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 Daily Motion.

I apologize for the delay in posting this review.  I was feeling under the weather last week.  This week, I feel well enough to share this review of one of the most emotional hours of television that I’ve ever watched.

Episode 4.3 “Haunted”

(Dir by Mark Tinker, originally aired on October 23rd, 1985)

This episode begins where the previous one ended.  After crashing his car, Stephen Craig and his wife, Yvonne, are rushed to the Emergency Room.  Despite the best efforts of Drs. Chandler and Axelrod, Stephen dies in the ER.  Yvonne goes into labor, eventually giving birth to Dr. Craig’s granddaughter.  Dr. Mark Craig and Ellen show up shortly after Stephen has been pronounced dead.  While Ellen immediately slips into denial (“That’s not Stephen!”), Dr. Craig calmly tells Chandler that he knows Chandler did everything that he could.

Throughout the episode, Ellen struggles with her grief while Mark holds back his emotions.  He suspects that Stephen was once again using drugs and he even goes to the autopsy to see for himself.  While Stephen’s organs are being weighed, Dr. Craig starts to talk about how he was never close to his son but how, when Stephen was young, they used to read Dr. Seuss together.  “Thank you Sam I Am,” Dr. Craig recites under his breath, right before hearing that Stephen had used cocaine shortly before dying.

For Dr. Craig, Stephen’s renewed drug use is an excuse to refuse to mourn for him.  For Ellen, Stephen’s drug use is proof that his father was too critical and pushed him too hard.  Ellen tells Mark that he never cared about Stephen except for when Stephen said he wanted to be a doctor.  As the episode ends, Dr. Craig sits in his office and thinks about the words of Dr. Seuss and finally, he starts to cry.

I cried too.  I cried a lot while watching this episode.  This was the most emotional episode of St. Elsewhere that I’ve watched so far.  Both William Daniels and Bonnie Bartlett were heartbreaking as a couple who each dealt with their grief in their own way.  It was hard to watch Ellen fall apart in the Emergency Room but it was even harder to watch Dr. Craig fall apart as he realized that his wife was right.  When Stephen was young, the only time they were close was when they read that Dr. Seuss book.  And now, that memory is all Dr. Craig has left.

There were other things that happened in this episode, of course.  One thing about St. Elsewhere is that there are always several stories going on at once.  Elliot worried about his weight, even after discovering that his girlfriend liked the fact that he wasn’t thin.  Dr. Caldwell spent the weekend at a recently purchased house in Cape Cod and Fiscus showed up unannounced.  Dr. Morrison encouraged the other male residents to donate sperm.  Dr. Westphall continued to try to push through his efforts to make St. Eligius a community-centered hospital.  But none of the other stories could match the power of Mark and Ellen Craig losing their son.  In fact, I found myself resenting being taken away from the Craigs.  “Who cares about Cape Cod!?” I said, “The Craigs have lost their son!”

This was not an easy episode to watch but, in the end, it was powerful, it was touching, and it made me cry.