Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing St. Elsewhere, a medical show which ran on NBC from 1982 to 1988.  The show can be found on Hulu and, for purchase, on Prime!

This week, Judith Light has got a gun!

Episode 1.18 “Dog Day Hospital”

(Dir by Victor Lobl, originally aired on March 22nd, 1983)

Finally, Dr. Ehrlich is performing his first solo operation.  Dr. Craig is assisting but Ehrlich is in charge.  He gets to play his music in the OR.  He gets to decide what type of retractor to use.  It’s a simple hernia operation.  The patient (Sam Anderson) is awake and babbling through the whole operation.

Unfortunately, there’s also an angry woman in the OR and she has a gun.  Barbara Lonnicker (Judith Light) is eight months pregnant, despite her husband claiming that he got a vasectomy at St. Eligius.  As she already has several children to deal with, she wants to see the doctor who screwed up the vasectomy but she’s just as willing to shoot any other doctor to get her revenge.  The operation continues while Dr. Craig and Dr. Westphall negotiate with her.

I have to admit that I did find a lot of this episode to be amusing.  Ehrlich’s excitement over getting to do his first operation, Dr. Craig’s stuffy annoyance with being interrupted by a woman with a gun, and the patient’s nonstop rambling all made me smile more than once.  And Judith Light, not surprisingly, was great as the woman with the gun.  I loved the her husband was played by Tom Atkins.  You never know who you might see at St. Eligius!  That said, after the episode ended, I couldn’t help but think about how dumb the whole thing actually was.  How are people always managing to get guns into St. Eligius?  How did Barbara manage to get into an operating room without being stopped beforehand?  (Luther does tell her that she can’t be back there but he’s the only one who seems to notice her before she bursts into the OR.)  How come no one in the hospital seems to be more upset about the fact that there’s a woman waving a gun around an operating room?  At one point, Barbara shoots Ehrlich’s radio and hardly anyone seems to react.  The plot is played for laughs and that’s fine.  But, in this case, the story was a bit too implausible for its own good.

Meanwhile, Nurse Rosenthal returned to work after her mastectomy and struggled to get back into her routine.  Carolyn Pickles did a great job portraying Rosenthal in this episode.  And Fiscus and Shirley Daniels visited an old woman in a nursing home.  The subplots were handled well but, for the most part, this episode still felt as if it was trying a bit too hard.