Now, before this episode aired, ER had gone through some luck, the pilot script had been passed up by all the networks a couple of times, and when it did finally get picked up, it was lucky to be picked by the #1 network at the time - NBC, it got basically the best timeslot possible, 10pm Thursday, heavily aided by Seinfeld the #1 show at the time, they had a fresh new unknown cast, and had an exciting innovative fast-paced concept that hadn't been seen before, then to add to that, there was a lot of hype about who would succeed and who would fail, Chicago Hope on CBS or ER on NBC, both of which were Chicago based hospital dramas, now with all this behind it, nearly any show could get excellent ratings, and so far ER had been doing that, but Love's Labor Lost was the episode that made you stand up, the episode that grabbed your shirt and glued your face to that TV screen and made you never want to leave the couch ever again.
The episode starts off pretty standard, Benton's mother gets treated for a fall, the others treat their usual array of patients and what not, then Jodi O'Brien is tended to by Mark Greene, he diagnoses her sickness as a simple infection, gives her some anti-biotics and sends her home, but then she begins to get worse and worse, mistake after mistake, Mark Greene just could not get the prognosis right, misdiagnosing a patient, then messing up a C-section only made the situation worse. It didn't help the cause when nobody from the OB unit came down to aid Greene, and when Janet Coburn finally does comes down, she doesn't miss the opportunity to rub in the fact that Greene made a fatal mistake on what should have been a simple case.
Now when I watched the final parts of the episode at first, I was sitting on the edge of my seat, yelling at my box that showed me these moving pictures, my thought was, c'mon, he's going to save her, this is Mark Greene, sure he hasn't been able to save some traumas, but he's not going to actually KILL a patient is he? Much less a pregnant lady? And as I saw not only case, but Mark Greene get worse and worse as the episode grew further, I was trying to find excuses for both mother and baby to live, it's broadcast television, they're not going to kill a new mother, or, c'mon, this is a medical show... they don't kill patients, but then it happened, the final timestamp on the bottom of the screen, it was in the very early hours of the morning, Mark had been desperately trying to resuscitate her with CPR for over an hour, there was probably a hundred empty blood vials lying on the floor, the EKG machine had spit out enough paper to kill an entire Brazilian rain forest all showing her flat lined heartbeat, yet he still gives it everything he's got, having been there from square one he cannot let go, but by then he, just like everybody else in the room, Susan, Carter, Carol, Coburn, other nurses and doctors, know what the end result is, he simply cannot save Jodi O'Brien, not only did we see Mark Greene over the course of about 18 hours kill a newborn's mother, but you can almost literally see his heart torn out of him slowly, from the inside out.
I've seen this episode about ten times, and I've seen a lot of television over the years, everything from I Love Lucy, The Fugitive, right down to Arrested Development and Friends, I've seen soaps, sitcoms, dramas, everything, but no hour of television will ever move you more than this episode, Anthony Edwards' portrayal as Mark Greene in this episode made the general public stand up and take notice of ER, and recognise it not only as a TV show, but one of the best that has ever existed. I truly believe that this episode, is the single greatest episode of television of all time, because it put an entirely new perspective on not only ER, but your own life, and how little it takes to lose it all.
22 out of 25 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
