ER - יהי זכרו ברוך

I've been writing an awful lot [and here and here and here] about the pop-cultural texts that make up my own mythologies lately (and there's more in the pipeline - trust me). Not precisely sure what that's all about, but it seems worth noting. (Blog as therapy, interesting simile.)

Seven years ago, Mark Greene died. At the time, it was pretty earth-shattering, though Anthony Edwards had abandoned me (us) twice before, in Revenge of the Nerds II and Top Gun. At the time, ER was ten years old, and with Mark's death, I stopped following it regularly. Tonight, as everyone seems to be noticing (CNN; Slate; EW; TV Worth Watching, and this hilarious NPR blogpost submited by b-i-l-p-e Ace), ER will triage one last time. And it seems like just yesterday that Carol Hathaway decided to kill herself (maybe Julianna Marguiles knew what would become of her post-ER career?), Lucy was stabbed, and Romano got screwed every way imaginable. The show dealt with every possible issue imaginable - Djimon Honsou's PTSD-induced impotence; Sally Field's manic depression; child abuse (pretty much every episode); Eriq LaSalle's deaf son, Reese (with possible auditory nerve damage from his father's jheri curl in Coming to America); Mekhi Phifer's gang-riddled past; Laura Innes's adoption and lesbianism; Sherry Stringfield's sister Chloe's mental handicap (and that big black guy in the helmet); Goran Visnic's demons from the war-torn Balkans being exorcised by James Cromwell's dying bishop; Parminder Nagra's second-generation-American-from-Southeast Asia issues and her ill-fated love affair with national guardsman Sharif Atkins who was killed in Iraq; and probably a million more I can't remember this second. It has also left questions unanswered, most notably, why don't any of these doctors sleep with people they don't work with? (Yes, Zach, double negative.) Also - and more flummoxing - how did the red-headed pot-smoker who was going to get busted by Romano but was "saved" by the falling helicopter stick around on the show until its end?

Too many of the questions I ask now are meta. Part of this is that, frankly, I don't like endings. Such is the situation that I've never seen the last few episodes of the West Wing (though I did download them through iTunes recently -a promising start) and something that gives me a bit of pause vis-a-vis the little project on the horizon called "my dissertation." But I do like the idea of saying good-bye, and when Mark Greene died in the spring of 2002, I tried a few times to write a poem - an elegy for a man who had been with me for ten years, a close friend, a mentor, a role model, a teacher. Both times I failed miserably, perhaps a commentary on the roller coaster semester I was experiencing, or trying to make too much out of a fictional relationship. Either way, I wish I had been able to put into words what he had meant to me through the years.

In both aborted poems, I refer to him as a paragon of truth, and in one as the "realest." He was.

I also allude, in one of the poems, to ER's seeming propensity to name its early doctors after major figures from the New Testament (i.e., angels or saviors), e.g.:
JOHN Carter
MARK Greene
PETER Benton
LUKE Kovac

Note, of course, the exclusion of George Clooney's philandering (and immoral?) Doug Ross.

I will not be watching the three hour ER extravaganza tonight, but I will be thinking of it as it lays its impressive itself - and thirty years of NBC's best programming in its time slot - to rest. I assume it has signed a DNR order, but its soul lives on.