WARNING: will contain ER s6/7 spoilers.

I borrowed Goran Visnjic's face for an online RPG avatar. I had, up until that point, seen nothing he was in. Because I have a very strange set of ethics, in return for using his picture for a character he never played, I went out and bought every movie he's been in that I could get my grubby little hands on. So far, I'm really impressed. He can make me hate his characters (Practical Magic), make me love his characters (Spartacus), and make me cry for his characters (ER).

I don't watch TV, so I've missed the last 6 years of him playing Luka Kovac on ER. To my dismay, ER's only out on DVD to season 4. A lot of begging to my friends produced seasons 6-9. Fansites provided lots of little clips, and I watched those in the interim. I got the general impression that Luka Kovac's kind of a jerk.

I began watching s6 and got through the first two episodes, and noticed the character wasn't that bad. I sensed an impending trauma in his life. I was directed to s7. I've gotten through the first 7 episodes, and now all is made clear.

What I don't understand.. after Luka kills the mugger, he begins to self destruct, and it gets progressively worse through the seasons. None of that had been shown before the mugging, and there's fairly clear evidence that it affected him very badly. Nobody steps in. Abby does the worst thing possible and provides physical comfort, for which I suspect Luka's going to feel bad and use that to feed his self destruction.

He killed a man. Violently, in a rage. He works with an entire ward full of trauma doctors. Nobody forced him to take some leave after the incident, nobody asked him how he was doing, nobody referred him to counseling - and by that I mean his superiors didn't make him go. Abby doesn't help, she covers for him instead of telling people to talk to him, by saying he's fine. What the hell? A recovering alcoholic who should know better than to be an enabler.. enables him.

You've got a doctor who's a Bosnian war survivor, who's carrying guilt from watching his family die and being totally powerless to stop it or help them. Chances are good he's using being a doctor as some form of coping mechanism. Even watching people die, losing a patient - he wasn't powerless, he can do something. Then he smashes a guy's head on the sidewalk and when the mugger's brought into the ER, he's kicked out and made to watch, powerless, as the mugger dies. Even after that - he tries for redemption. He tries to find out who the guy is, to find his family, and so far he hasn't - making him powerless again, to do anything to make up for what he did. In two episodes, they strip his coping mechanism away. I watched that and kept shaking my head, knowing he was going to implode if he didn't get help.

I've been told he does self destruct, rather spectacularly, as the seasons progress. Later, his backstory is explained, and that should've made someone reassign him as suffering from guilt trauma to PTSD alert. Yet it doesn't.

What a horrible thing to do to a character. The entire premise of the show appears to be "Hm, just how awful can we make their lives today?" and then conflict->resolution. From what I've heard.. Dr. Kovac's conflict never really gets resolved. And it's never really explained why everyone around him misses it. I hope they have a really good reason for doing this, because it's painful to watch. You can see Dr. Kovac trying so hard to hold on.. and failing.. and it makes me want to cry for him. They do this to me with most of the characters, reaching in and squishing my heart just about every episode - and hey, that's why it's called a drama - but they usually resolve it one way or the other within a season.

So far, though, I like the series. It's like Stargate SG-1, Law & Order and CSI.. and I'm glad I'm not watching this on TV because if I had to wait a week to find out what happened next, I'd probably go rapidly insane. I like the way the show tries to establish the doctors individually as three-dimensional people. The actor who plays Romano... wow. I loathe his character, and I want to stand up and applaud every time the actor carries off a scene that makes me detest that character. I want to applaud whoever wrote that character, because so far, they haven't taken the easy route and done something to explain why he's an ass or to make the audience sympathetic to him. He's an ass. We're not supposed to like him, and the actor carries that off really really well.

I love shows like this. Where I'm watching and I get sucked in to the point where I'm concerned about the characters and what happens to them. I guess it's my version of soap opera syndrome. The show has an incredibly talented cast and it's incredibly well written, even if I think the writers are a bunch of maniacle genius sadists. "Hm. What horrible thing can we do to the characters today?" ".. Causeway collapse at a SciFi con?" "Oooh! Let's!" .. "Wait, this person hasn't had any personal truama in at least three episodes." "CUE TRAUMA!" I am getting the Star Trek "red shirt" vibe, though.. because things like, "I love you!" "I love you too, Mom!" .. and I'm sitting there going, "Yeah, that kid's gonna die." (speaking of, I thought that was Ashton Kutcher. It looks like him, but it's Todd Duffrey, who was on an episode of That 70's Show. That has nothing to do with anything, I just thought it was a neat '6 degrees' thing when I tried to look up who the actor was. Speaking of.. information was found here. I ::HEART:: Imdb.com!)

I can't wait to get home and delve back into the episodes. Anything that can grab my attention and hold it, making me stay up until the wee-smalls and my eyes are burning because I forget to blink..

I think I have a very warped idea of what constitutes a good time. This, however, fails to bother me in the slightest.