Episode Report Card Heathen: C | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Abby Normal
By Heathen | Season 10 | Episode 20 | Aired on 04.28.2004
Flasher complains that the soda machine stole his money. Well, he shouldn't have tried to buy a can of Diet Karma, then. Abby doesn't care. Just then, Seizure Mom's neighbor shows up with the baby in tow for a visit, so Abby lets her through; Flasher yammers on and on about things just long enough for Abby to notice that Seizure Mom has abruptly begun convulsing again. Nick freaks as Abby rushes into her room; Big Ears sends everyone outside. "It's okay," Abby coos into Seizure Mom's ear. "It's okay." Sure enough, she stops. Abby and Big Ears put together that the seizures only seem to happen when someone brings in the baby. It happens with a little more revelatory fanfare, but I am feeling way too succinct for any of that. Credit Abby with the pickup, and let's move on. "We need to get her talking about her past," Big Ears nods importantly. "Why won't it stop?" murmurs Seizure Mom. "I want it to stop." We fade to black kind of wishing that Diet Karma were a real drink that we could throw in the face of our nemeses.
Okay, some dumb kid is running back and forth past me and he just spit on my shoe. Foreign bodily fluid. From a kid. On my shoe. Now I'm going to have to set fire to the damn thing. And to my ovaries, apparently.
Neela is back down in the ER working with a fry cook who burned his hands on the griddle. He's anxious to get out of there so he can finish his shift, and presumably scrape the charred bits of his flesh off the grill before they get served up in anyone's Big Macs. Pratt shows up and recognizes the guy, asking him gently and in a brotherly way whether he was using cocaine or ephedrine or something. "I don't do that stuff," the guy insists. Pratt nods his understanding, and then pulls Neela aside and asks her to run a tox screen anyway, because he thinks that guy's as full of drugs as he is shit. Neela tells him it'll be a while because she has to go up to the lab. Pratt's irritated with her, because they have a patient. "Are you an ER doc, or not?" he yells at her disappearing figure. Luka appears now, and rather weirdly inserts himself into this conversation as he breezes through the lobby. "Last time I checked, you're not the first one to ask," Luka tosses off , whirling around as he walks so that he can prettily shout this at Pratt. What? Luka? Where did you come from? Why did you jump on that bandwagon? This episode is so choppy.
Of course, Sam and Luka then bump into each other again. This time, she insists she's been meaning to call him. "Me too," Luka fibs. "Try you tomorrow?" she attempts. "Yeah," he says. You could douse me in freezing water and then turn a fan on my face and I'd have more heat than they mustered in this scene.