants to use this as clearance to operate, but Kerry insists that he wait until Romano wakes up and can decide for himself. “Could be tomorrow morning,” Joe Gunn says. “By then, it could be too late.” Weaver stands firm. “It’s his decision, not mine,” she says, gazing at Romano.
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