[1]Benton, Carter together again.
Thursday night, “ER” ended its 15-year run with a three-hour celebration of past, present and future. At least I guess that’s what John Wells was going for. The one-hour retrospective that led off the evening was a heartfelt look back by cast members of yesterday and today at what made “ER” special. But the two-hour finale itself, while sometimes touching, was also uneven to the point of being maddening.
”Life goes on” at the ER, the episode may have tried to suggest by introducing a lot of people we’d never seen before and would never see again. What, for example, was Alexis Bledel doing as an intern who’d clearly been working there awhile but whom we’d never encountered? Why so much time spent with patients whose conditions were pretty familiar and rarely riveting? The birth gone wrong was clearly intended to refer back to the classic “Love’s Labor Lost” episode in Season 1, but it didn’t have a fraction of the emotional resonance. The appearance of Marilu Henner reminded me of something I’ve never liked about “ER” — silly interludes with guest stars, in this case just wasting our time.
The heart of the episode, for “ER” fans who’ve either stuck with the show or returned to see it out, was the dedication of the Carter Center and the return of old friends to support Noah Wyle’s Dr. John Carter. I loved these moments, especially seeing Mark Green’s daughter, Rachel, played by the same actress who played her when last seen. That was the real full-circle moment in the finale, with Rachel applying to medical school and getting an ER tour courtesy of Carter.
I loved seeing Ellen Crawford back as nurse Lydia, unseen since 2003. My preference would have been for way more of this kind of offhand nostalgia and less time spent with Morris and Gates (sorry; never grew on me) and other relative newcomers. But mainly, two hours was just too much time to fill with too little content that felt important, like a sendoff after 15 years. The final plot turn was typical of something else that drove me crazy about “ER” — the inclination to churn up an over-the-top disaster whenever the stories lagged. But the last scene, at least, will stick in our minds as an iconic “ER” moment.
Instead of just a three-hour sendoff, I turned the evening into a six-hour “ER” orgy, also watching the three previous episodes, starting with the March 12 Clooney-fest. Now, that was a great episode. A pefect episode, in fact. An episode that should have, could have been the series finale. After that, the actual finale was anticlimactic.