A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

I THOUGHT WHAT YOU DID WAS A HEROIC THING: As Adam noted, TNT reran "Love's Labor Lost," pretty much unquestionably the high point of ER, this morning, and I, working from home as I get over a bout of stomach illness, watched. I hadn't seen it in years (maybe even since its first airing), and some thoughts:

• Man, everyone looks so young and many of them had so much more hair (particularly Edwards and Whitford)--though Sherry Stringfield's hair maybe looks even better now than it used to.
  
• Because of how great the Greene plotline is, it's easy to forget about the very brief Benton subplot, in which Benton has to deal with his mother's broken hip, which featured some really nice work from Eriq La Salle, and some nice, not excessively anvilicious, parallelism with the Greene plot. (Similarly, even though Clooney was the breakout star of the show, he's barely in this episode--nor is Julianna Margulies.)
  
• The camera work throughout is just extraordinary--Long, carefully choreographed Steadicam shot as we move from one trauma room to another, POV shots which look particularly stunning in the HD version aired on TNT HD. Sadly, director Mimi Leder has never done anything as good since, going on to direct Deep Impact and (shiver!) Pay It Forward.
  
• What's fascinating is how the show demonstrated that even our heroes on ER could and would often be fallible and make mistakes. Even though Greene is our hero, he screws this case up, and screws it up badly. That's where the show lost its way more than anything else--it stopped being about folks who screwed up sometimes and started being about perfect heroes who invariably saved the day.
  
• The emotional payoff in a lot of ways is a scene that's nothing more than Greene breathing heavily and the sound of a flatline--there's no screaming, shouting, or overpowering score telling us how to feel--just darn fine wordless acting. Similarly, we don't hear the Edwards/Whitford confrontation--we just see it through the glass of the hospital room. Contrast with current shows, which probably would have used a pop song to tell us what we should be feeling, rather than trusting the viewer to find their own emotion. Similarly, there's no real comic relief plot (aside from an early "show me your teeth" joke)--this is an episode devoid of laughter.
  

Anyone else watch and have thoughts? Particularly interesting would be those who now have kids and haven't viewed the episode since pre-childbirth.