I worked from home today, and as is often the case while doing so, I put in a DVD of ER and let it run in the background while I performed my miscellaneous inane tasks. Only this time, one of the eps on the disk was that one - the scariest hour of television I ever saw. It's the episode where they kill Lucy, and it remains a legitimate masterpiece in the filmic craft of creating seemingly unbearable suspense by delaying the gratification of knowledge that the audience has, but the characters do not have.

At the end of the previous episode, Lucy and Carter have been stabbed by a knife-wielding schizophrenic whose condition worsened while in the ER. The incident took place during the Valentine's Day party, and the loud music prevented anyone else on the staff from hearing their cries for help. Now, at the beginning of this episode, we know that Lucy and Carter are in one of the examination rooms and dying, but nobody else in the ER does. Then, in what I still consider to be a storycraft masterstroke, the entire first act of the episode unfolds around the outside of the room that Lucy and Carter are in - the camera almost uniformly pointing towards the room, past oblivious characters who do not yet realize that their friends are bleeding to death just on the other side of the walls they are standing beside. The room, and its occupants, are the key point of the story and so the room is given visual priority in every frame. And for about 6 unbroken minutes, the other characters find every single conceivable reason not to go into that room. It's maddening. I still remember watching that episode with my sister the first time it aired, and I'm pretty sure by the end of act one we were actually screaming at the TV. I still get chills thinking about it. Not bad from a nighttime soap that was, even then, a few years past its prime and is, nowadays, utterly irrelevant to the television landscape it still vaingloriously inhabits. They made a casual Lucy ref a few episodes ago when Maura Tierney finally left the series, and I was left thinking, "yeah, even 9 years later they've still pretty much never done better than that."

What a fabulous little episode.