Entertainment :: Television
ER: The Complete Eleventh Seasonby Kilian MelloyTuesday Jul 14, 2009 At Chicago’s County General Hospital, doctors come, doctors go: that’s the formula that ER hit on when it began losing its original principle cast members, and it’s a prescription the show stuck until the end of its 15-year run.
With the Complete Eleventh Season, the series addressed various character arcs: Neela (Parminder Nagra) has a vocational crisis early in the season, while Sam (Linda Cardellini) and Kovac (Goran Visnjic) struggle along in their relationship.
While season eleven introduced some popular new faces--Shane West as Barnett, the black-fingernailed, tattered-T-shirt rocker doc, and Leland Orser as the brilliant but socially awkward Dr. Dubenko--it also ushered some old favorites out.
Carter (Noah Wyle) endures the emotional fallout of season ten’s events, including the stillbirth of his son; separated from Kem (Thandie Newton), he pursues a new relationship with a social worker named Wendall (Mädchen Amick), but his heart isn’t in it: in a season that also saw the departures of Corday (Alex Kingsbury) and Jing-Mei (Ming-Na), Wyle checked out of the series, with Carter headed off to Africa to reunite with Kem.
The loss of Carter--the last of the series’ original cast to have stuck with the show continuously--in the season finale seems like a watershed moment, but the producers seemed unfazed: Carter got a poignant sendoff, while the episode title reassured viewers that "The Show Must Go On," as indeed it did--for four more seasons.
Family stories are popular in season eleven. Jing-Mei has an arc concerning her father’s lingering death; Pratt (Mekhi Phifer) comes to know about his long-absent father (Danny Glover); Sam and her son Alex weather a visit from Alex’s father (Garret Dillahunt).
With all this going on, the long-awaited meeting between Weaver (Laura Innes) and her biological mother seems a let-down: naturally, Mom turns out to be a born-again with a faith-based prejudice against gays. Weaver’s confrontation with, and tender farewell to, a woman who refuses to accept her are powerful, but play out in a single episode, re-enforcing a pattern in which Weaver’s family dramas peak quickly (even her running battle with son Henry’s biological parents abruptly fizzles).
But the eleventh season finds fresh dramatic strength from two sources. One fount of inspiration provides powerhouse single episodes with special guest starts, like Cynthia Nixon (playing a mother of three felled by a stroke) and Ray Liotta (whose real-time final struggle with alcoholism-induced health issues is a change of pace for the show); Red Buttons reprises his role as "Ruby" Rubadoux, finally resolving a storyline from season two when Carter, still a green M.D., unwittingly led Ruby and his wife along instead of breaking hard news to them.
In a slightly longer-form version of the same idea, a two-episode arc brings back Gallant (Sharif Atkins), who is seeing even tougher cases over in Iraq than his former colleagues are in Chicago, and whose long-distance love affair with Neela ignites upon his brief visit Stateside.
And that, as it turns out, is the second source of many of the eleventh season’s strongest stories: the Iraq war and its effects are presented as good social message drama, a far cry from the silly season 13 cliffhanger ending that saw Neela get trampled at a peace demonstration. In 2005, evidently, the war had more emotional resonance than it does now.
Throughout the season’s frenetic action and ceaseless jargon (how many tension-pneumo thoraces can they possibly stuff into one year?), Maura Tierney’s Abby Lockhart remains the stalwart: even as Wyle’s Carter is preparing to drift off and Sherry Stringfield seems to getting primed for her eventual departure (her character, Susan Lewis, isn’t enjoying her post as chief of the ER), Tierney is the glue that holds the show together, even as Lockhart is the calm, witty presence that helps the ER function, even poorly (the season makes a point of telling us how badly the hospital’s emergency room staff is doing in terms of patient satisfaction). In many episodes, Abby is the calm at the center of multiple storms; in one harrowing installment, she’s kidnapped by gang-bangers and forced to perform impromptu surgery in the back of an SUV with supplies from a drug store.
Season Eleven seems like a second wind for the show, with less story recycling going on and standout episodes emerging from the never-ending onslaught of shootings, assaults, and accidents. Even the packaging on this 6-DVD set is a step up: a plastic case holds all the discs securely on double-sided leaves.
Only the special features are a disappointment, with the usual deleted scenes (or "Outpatient Outtakes" as they’re called) being the only extra material. A few are pretty good: ER pandemonium on the Fourth of July comes to a head in a deleted scene that serves as the show’s punchline (how it must have hurt to trim those few minutes!), and a deleted scene between Carter and Ruby gives a sweet payoff to a long-delayed coda to Buttons’ guest appearances from Season 2.
Kilian Melloy reviews media, conducts interviews, and writes commentary for EDGEBoston, where he also serves as Assistant Arts Editor.
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