During
sweeps weeks, the networks are notorious for over-hyping
queer storylines that burn out quickly like bum roman candles
(past examples include episodes of Friends
and Ally McBeal).
It's no coincidence, then, that Dr. Weaver’s long-buried
sexuality gets excavated again in this week's ER
episode, “Just As
I Am.”
The
producers of ER should be lauded for actually keeping
Laura Innes’s workaholic character gay over these past
four years, but ER’s focus on Dr. Kerry Weaver’s
lesbianism has been hit and miss (and mostly
miss) since Weaver first fell for firefighter Sandy Lopez (and
was outed to her ER crew) in the serial drama’s eighth
season.
In
this week's episode, we’re offered yet another dramatic
“coming out,” this time to Weaver's long-lost religiously-conservative
mother, Helen Kingsley (played by Frances Fisher). Weaver interrogates
her mother as to why, four years after Weaver sent a letter
in search of her, Kingsley’s suddenly trying to meet the
daughter she abandoned long ago. We’d like to know the
same thing: why is this character suddenly showing up? ER
is obviously playing out this strained mother-daughter reunion
to make a timely reference to the rift between gays and conservative
Christians since last year’s election-geared attack on
gay marriage (a topic Wife Swap
tackled last week too).
“Just
As I Am” begins with a provocative flash forward.
Dr. Kerry Weaver tromps bundled-up through the snow to a hotel.
She doggedly enters without addressing the bell boy, who asks
“Can I help you?” to her cold non-response. Weaver
beats on a hotel room door, a red-haired woman answers, and
in the doorway, Weaver delivers an overwrought plea: “I
don’t want to leave it like this!” We are unsure
given the high melodrama, if Weaver’s perhaps in love
with a woman we haven’t been introduced to yet? The ambiguous
nature of this hallway-set outpouring of emotions is intentional,
and we’re tricked into waiting with bated breath through
the episode to find out the juicy details on Weaver’s
potential new affair.
The
slew of patients rushed into our familiar Chicago emergency
room in the midst of this week’s snowstorm include a sliced-open
ice skater, a pushy Demerol addict, an older woman with dementia
who’s been cutting up her hands, a potty-mouthed man stabbed
multiple times with a screwdriver, and a woman—the redhead
from the flash forward—whose only complaint is a un-diagnosable
shortness of breath. This last patient asks specifically for
Weaver, claiming she’s seen the doctor previously. When
the hospital records on her come up empty, Weaver becomes suspicious
and chases the woman, who bolts out to the street. Weaver warns
that she should stick around for the test results on her breathing
problems. “There’s nothing wrong with me”
the woman says, admitting her ruse to see Weaver, and says,
“I’m your mother.” Our hopes that Weaver is
back on the horse, dating-wise, are dashed.
