TVSquad

No, George Clooney did not show up for the series finale of ER.

But it was a pretty good finale anyway. It's impossible to please all fans of a long-running show in a series finale because we expect too much, and what we expect can change depending on whether you've been watching it since the beginning or just started four years ago. Do they focus on the old cast members coming back and focus on the people who have been there for the past few years? Do they tie up all loose ends neatly in a bow or leave things open-ended because that's how life is? ER managed to do both last night.

After the jump, the good and bad about the last episode of ER.

Yup, tonight is the final ER. NBC will have an hour-long retrospective at 8 PM and then the two-hour season finale of the show at 9 PM (sorry, fans of My Name Is Earl, The Office, and 30 Rock). We've seen several old favorites come back this season in previous episodes, and we know that a couple more are coming back for tonight's last hurrah. Will George Clooney be one of them?

Clooney already made an appearance on the show with Juliana Margulies a few weeks ago, and I liked the episode enough. It's just that there was a slight something missing from the episode, something concerning Doug and Carol and them not knowing that the kidney going to County General was for Carter.

So this Thursday at 9pm, the series finale of ER airs on NBC. I think that even former fans who drifted away from the show when Anthony Edwards was killed off, or when Noah Wyle left, or when they just didn't enjoy the show anymore because it had been on for too long will tune into the finale. You can't watch a show for so many years and then just forget all about the finale. The thing has been on since Bill Clinton's first term, so we gotta find out how it ends.

The episode (like this season in general) will also have some familiar faces coming back to County General, and probably some in pictures and/or flashbacks (the episode will be preceded by a retrospective at 8pm). After the jump, a video sneak peek at the episode (and, yes, there are possible spoilers, so proceed with caution!)

Did you see "The Wall" last night on ER?

I don't know if this so-called "legendary" wall has ever been mentioned on the show before (if it has, I apologize), but I thought it was a rather out of the blue piece of symbolism for the show to have in its final episodes. Neela said that she had heard rumors about the wall but wasn't sure if they were true or just a myth, which I don't really understand because we're talking about a wall in a lower floor room with name tags on it, not the mythical land of Narnia.

All the big names were there from the quick shots I could see: Greene, Ross, Lewis, Gallant, Lockhart, Pratt. Was Carter's tag up there or did he take it off the wall when he came back this season?

So yes, George Clooney was indeed on ER last night.

The episode, overall, was very good. The banter between Carter and Benton was great, and it was great to see Eriq LaSalle again, and the way they reintroduced Doug and Carol into the plot was really well done and didn't seem forced or stupid. The show deserves points for that. It didn't work 100% though. Here's what I loved and what I didn't love about the episode.

If you've been watching NBC this week, you've probably seen all the promos for tonight's episode of ER. The episode is called "Old Times" and will feature former stars Juliana Margulies and Eriq LaSalle (joining Noah Wyle, who has been back for a couple of weeks). But one star who is supposed to be on the show before it ends in early April, George Clooney, isn't in the promos for tonight's episode. Does that mean he's not on until a later episode?

Probably not. Producer John Wells is telling fans to make sure they watch tonight's episode, and Margulies has already said that she has filmed scenes with Clooney, so it's a good bet that he's on tonight's episode. Also, if you notice that at the very end of the promo, the screen suddenly goes black when Margulies says hello to someone she sees. Above is a pic of Clooney on the set when he filmed his scenes in January.

Oh, ER. Not again, not again.

If you watched last night's episode of ER, you saw the return of Dr. John Carter. His wife is visiting family in Paris, and he's back in Chicago to...well, we don't exactly know why he's back yet, but he's actually going to be working part-time at County General again. That's the only good news about what happened last night (I thought this was just going to be a quick visit by Wyle for a few episodes, I didn't realize he'd be working at the hospital again) because the ending probably made longtime ER fans sigh and/or grit their teeth.

The last scene showed Carter hooked up to...well, I'm not a doctor, but I'm assuming it's a dialysis machine or some sort of cancer treatment? He had a haunted look on his face, and he had a rather somber attitude throughout the entire episode. Scenes from episodes coming up showed Carter saying that he came back to Chicago specifically to talk to Dr. Banfield (?) and we also saw a scene of Carter dropping to the floor in the emergency room looking really, really bad.

Are they going to kill off Carter a la Mark Greene?

Awww, Juliana, you don't want to come back to County?

Seems like we've been hearing news about old ER members coming back to the show for its final season, and now comes word from Juliana Marguiles. The actress says that she won't be coming back to the show because she thinks that Carol Hathaway left on a good note and she really can't see how they could top it. A lot of fans would probably say they don't want them to top the character's last appearance, they just want to see the character one more time before the series fades off into the sunset.

Tonight's the night that thousands of fans of ER have been waiting for, the return of Jennifer Aniston! Oh wait, that's 30 Rock that she'll be on tonight. Never mind.

Actually, tonight is the night that Dr. Mark Greene (Anthony Edwards) returns to County to try to save the life of Dr. Banfield's sick son. As we told you last week, Greene isn't really alive and he's not a ghost. It seems that Dr. Banfield came to County with her son and husband, years before she became the new head of the ER, and Greene was the doctor who worked on her son. Her memory (and the flashbacks) are triggered by a current story where Banfield is trying to save the life of another child who comes to County.

Edwards isn't the only one who comes back. Since most of the episode takes place years ago, we also see Laura Innes as Dr. Weaver and Paul McCrane as Dr. Romano. Innes has a rather dramatic entrance in the clip after the jump!

I'm not sure what George Clooney fans are called. Clooneys? Cloonsters? Cloons? Whatever you fans are called, you're probably going to be very happy about this news.

In an upcoming TV Guide interview, ex-ER star Noah Wyle (who will be appearing in several episodes this last season) says that Clooney said he will "absolutely" appear in the show in an episode, at least if his schedule permits it (though I'm sure he'll make the time). This has been off again and on again for so many months, but I think Clooney will do it.

When the news came that ex-ER star Anthony Edwards was going to return to the show for an episode this last season, fans wondered how that could happen, since he died (and we mean really died, not soap opera died) of a brain tumor around 6 years ago. Would he be a ghost? A hallucination only a patient can see? Would he be Mark's long-lost twin brother (Matt, or maybe Monty) who comes to work at County because his brother worked there? The news that Dr. Mark Greene is going to interact somehow with new doctor Cate Banfield (Angela Bassett) just makes the scenario more confusing.

But now we have our answer. Edwards tells the AP that Mark will be shown via flashback in an ER story we haven't seen before.

Okay, I'm not a doctor (surprising, I know), so maybe if you are a doctor, and your most recent medical experience is tsunami relief in Indonesia, maybe moving to County General doesn't seem so bad. Sure, it gets blown up occasionally, gunfire breaks out often, and maybe you may get taken hostage and/or stabbed by a crazy patient or two. But here's my question: Would you tell your spouse to work there too?

Apparently Angela Bassett would. Bassett, who is joining the cast of ER as a "troubled" new attending, is bringing her husband along with her. Courtney B. Vance, who spent five seasons on NBC's Law & Order: Criminal Intent as ADA Ron Carver, is also joining the cast. Vance will be playing another attending physician an the on-screen husband of his real-life wife on a recurring basis. While I'm sure that the set of ER is a perfectly safe place for Vance, I'm highly worried about the fate of his character.

This originally was going to be yet another post on how George Clooney might come back to ER one last time in the final season of the show (executive producer John Wells says he hasn't asked him yet). But we've been back and forth on that so many times that we really don't know what's going to happen. However, TV critic Terry Morrow did ask Wells if any characters on the show would be killed off in the show's last season, and Wells says that yes, at least one person on ER will die before the show ends. He didn't, however, say whether it's a current cast member or if it's someone new that will be introduced this season.

So assuming that it's a character we already know, who do you think it should be? After the jump, a poll. Should a helicopter fall on Morris? How about Neela getting shot by a patient? Maybe an explosion in the emergency room can kill everyone except Frank? Are they bringing Noah Wyle back just to kill him with a Sno-Cone machine?

(S14E17) "I already know. Get over yourselves." -- Archie Morris, passing by a kissing Samantha and Tony.

Ye gads, that was bloody! I mean, we've seen plenty of blood in the ER over the last 14 seasons, but that was one of the more bloodier sessions I've seen in a long time. It was just flowing everywhere. Too bad that its flow was hampered somewhere down the line by a clot because, if everything was okay, then we wouldn't of had a serious spotlight on one Archie Morris.

So, I guess things turned out well. For us, not for the patient. That was actually pretty bad. And, not for the patient's husband who...well, you'll need to find out what happened to him after the jump. So, Spoiler Alert ahead, mateys.

(S14E15) So, Neela.

We all know her. She's cute. She's smart. She has that lovely English accent. She draws every single man and woman into her universe with her mutant ability to make people fall in love with her (Professor X, I hope you're aware of this). We just haven't seen much of her this season. Well, except for the season premiere, but even then she was unconscious for most of the episode. Perhaps the producers decided to give Ms. Rasgotra a break this season after the whole Dubenko/Gates/Ray love triangle took up a good portion of last season. That was corrected this episode as we finally had an episode that put some focus on the good doctor after a 24-hour shift.

Why focus on her after such a long session? To show her screwing up, of course.