ER

As anyone who follows television knows this past Thursday brought the end of ER. Over the 15 year run of the show I watched most of it. I watched it through it's ups and downs and cursed it when it decided to make it's female characters too much of secondary plot lines. There were times when you thought, "This has to be the end of the show. They've just gone too far into stupid land with this storyline." But, some how it always recovered.

The show was always at it's best when it was inside the ER. Showing the characters outside the ER in their regular lives was nice but, they had occasion to go too far and spend too much time outside the ER. I never cared too see much of their lives outside the hospital. I was more interested in the original point of the show which was how these doctors survived such a high stress job and how their outside and personal lives affected them at work.

I was very happy to see so many people come back and do appearances in the final season. It was nice that they came back to a show that really gave a lot of them their careers. And I liked how they folded some of the stories back in. While I was watching the retrospective leading up to the finale I thought to myself that it would be nice if they found a way to bring Dr. Green's daughter back into the story. But, I really didn't figure they would because she wasn't a big main character and since they had the flashback episode for him earlier that would be it. I was so pleasantly surprised when they did in fact find away to bring her into the story.

I almost cried when she told Frank who she was. That scene had so much impact because Frank was such a hard ass kind of guy. Never really seemed to care much about other people's feelings and certainly not showing his but, when he had that moment of sorrow and I guess joy at seeing her it was very moving.

When ER started there was one moment for one character that truly made me fall in love with the show. It was in the first episode when a patients heart stopped and Dr. Carter was the only one around. He called for help but, no one came. The crash cart was down the hall and instead of pushing the cart to the patient he ran over and grabbed the paddles and ran back to the patient pulling the cart behind me. That was the moment I knew the show had great potential. All that heavy drama and they never forgot the comedy that comes with life.

Unfortunately over the years they drug Carter's character down to a place that I began to hate him. I was never happier in my life to see a character leave a show because they had lost all focus of who he was and his character alone was dragging the show down. It was great that they brought him back and where able to center a good portion of the end of the series around him and that his character was back to what he once was.

My only problem with the final episode was it was too slow. They should have had a pulse pounding emergency early on in the show. In a way it would have been kind of fun if all the docs had visited and a major emergency had thrown them all into action together one last time. But, I know that would have been a little absurd. I did like how they put all the returning characters for the episode back into the opening sequence.

In the end it was a good episode and it wrapped up a lot of stories nicely.