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Post by darksparrow on May 10, 2009 8:07:44 GMT -5
So subtle I didn't even notice it.... Carter seemed so "healed" in this episode, that I didn't even see the connection there. But of course, it all fits. He's looking well because for the first time in a long while he's not in pain, he's telling himself that he's over it... he's taking on extra responsibility... and then all it takes is a stab wound trauma patient to destroy all that.
And if you think about it, Dave was pretty mad at Carter the entire episode. You know, with Carter "stealing" Dave's med student and second-guessing him in that trauma with Kovac. I'm sure if I were Dave, Carter's emotional needs wouldn't be my top priority at that point. Not to mention it's easier for us to see the connection- not everyone would be as affected by the stabbing as Carter.
it's scary how almost every patient that Carter sees between the stabbing and the season finale has some sort of reflection on Carter. It's not all as obvious as the OD guy in Under Control... take the diabetic kid who Carter released because he didn't have insurence. When Carter's talking to the kid's dad, the dad is brushing off responsibility... and you can see it upsets Carter, and you know he's not just thinking about that particular case, he's got his own guilt in mind. Or the guy who falls off the ladder in Match Made In Heaven and complains about back pain, which Carter diagnoses as MU (made up)... Carter would be the expert in back pain, right? There's another brilliant Noah moment there, when Carter tells the patient there's no visible damage to the back, and the patient says "yeah, that doesn't mean I'm not in pain!" and of course, Pablo coming in and being combative... That's almost too obvious. But there are also much less obvious moments. Carter's spending a lot of time sitting, and there are blink-and-you-miss it grimaces that are just enough to tell us he's still in pain. it's brilliant!
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Post by claired80 on May 10, 2009 9:03:13 GMT -5
Oh yeah, it was brilliant all along... subtle almost all of the time, so rewarding when you spot it. ER at its best. The only 'over the top' moments for me were the flashback voices in "The Fastest Year"... when Carter is cutting some bread especially (yeah, we can't guess where his mind can go when he sees a blade... Thank you for the hint writers! I didn't get it! ). For the spinal tap, I minded it a bit, but that was more okay (since when the spinal tap on Sobriki was shown, we didn't know yet where things would go, while it was the starting point of Sobriki feeling like he was stabbed himself... as Carter says to the shrink later on...) Talking about "The Fastest Year", another little brilliant point (though maybe my imagination goes too far here): first scene with Carter waking up on the kitchen table. We know he has insomnia. Close to him on the table, there's a bottle of pills (painkillers?) and a Coke. Huh...caffein? Does he really try to get some sleep? or is he rather trying to stay awake? It is! The way he gets up from chairs... It's constant. Something I always wondered about: in "under control", when Benton leaves, Carter is at the admin desk and Benton pats him right on his lower left back . Come on Peter! we know you like to torture Carter, but that bad?
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Post by darksparrow on May 10, 2009 9:32:00 GMT -5
Hmmmph, I actually missed that scene. Yeah, Carter's got his share of back slaps that day... Chen coming up from behind him and almost knocking him off the crutches was just the beginning. Really pointless curiosity: when Weaver's coming up to talk to him, is he sitting in a wheelchair? Well staying awake might be better than the alternative. I'm guessing nightmares. We're supposed to assume that he started OVERUSING painkillers around Loose Ends, because that's when his miraculous recovery seemed to happen, but that looks like a wine glass right by the coke and the painkillers. Just sayin'. Yeah. the knife flashback I could live without, mostly because Noah is fully capable of delivering that feeling of horror without the voices. I mean it doesn't take a genius to figure that out. But the spinal tap scene I actually thought was pretty well done. it's something that doesn't seem significant until you realize just how guilty Carter's feeling about missing the signs in that LP... and well, I thought the voice-overs there were more effective. Disturbing. The scene where he's talking to DaRa'ad in the end of that episode, by the way, is classic. Perfect perfect perfect writing and perfect acting. When DaRa'ad says "what if I'd come down sooner for a consult?" you can sort of see Carter go "yeah, why didn't you?" in his head... and at the end, he reserves the right to feel guilty, and nothing that anyone says can change his mind... Gawh, I miss good ER.
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Post by claired80 on May 10, 2009 9:55:11 GMT -5
He definitely is... I loved that touch. It's not emphasized at all, nothing is said. You just have to imagine that after a day at work he really couldn't stand on his feet (and crutches) anymore and just moved around in a wheelchair to do the charts... Just this little detail to say that he came back to work way too early. Yeah, exactly. And I like that it's just sitting there on the table to see... nothing said. Yeah, but considering that he got milk from such a glass at the end of the previous episode, I always thought that they just didn't have any other kinds of glasses at the Carter's mansion . They just don't know what a plain glass is... Oh me too... That scene is so great indeed. You feel the missed opportunity here... Carter is almost opening up, he admits he has flashbacks, it's the most open about the stabbing that we ever saw him, he is trying to explain his guilt, that he shouldn't have gone through with the LP, but DeRaad is basically shutting him up, telling him he shouldn't think in terms of "what ifs". And that's it. Carter won't ever try again to open up from then on...
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Post by darksparrow on May 10, 2009 15:24:43 GMT -5
I like your scenario. I never noticed that it was a wheelchair, and it's making me feel even worse for him in that scene, if that's even possible. And while we're on the subject of overanalyzing those episodes, almost every Carter insomnia scene involves the hour 2 a.m somehow. First when he stumbles into the kitchen for a glass of milk at 2:15 a.m and then when he tells Gamma that he gave up trying to sleep around two. Now I know that insomnia usually has a regular schedule, but is this a coincidence or a really obvious throwback to Lucy's time of death (which he obviously wouldn't know?) I can't decide. You know, for the head of the psych department, he's not functioning too well. I know that he wasn't technically "treating" Carter but in that scene, you don't need to be a psychiatrist to pick up on the fact the guy's going through something serious- even if it's just regular survivor's guilt, he could use therapy. And it's even more serious because the symptoms Carter describes - flashbacks and memories and insomnia- sound A LOT like PTSD and no psychiatrist would see him and just tell him to "give it time"... it doesn't go away by itself, that much even I know. So he should have insisted more on treatment- "come again anytime" doesn't really cut it. It's like not coming down to a psych consult on a potentially dangerous schizophrenic... oh wait, oops. Never mind. Another thing that pissed me off me in that scene was the fact DeRaad says Lucy hadn't noticed that something was seriously wrong with Sobriki, and Carter agrees. Now obviously none of them knew HOW dangerous the guy was, but schizophrenics are unpredictable when off their meds... and since Lucy figured out the schizophrenia part, wouldn't it be safe to say that she DID know better? And she DID try to talk to Carter about it? Way to make him feel even more guilty... the future psychologist in me is upset.
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Post by claired80 on May 10, 2009 16:46:40 GMT -5
Wow.. I never thought of that . Though, if they had wanted to make it obvious, they should/could have put around 2:56am on the clock that Carter checks while he gets milk... Funny that you point out that Carter wouldn't know about Lucy's time of death. I always wondered about what Carter really knew about Lucy's death, if he asked for information (which I doubt). He probably knew less about her injuries than Kerry, Malucci and all the others... And I also wondered about what the rest of the staff really knew about Carter and Lucy stabbing. Did they actually realize that Carter and Lucy saw each other, did they know who got hurt first, how long they were conscious... ? Obviously they didn't get that kind of information from Carter, so it would have been just through a police report or something... Anyway, doesn't make a big difference in the full story, but it's just things that I wondered about . I think even with zero knowledge about psychology (*raises hand*) it shows that DeRaad is not the best... . I still don't really know how to understand that DeRaad says that even Lucy hadn't noticed anything wrong. Did really no one else than Carter know that Lucy had figured out that Sobriki was schizophrenic (if that's the case, even more weight on his shoulders)? She called for a psych consult... did she just say that she needed someone in the ER, or what? How can DeRaad say that Lucy hadn't noticed anything wrong either while he knew she called for a consult? I still don't get it.
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Post by darksparrow on May 11, 2009 1:18:29 GMT -5
That would be a little too obvious even for the ER writers (and a real coincidence, too) though I wouldn't put anything beyond them.
I love that they let us fill in the blanks for ourselves, there. Because they only showed us key moments, we were free to guess what happened "in between"... And it would have been so easy to go deeper into that storyline. I'm sure Carter would want to know how Lucy died- at least as far as talking to Elizabeth who was her surgeon, maybe not all the gory details. I'm sure seeing him give the statement to the police would have been a powerful moment (because even though he came close to it with DeRaad, he never really talked about what happened and what he'd felt. I'm not Lucy's mom, I don't buy the "it all happened so fast I didn't really know what's going on, but I didn't feel anything".) They could have shown him reconcile with gamma rather than just TELLING us about it... and they could have explained why his parents were not there. (And obviously there could have been more Carter/Benton scenes, but that's just me being greedy) Anyway, I think that not showing us all these things might have been for the best, because then we can just imagine them... And sometimes the scripts we come up with are better, you know?
They would know that they saw each other, or at least that Carter saw Lucy, because he asked about her in the ER. They could figure out how long they'd been here by the bloodloss, but anything more... well I'm not sure they'd want to know.
I don't know, they seemed very sure it was Sobriki from the beginning, even though technically, ANYONE could have come into that room and stabbed him. And when they're telling Benton what happened they're telling him it was a psych patient, so they must have figured out by that time that it was Sobriki. I guess it's safe to assume that Carter wasn't the only one who knew Sobriki was (at least a suspected) schizophrenic. I'm guessing both Lucy and Carter left out the "potentially violent" part. So Mark and Kovac knew about the patient, but they didn't see him, so they wouldn't know how dangerous he was.
(we have just overanalyzed the HELL out of that storyline.)
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Post by Raffy on May 11, 2009 1:32:09 GMT -5
Propably it was just an assumption, because they were stabbed in the room where there was just Sobriki, because they saw the blody footprints on the floor and because they couldn't find Sobriki anywhere after the stabbing...
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Post by darksparrow on May 11, 2009 1:42:25 GMT -5
Yeah, and it's a logical assumption. all I'm saying is they knew Sobriki was waiting for a psych consult, they refer to him as the psych patient, so they must have known he was schizophrenic. Just answering Claire's question about whether Carter and Lucy were the only ones who knew about the potential schizophrenia. But schizo doesn't necessarily mean dangerous, and that was what the other docs missed.
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Post by Raffy on May 11, 2009 1:58:18 GMT -5
Indeed he didn't seem "dangerous". And even if Lucy was worried about him I don't think she thought he was a risk for other people. Sigh.
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Post by claired80 on May 11, 2009 2:22:29 GMT -5
I tend to agree that it's good that they didn't show too much. Just a bit more maybe would have been good for me . It was borderline not enough. And yeah! Especially with Benton! ;D Though it was already very well written and powerful to have Benton discuss about Carter with Cleo while almost entering the infamous "Jazz Club" (I just loved the way Carter pronounced it in Be Patient... ). Benton on an important date, and he can't stop thinking about Carter and 'babbles' about him with Cleo... You think? ETA: And they didn't imagine one second he could get his hands on a knife or any other dangerous object... Even if Lucy might have imagined Sobriki could become aggressive and potentially violent, the guy was hardly taller than her! (I think the cast of David Krumholtz was brilliant... Had Sobriki been 6'3'', both Carter and Lucy might have felt that restraints could be safer... Carter couldn't have hold him down for the LP already... ). Without a knife, he was harmless...
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Post by darksparrow on May 11, 2009 14:05:18 GMT -5
Going back to the scene I mentioned a while ago- from Viable Options, where Carter's talking to the kid's father who's trying to shake off responsibility- A perfect example of subtle ER. Almost every line in that dialogue is a reflection of what Carter must be feeling in terms of his guilt over Lucy's death... "that's why they have parents to look after them"... "you never led me to believe it could get so bad..." "so you have no culpability in this matter whatsoever?" and of course, "you were his doctor. if you didn't know this could happen, how the hell was I supposed to?" The father's doing a great job brushing away all guilt, something Carter wishes he could do. Or am I reading too much into it? Oh, it'll forever be "the jaaaaaazz club" in my head. One of those little ways in which ER has taken over my life. Same way I can't look at an energy bar without thinking "mmmm, peanut butter..." But yeah, I found that scene adorable beyond any words. It's such a contrast to the number of times where Benton tells Carter "since when do I give a d**n what you do...?" and remember Benton saying in season three (about Gant) that he never gave him a second thought? This is just so different from the Benton we know. And considering he didn't exactly try his best to comfort Carter earlier, it's nice to see that he really is worried and really is upset. He's just Benton, so he doesn't know what to do with that worry.
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Post by Raffy on May 11, 2009 15:31:09 GMT -5
Well, they were cute and funny and not depressing or angsty....well, they weren't carby.
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Post by Raffy on May 11, 2009 15:36:24 GMT -5
"Both."Come on, Abby! You're with Carter! Could you please sound less annoyed than this?
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Post by claired80 on May 11, 2009 16:02:35 GMT -5
The pool scene is beautiful! ... even if you don't consider Carter.. the cinematography, the reflection of the pool in their face, it's really nice... and well, Noah looks amazing in the very last shot ;D (Anna's sig!) Yeah! Who cares about water?
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