Dr. Pratt's disabled roommate leads him to a wounded thief. Dr Carter decides to practice medicine in Chechnya. A doctor makes a pass at Dr. Corday.

Dr. Carter tries to prevent a grieving gang member from going after vengeance. Dr. Kovac races against time to save a Croatian boy's life. A baseball player gets treatment for a heart problem.

Luka Kovac arrives safely at County General and is hospitalized for treatment. His friend Gillian delivers John Carter's letter to Abby. Pretty much everyone gets to read it when Frank retrieves it from the garbage and passes it around. Greg Pratt has dinner with Chen and her parents. The dinner goes well but they have a serious argument afterward. Dr. Romano is unhappy with his prosthetic arm which makes him even more difficult to deal with. Some of the more senior nurses find their hours being reduced as a cost-saving measure and stage a walkout. Romano's response is to fire them all. Dr. Lewis treats a teenager with a serious heart problem but her parents insist that she not be told immediately. A new group of second year residents arrive.

Confident second-year resident Pratt wants to prove his abilities when he works the graveyard shift (11 p.m. to 7 a.m.), but his heroics sometimes backfire. Pratt shows contempt for a man, Ed Gamble, who presents no symptoms of disease but temporarily loses his speech. Chen continues to get in the way of Neela's progress as her jealousy regarding Chief Playa Pratt's flirtations with everyone who wears a skirt reaches new levels of ridiculousness.

Emmy nominee Bob Newhart guests as Ben Hollander, a distraught architect whose degenerating eyesight causes him to be despondent while a spirited new nurse, Samantha Taggart, joins the staff. Elsewhere, disaster strikes when the doctors suspect a mother is abusing her child while Dr. Corday learns something shocking about the charismatic Dr. Dorset, and Dr. Archie Morris is overwhelmed by the chaos and grisly conditions of life in the E.R.