Previously on Energetic Romps, Elizabeth rode Dr. Diego's love stallion until it foamed at the mouth. Also, Abby got her ex to co-sign for a loan, and Luka admitted to missing being in the Congo.
The faint strains of African music bring us up inside an El train. We pan across bored passengers, and a man frantically yapping about the stock market into his mobile phone, until we finally rest on an amused Dr. Luka "The African Queen" Kovac. He stares a personal injury lawyer's ad and a poster for The Lion King, smiling a bit condescendingly all the while. Apparently, once you've had malaria, puppets and Elton John songs no longer interest you. ["Sometimes that happens to you even when you haven't had malaria." -- Wing Chun]
Luka enters the new-look County General and accepts Chuny's boring greeting with a smile. "Someone redecorated?" he asks. "Same patients, different furniture," she says. Frank doesn't even give him the kind of warm, racist salutations we've come to expect from the resident mouthpiece of Mephistopheles. He just says, "Call Weaver." Which anagrams to "reveal claw," which I believe further fingers him as a minion, and holy God, I promise that's the last time Frank and the verb "fingers" will appear together in any of my prose.
Malarkey overhears Luka's name and eagerly introduces himself. His first name is Archie, which is so perfect considering he's full of bunk. Chuny tries to get Malarkey's help on something, but he scurries away, muttering something about needing to go on a lab run. "The ducklings could use some guidance -- we're short on Attendings," Frank mutters. Just as Luka's trying to locate the new lounge, a lunatic screaming about coyotes as messengers of evil gets forcibly escorted through the lobby to a room. He's screaming and protesting and fighting them. "All Hallows Eve, and the loonies are on the loose," Frank sighs. Luka resists pointing out that Frank himself is on the loose all the time.
A woman frantically gets Luka's attention. She's cradling a baby who fell out of a cart. "I guess I didn't strap him in right," she blubbers. Except she's holding a baby that doesn't look big enough to fall out of a shopping cart, so unless "didn't strap him in" means "dropped him on the ground," then I'm not totally sure I can picture this. "Did he hit his head?" Luka asks. "I'm not sure," she admits. The serene little boy at her side affirms that the baby did seem to smack his head, but didn't start crying afterward. Luka whisks the baby off to a trauma room; the family follows.
Bob is using the world's biggest magnifying glass to read the paper. It's got to be some kind of medical equipment that he grabbed from a table, because there's no way he travels with that: "Is that an industrial-strength magnifying glass, or are you and your oddly square penis just happy to see me?" Bob reveals to Susan that he's got macular degeneration, and sadly, none of the new treatments cater to his type of disease. "How far along are you?" she asks, sympathetically. "Far enough," he shrugs. Elizabeth dryly whips out Bob's prescription of Digoxin and notes that it's empty. "Congratulations. Mystery solved," he says pleasantly. Susan doesn't think Bob ingested them all by accident, and worries that he's had suicidal thoughts. "Yes, in the seventh grade. I was a pudgy child," Bob deadpans. Susan doesn't appreciate his humor. "I'm a seventy-one-year-old man who's going blind. I've considered everything. I'd be crazy if I didn't," he sighs. Susan gently threatens to put him on a three-day psychiatric hold unless he speaks to someone about his problem. He has no interest in this, but recognizes that she has his jowls in her vise grip, and leans back against the bed, feeling put-upon.
Paula stares vacantly into Trauma Yellow, and then gets up and walks away like a zombie. Suddenly, Henry notices Adam making eye contact with him, and joyfully runs outside to tell Paula. As he runs around trying to find her, Paula shuffles out to the car, tossing off a flip excuse to Susan, and rummages for a brown paper bag. Climbing inside the car, she cradles it.
Outside, Malarkey rants to Coop that he hates County already. "That's a step up -- you hated your internship after the first day," Coop teases. So they clearly have a history together. They pass Paula in her SUV as she locks the doors, pulls out a bottle of lighter fluid, and dumps it all over herself. The ER Catastrophe Makeup Specialists stand by, hands twitching as they clutch their kits, all kinds of ready to morph Paula into Baked Wingnut. "Mom!" Henry shouts, running outside. Paula can't see or hear him, and strikes a match, dropping it onto her pants. She and the car burst into flames. "OH MY GOD, MOM!" Henry screams, his voice breaking. Luka and Coop immediately grab a gurney and charge toward the fireball while Malarkey flails around shitting a crematorium for Malarkey & Malarkey's Final Resting Home.
Luka and Coop shatter the car window and duck from the roiling flames. Susan runs "toward them," meaning, right at the camera. It's a moment of tinny audio and poor editing that makes it so painfully obvious that she shot this separately. It's the opposite of seamless. It's all jacked up with seams. Susan throws a blanket at the camera lens, and we cut to Luka catching it and fighting the flames to get Paula out of the car. From above, we see Faux-Paula The Fireball Stunt Double roll out of the car and start twitching on the ground as NotLuka and ImitationCoop -- who has straight, coiffed hair, of all ill-matched lunacies -- begin trying to smother the flames. We cut back to an isolated shot of Luka finishing the job so that we feel like Goran was there all along, and clap a little and decide that he's our hero and would be likely to rescue us competently from the immolation of our loins that so often accompanies the sight him and Coop on the same screen. Then they roll Paula onto her back. She is royally barbecued. "Paula, can you hear me," Susan states in an uncharacteristically wooden line reading and another totally detached close-up. We fade to black...well, kind of wanting to hug our mothers, actually.