The Untimely Canon: ER S1E4 “Hit and Run”

Original Air Date: October 6th, 1994

Written By Paul Manning

Directed By Mimi Leder

Streamed on Hulu

ER is a series that was on the air for 15 seasons, producing 331 episodes. This means that not every episode is going to be the most meaningful one for the entire cast. In fact, many of the episodes will be fair to middling in quality with, I’m sure, some that are downright bad or that have aged horribly. However, during the first season of any long running show, it is interesting to see how subtle moments, even in the more forgettable episodes, are able to shape the characters that will become familiar to the audience as they come along for the ride.

“Hit and Run” is not a great episode of television. It is, though, a pretty great episode of character development for one of the younger characters on the show, Noah Wyle’s young med student, John Carter.

It should be clear that we are going to be dealing with a Carter heavy episode when the young 3rd-year med student gets the wake up treatment that, in the previous episodes, has been saved for the residents that supervise him. Of course the fact that he is woken by his rather brusque mentor, Dr. Peter Benton(Eriq La Salle), does not make Carter feel that getting this scene in the episode is that much of an honor.

It doesn’t take long until Carter, Benton, and Dr. Sarah Longworthy(Tyra Ferrell) are thrust into the titular heart of the action in the episode, a hit and run accident that has left a 17 year old victim on the edge of death. After working for 31 minutes to revive the young man, Dr. Longworthy calls the time of death and tasks a shaken Carter with the task of identifying the young man, who had no ID on him when he was brought in. Using the clue that he was wearing shorts from a particular high school, Carter calls the school and obtains a yearbook to identify the young man from the photos.

As anybody who has ever spent time trying to identify anybody based on a grainy photo in a yearbook can tell you, this is not an easy task. And when you add the weird way that people look when they are dead, it is monumental. And Carter screws it up. He “identifies” the young man and contacts the parents to come and be told that their boy is dead. Unfortunately, he doesn’t contact the right parents. When Benton takes the parents back to see their deceased son, after being comforting about how hard they had worked to save his life, he is not super pleased about the fact that he had just traumatized a random family. Carter, of course, feels pretty awful about the whole situation.

Carter does, eventually, contact the correct family and, as a form of punishment, though I’m sure the doctors would say it is part of the whole “watch 1, do 1, teach 1” ethos of teaching hospitals, he is forced to be the one to break the news to these parents of their son’s death. I assume these are the right parents, though we never see them being taken back to make sure that this is actually their kid. Maybe the County General staff just decided to call it good.

Carter has had a monumentally shitty day at this point. Enough so that when he and Jerry(Abraham Benrubi), the desk clerk, are chatting outside after the end of their shifts, Carter is truly considering not returning to his post the next day. This is when the conveniently timed medical emergency appears in the form of a careening station wagon with a frantic soon-to-be father and a crowning pregnant woman. Carter rushes to the car and, in a rather impressive bit of doctoring, delivers the couple’s little girl while Jerry rushes inside to get somebody to help.

The last we see Carter in the episode is him standing next to that car, afterbirth covering his hands and arms, smiling and feeling pretty damn good about himself, which is nice to see after the shitshow that his shift was, to be honest. It is pretty clear that he will be coming back, after all.

Other Important Character Moments

• La Salle’s Benton has a couple of important moments in the episode. First, we find out that he is competing against Dr. Langworthy for a fellowship. Second, we also find out the first bit about his personal life when his brother-in-law, played by the always nice to see Ving Rhames, shows up to discuss how he needs to come sit with his mom so that Ving(whose character name is Walter but will always be Ving) and Peter’s sister can go out to celebrate their 10 year anniversary. Of course, Peter fucks this entire situation up by getting sucked into a long surgery and forgetting to go, leading to a hell of a scene where Ving chastises him for always putting his career in front of his family.
• Carol Hathaway(Julianna Margulies) is still back at work and still dating Tag(Rick Rossovich). Both of these things become important throughout the episode, as their is clearly a confrontational air between Tag and Carol’s ex, Dr. Doug Ross(George Clooney), that comes to a head in the final scene of the episode when Doug shows up at Carol’s house at midnight, drunk with flowers, only to have Tag answer the door. Carol, wearing only a robe over her nightshirt, rushes after Doug and has a very loud and public confrontation on the platform of the Chicago Ave stop of the Brown Line. While this would have been noticeable to me during my time living in Chicago, it is not even among the 100 craziest things I witnessed on El stop platforms.
• Susan Lewis(Sherry Stringfield) doesn’t have a lot to do in this episode. She does, however, tell Mark Greene(Anthony Edwards) about her secret relationship with Dr. Cvetic(John Terry), the pompous psychiatrist.
• Edwards’s Greene is also pretty much left to just play with patients of the week with no real deep storyline emerging. He and Doug do discuss his clear attraction to Susan, and the fact that his wife, Jen, is off in Detroit for a few days interviewing for a lawyer job. But, as a whole, his episode was mostly jokes.
• Clooney’s Ross is mostly involved in the storyline with Carol, though he does lie to a kid named Ozzie(played by Andrew Ferchland who would later be the Anointed One on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and tell him that he will get to stay with his mom who was hearing voices. Not exactly great doctoring, though he does eventually tell the kid the truth after being shamed into it by Carol.

Notable Guest Stars

• Ken Lerner as Harry Stopak, an amazingly obnoxious patient whose Zack Morris-like cell phone is causing all sorts of wacky, and potentially deadly, electronic malfunctions throughout the ER.
• Andrew Ferchland as Ozzie, proving that this kid is creepy no matter what role or age he is playing.
• Ving Rhames as Walter Robbins, Peter’s brother-in-law and the last person I’d want to piss off by not letting him celebrate his 10 year anniversary with my sister. Peter is a braver man than I.
• William H. Macy as Dr. David Morgenstern, the chief of the ER, who pretty much is only in the episode to scold Peter then build him back up. I’ll be honest, they are wasting Bill Macy thus far in this series.

MVP of the Episode

This is truly a one person show this time. Noah Wyle’s performance as John Carter in this episode is leaps and bounds ahead of what anybody else did. This is the first time that a viewer would really watch Carter and believe in him as a fully rounded character instead of just the guy that is going to fuck everything up and cause complications.