Hi friends, welcome to TV Tuesday. Today I’m back with season nine of ER.

Uhm okay wow, is all I can say to the start of the new season. I know I was eager to start it, but damn!

Alright so first things first, we start off right where we left off, which this show never does. This show always seems to go on a “summer vacation” each season ends at the beginning of summer and pick ups right at the beginning of fall so all the characters can talk about how they spent their summer.

This one was a little different. At first it took place in the jungle, but that was to show that the small pox that they caught last season was being tracked.

So the hospital closes for 2 weeks while they sterilize and ensure that it’s safe for everyone who’s locked in to come out. That means 2 weeks in quarantine. Carter and Abby spend time together… I’m going to assume they are a couple now. The new annoying guy, Pratt, Chen, there’s a patient in there with them too.

Then on the outside is Romano… who’s bloody arm gets ripped off! Like holy hell I was not prepared for that. They were not holding back… after we lost a few characters last season they’re just gonna rip an arm off of another main character?!?! Dude, and I was just starting to like Romano. Ugh.

Then we have Elizabeth who moves back to England to be with her parents. But what she finds is that she doesn’t care for the way they practice medicine or the bedside manner in which they keep. They are very, very old school. Her father can tell she’s homesick so I think she’s going to go back home to Chicago.

Yes, Elizabeth is back in Chicago, and you can tell she’s missing Mark… and everyone is trying to make sure she’s okay, but she’s not having any of it.

Then there’s Weaver, who never shows her emotions, all of a sudden bursts into tears. What is up with that?!

And Pratt, my god. He thinks he knows everything, like we knew that when we met him last season, but you would have thought he’d learned a bit. Nope. He still makes very rash on the spot decisions that in the end hurt people instead of making them feel better. Why can’t he just admit he doesn’t know everything?! He drives me crazy.

We do learn that he has a brother with a disability, maybe that’s why he is the way he is. I don’t know.

So this crazy man comes into the ER demanding pain meds. When Pratt won’t give them to him, he holds the ER up at gunpoint. Chen is held hostage as Abby has to get the meds. Luckily no one is hurt, but this sparks a light in Carter. He stages a walk out when Weaver won’t allow him to make the ER safer. He orders all these metal detectors to be installed so that people with guns can’t just walk on through.

Weaver is not happy about this, but when more and more people join Carter’s walk out, she has no choice but to accept the metal detectors and to take steps to ensuring the ER become safer.

So Abby has been appointed nurse manager, which means that when a nurse has a complaint they go to her… and a lot of nurses are complaining about Kovač. Why is Kovač such an ass this season? He’s sleeping around and treating women like trash, like ugh.

There’s a new batch of med students and one of them, the one they chose to focus on, has Parkinson’s disease. At first it doesn’t seem like it’s a very practical thing for him to be in the ER, and Elizabeth sees that, and pretty much tells him that. But he’s very convincing and very smart, he’s older than most students, and the other two are not the smartest. It’s his determination that strikes Elizabeth and I think they’ve learned to respect one another.

So, I’ve always known that Romano has liked Elizabeth, and I hoped I’d be wrong that he’d try to make a move on her, but in a moment of weakness he caresses her face. He knows he’s wrong at least because I do like how sweet he is to her.

It’s also amazing to see how his arm is coming along. You can tell he’s very frustrated by the process and that he’s not progressing fast enough. He wants to be back in surgery, but he looks to be healing well.

And then there’s Weaver who’s now taking hormones… and I can’t figure out why. My two guesses is 1) she wants to become a mom or 2) she’s thinking of becoming a transgender. I could be wrong, but those are my two guesses.

So I was right!!!! Weaver is going to have a baby, and she’s pregnant! Wow, I’m happy for her and her girlfriend. Things are looking up for her.

Ohh damn, so a few seasons ago Abby went through a lot with her mom, now her brother Eric is in town, but he’s very flighty and can never be reached, now he’s missing from work. This is becoming the tell tale signs of a mental disorder, quite possibly bipolar like their mother. Abby is very worried, but seeing Carter and how much he cares for her is very comforting.

Okay, so I thought Elizabeth was gaining respect for the Parkinson’s med student, Nathan, but boy was I dead wrong.

Who does this guy think he is anyways? When patients who come in and are on the brink of dying, where it would be in their better interest to let them die with dignity instead of going through victorious treatments, Nathan doesn’t think they have been given all the facts. So he takes it upon himself to reevaluate and get second opinions, which in the end have only made the patients suffer more.

Why does Nathan think he’s god? Because he has Parkinson’s? He’s more destructive than anything else.

It’s an interesting character dynamic though, a perspective that I never would have thought about.

In the end, Elizabeth does exactly what she says she’s going to do, she fails Nathan, but that’s after his disease gets to him so bad that he can’t check a patients ear and instead jams it in her ear. But what Elizabeth does tell him is he’d make a very good physician because he has extremely good people skills, which let’s be honest doctors just don’t have.

I do like that they give him the chance to start a little boy’s heart as his last move as a surgical intern.

So Abby’s brother, Eric ends up being arrested for not showing up for work, this what happens when you work in the military, hella strict.

Anyways, she goes out to try and find him. It’s this whole big ordeal and she ends up finding her mother instead. All Abby wants is best for her brother, but her brother is kinda erratic. But he feels that his mother understands him better than Abby ever will, he just has a hard time telling her that. I think you can see that her mother is trying to say that to Abby too, but Abby just wants to try and fix everything. In the end Eric refuses to see her and tells her to leave. He lets his mother in but not her. So she’s out.

They have an interesting character dynamic where a father and daughter come in, only the daughter is really a boy. We learn that the mother couldn’t handle her son wanting to be a girl so she left, but when the father unfortunately dies, the mother has to come since she’s the next of kin. Only she can’t take her son back looking like a girl so she’s cutting his hair. Pratt, of all people was really defensive about it, saying his mother doesn’t have the right, and child services should have been involved. Unfortunately Pratt had to deal with his brother and Carter became in charge of the patient. I’m sad that Carter didn’t think better of it, but it was definitely a very real, and ethical plot.

What a strange plot and the way they told it was strange too. So it’s told backwards pretty much. We start the episode at the end, Kovač gives Erin, one of the med students a ride home from work when they get into an accident.

From there the episode keeps going back in flashes.

All I know is that something is up with Kovač, and he and Erin aren’t seeing each other like they made it seem at the beginning of the episode. I don’t know what the point of flashing back every few hours was, to show how much worse he progressed. We didn’t even get any answers.

Something is STILL up with Kovač, like he’s misdiagnosing patients and thinking the worst, and pretending a woman is dead so her husband will go up to surgery, like damn WTF?!

So Weaver loses the baby, I’m actually sad for her. It’s so out of character for her to be sad and just burst out crying that it really humanizes her. She’s not so rough around the edges anymore. I like that we’re getting to see this side of her.

Pratt is having a time. So his brother got fired from his job, so Pratt gets him another one at the hospital but before he can even start he’s arrested for hanging out with the wrong crew before his shift. Pratt has to keep leaving to rescue his brother, which I get, but I don’t know how much longer he’ll be at the hospital if he just keeps disappearing.

Carter is has a major dilemma in the fact that his grandmother wants him to join the family business and he still wants no part in it. But Abby sees this as an opportunity for him to take it and change the family business and to give money to what he thinks is important, but Carter wants none of it. Abby does have a point though.

But now Carter just may run off into the jungle to become a doctor, so who knows.

Pratt’s brother once again, gets into trouble. This time it involves a dead kid and a shot cop, so Pratt has to do what’s right for himself because he can’t be looking after his brother any longer, he lets him go. It’s sad, but it’s also the reality of the situation.

Abby’s brother Eric is back, I was surprised to see him back so soon. Apparently he’s on his meds and doing better. The heart to heart they have is touching and very honest.

We keep getting more from this story and it’s surprises me that it’s still going. So now Eric and his plane have gone missing, Abby thinks he’s dead, but her mom is adamant that he’s still alive.

In the end, the plane is intact and that he isn’t dead, but they have to wait for Eric to contact them. This drives her mother crazy, and Abby goes welcome to the other side of the disease.

Kovač is back after just dramatically leaving. He still wildly annoys me.

Weaver brings up the fact of having a baby again with her partner, Sandy and Weaver thinks it should be her to try since she’s younger, but Sandy is having none of that. That sucks. I feel like they haven’t known each other that long and now they’re jumping to have a baby. It’s kinda fast.

So uhm, wow! Carter! He went on vacation, but when he finds out about Eric comes back the following day, goes to work to be with Abby then bam just outright proposes to her when she feels like she isn’t worthy of his love. She calls him crazy, but his response, well then I’ll fit right in! Gahhhh these two!

Wait! So they’re not engaged?! Carter buys a ring, and he almost proposes, like officially, but he doesn’t. But then later, Abby finds the ring, hehe. I’m sure they’ll end up together.

Wow! So Weaver lied to help a very rich and important patient. Now that she’s on this committee, that he practically runs, he’s got her on a leash. If she doesn’t help him fake some more diagnosis, he’ll cut funding for the hospital. What kind of blackmail is this?!?! Weaver is not happy about anything she’s doing, especially when a person dies.

I think Susan is on to her too.

Then on top of that, because of Romano’s bad attitude Weaver becomes chief of staff. Oh dear.

Oh dear, Romano is now head of the ER and he’s a force to be messed with. He wants to fire anyone who won’t listen to him. I know this is all stemmed from his hand not healing as fast and he can’t perform surgery anymore, but wow this is probably the harshest he’s ever been.

And Susan, she’s spent a lot of this season looking for a man, at times it’s kinda sad, but then she goes to Vegas for a few days and gets married to this guy who doesn’t even know, yikes. He’s a nurse and he seems nice, maybe we’ll get to know him more.

Oh shoot. Carter’s grandmother passes away. He was very close with her and seeing how torn up he is over it is just so heartbreaking.

Then on the flip side that same day, when Carter expects Abby to be there for him, she tells him she has to go out and get Eric, he’s off his meds and needs help. I get where Carter is coming from because her brother is a loose canon, whereas Carter needs her right now, the fact that she chose her flighty brother over him makes him mad. And I get that, but I can also see why Abby would choose her brother because he’s her brother, she loves him, almost like a mother loves a child since she helped raise him.

I’d hate to be Abby.

So Abby thinks that bringing her brother to Carter’s grandmother’s funeral would be an ok thing. She thought she could just leave him in the car, but he doesn’t stay in the car. No he makes a scene and falls into her plot… what a disaster. I don’t really blame Carter though. He’s lost a loved one, and the person he thought he could count on, isn’t there and she’ll never choose him over her brother, and that sucks.

Then there’s Romano. Wow, so his arm that he can’t feel catches fire, and he doesn’t realize right away. It’s going to take a lot of work to repair it, but he’s just not having it. Instead he just wants to amputate it. He’s giving up, which is so unlike himself. I feel like he’s a tad bit suicidal too.

So is Kovač leaving for good? Now that he saved the Croatian kid that he was so desperate to save, he’s off to west Africa to be a doctor. Well then.

The second last episode felt very much like the last episode… ever. But it’s not, obviously.

We all knew Pratt was going to be leaving since he got a placement elsewhere, but by the end he’s like eh I’m staying, this place kinda grows on you. So he’s not leaving…

… but Carter is? Like, the show? He needed a better send off if that’s the case. Everything just went wrong, and when Kovač calls him, Carter then decides he’s going to go to Africa too.

Uh, okay then. That’s kinda rash, Carter isn’t the most rash character, but I guess now that his grandmother is gone nothing is really keeping him in Chicago.

Then there’s Romano, I thought he was going to be gone… and he still could be, but he actually gets his arm amputated which is going to be a big change. While under the heavy drugs he tells Elizabeth that he loves her, which is something we all knew, but I know that Elizabeth doesn’t feel the same way.

So the finale, that didn’t feel like a finale because it felt so disconnected from the rest of the show was Carter in Africa. This is were he learns how seriously understaffed, funded, and just how many resources they just don’t have.

They get shot at and have to move their clinic, my gosh is it ever scary. Carter ends up staying 2 weeks and he then he goes back home to Abby.

This season has been quite the season, but this was a season where we didn’t lose or gain characters, but it was filled with a lot of important messages. I love this show.