01.08 ER Confidential

Div is going totally nuts, dictating his misanthropic nilhistic rambles into a dictaphone before playing in the traffic. These days he'd have a blog abut how hard it is to be the pysch consult in a busy American hospital but this is the pre-interweb world. Although an annoying drunk mentions "all this talk of an infomation superhighway". That's so retro.

Ah, the first Thanksgiving episode. Doug is giving thanks for being a kept man. Drug sales lady buys his shirts, his dinners, his holidays, his pie for the pot dinner.

Lydia: Dr Ross, we got a patient.
Doug: I'm not a grown up doctor.
Lydia: We all know that.

A transgender woman arrives, making Carter very uncomfortable. He makes her so uncomfortable that she jumps off the roof.

Two teens who have managed to decapitate a pedestrian by jumping a red light are brought in. Doug reveals he used to race in someone's dad's TR7, Carol used to climb to the top of transmission dishes and Jerry used to play chicken with dynamite. Carol is so bugged by one of the guys lying about who was driving that she decides to tell pasta name bagel franchise guy that a) she slept with Doug whilst she's been dating him, just before her suicide attempt, and b) she let Doug kiss him the other day. Yeah, real sensible.

The joke involving a doctor taking the temperature of an aggravating patient using a flower is stolen wholesale from Carry on Nurse (1959).

Despite decades of exposure to American culture, Thanksgiving episodes of shows always feel like they require a decoder ring. So...it's a winter holiday involving family bickering, watching loads of tv and eating a big roasted bird? So it's like Christmas but a month earlier and just for Americans? Admittedly, my most thorough understanding of it comes from Buffy's yam sham episode. So whilst I understand the symbols in an abstract sense, the finer meaning of Thanskgiving is lost on me. As such, this makes this into 'just another episode' of ER rather than anything particularly meaningful.