Camille serves Aaron with divorce papers; Phillip benches Arthur from further surgery when Arthur's resting tremor begins to endanger patients; Aaron removes a brain tumor from an elderly patient; Jeffrey and Aaron separate conjoined twins.

Jeffrey runs afoul of the trustees when a grieving husband has second thoughts after allowing him to test an artificial heart on the body of the man's newly deceased wife; Alan comes to the rescue when a patient's HMO refuses to cover Aaron's operating on her very complicated and potentially fatal brain tumor; Jeffrey visits his wife Laurie, a straitjacketed patient in a mental hospital who apologizes for drowning their son Joey; Arthur's refusal to remove his wagging finger from Jeffrey's face during an argument leaves him with a bitten digit, and enables Jeffrey to diagnose the curable medical condition that's causing Arthur's resting tremor.

Arthur nearly fires Danny for failing to adhere to triage protocol, thereby delaying the treatment of a critically injured prostitute with AIDS; Phillip becomes the acting chief of staff after Hackett suffers a fatal heart attack during a little afternoon delight with Angela in the MRI room; Jeffrey and Arthur argue over the future of a baboon with the potential to prolong the life of Jeffrey's patient with heart failure and Arthur's patient with AIDS.

Jeffrey tells Nadine about Laurie's schizophrenia and the death of his son; Aaron and Camille grieve about their impending divorce; several members of a family of trapeze artists are brought into the hospital in critical condition after a devastating accident during a circus performance; one of Aaron's former patients reveals his bigotry when he refuses to allow Nadine to remove his diseased gall bladder and insists that Aaron or another Jewish surgeon perform the procedure; Jeffrey exhibits signs of a meltdown when, in the space of a few hours, outrageous conduct in a nightclub gets him mistakenly arrested for soliciting a prostitute and he vandalizes the car of a man who stole his parking space; Phillip incorrectly attributes Aaron's angry outburst at one patient minutes after losing another young patient in surgery to tensions with Camille, and threatens to fire Camille if there's a recurrence.

Tensions run high as hard truths ring out when Jeffrey, Danny, Camille, Maggie, Aaron, Arthur and Phillip are quarantined in an empty operating room after a possible exposure to Ebola; Jeffrey and Danny perform an emergency bypass after Arthur has a massive heart attack; Aaron and Camille reconcile.

The staff has its hands full when a man suffering from the after-effects of taking amyl nitrite suffers one complication after another, thereby necessitating multiple surgeries, and Alan takes one for the team right on the nose when he strains credulity in attempting to put the patient's situation in the best possible light; Geri and Jeffrey make peace; Camille contemplates having some plastic surgery after Aaron suffers from performance anxiety on their first post-reconciliation date; Jeffrey agrees to help Laurie put on the Institute's Christmas concert, but the preparations for the event begin to overwhelm her and put additional strain on her already fragile state; Danny and Maggie can't keep their hands off each other; Jeffrey confesses his despair about Laurie's condition and its effect on his life to Camille.

Billy Kronk, a hotshot young surgeon and recreational hockey player, arrives in the E.R. with a critically ill teammate and immediately takes charge, steamrollering over Phillip; Alan deflects a suit by Nabbott, but not before bristling at Harold's ""toad"" routine in court and being thrown into jail for contempt; Billy convinces a psychotic mugger with a history of pica who has bitten off the finger of a concert flautist during a robbery to submit to an endoscopy to retrieve the digit; as Geri successfully completes the reattachment, Billy and Phillip discover a second finger in the thief's digestive tract, and realize that the musician has been given a digit belonging to yet another of the mugger's victims.

Laurie asks Jeffrey for a divorce so that she can marry Gilbert Weeks, a lawyer who is also a patient at the Institute; spurred by this news, Jeffrey suggests that Aaron perform an experimental procedure which may cure Laurie's schizophrenia; fearful that Laurie will no longer love him if she is cured, Gilbert goes to court to stop the procedure, citing Jeffrey's conflict of interest and contesting his guardianship of Laurie; although she is torn between the two men that she loves, Laurie decides that her future is with Gilbert and declines the surgery; Billy becomes a member of the staff, and agrees to do a consultation on Tamara, a teenaged patient of an old friend, Dr. Dennis Hancock; after Tamara is diagnosed with breast cancer and refuses to have a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery despite warnings from Billy and Geri that she will die without the surgery, Dennis uses just the right approach to change her mind and allay her fears of disfigurement.

When the gun belonging to a critically wounded police officer drops out of his holster in the E.R., the distraught brother of a man waiting for a donor heart picks up the weapon and threatens the staff unless his brother receives an immediate transplant; as Aaron and Danny operate on the wounded officer, one of the exploding bullets with which he was shot goes off and severs two of Danny's fingers; Geri performs a successful reattachment, but Danny may be facing the end of his career as a surgeon.

The staff works to save a young boy who was submerged in a frozen lake for several hours; Jeffrey and Geri have a little digestive mishap on their way to pursuing a relationship; Dennis fights to get an experimental treatment for a patient with AIDS, and finds an unexpected ally in Alan.

Dr. Kronk's feelings towards his girlfriend undergo changes when he find out about her past. Geiger's heart patient develops an aneurysm which would take him off the heart recipient list unless highly experimental methods are tried. Meanwhile, Dr. Hancock's ejection from his clinic leads to bringing the HMO provider into the courtroom.

Dr. Kronk makes a rushed decision to rescue a man by amputating his leg with a chainsaw, only to discover later that the man is a place kicker. A friend of Aaron's with Parkinson's disease comes to him for an operation...bringing his own donor material. A ex-nurse is admitted into the hospital and is given special treatment by Dr. Nyland, whom she used to date.

When the Board of Health closes the hospital doors after several patients die from a deadly staph infection, the staff scrambles to find the source of the infection; Jeffrey and Geri help each other work through feelings of grief, loss, and guilt.

Following Dr. Joseph's witnessing of Dr. Geiger's actions, the medical board suspends him until his case can be reviewed. However, there is some disagreement among the hospital's staff as to whether or not the suspension is in their best interests.

Dr. Nyland pulls a switch with Dr. Kronk in order to avoid a charity function, but they have to face the consequences over somecmisunderstandings. Misunderstanding fills Aaron's life when his father barges into the hospital with a patient who is also his fiancee. Geiger finally understands that he may be causing more ripples than he thought.

Watters blames Birch for their poor showing after they're ambushed by a state senator during televised health-care hearings. Sutton operates on a pregnant woman's unborn child. Laurie remarries and asks Geiger to attend the ceremony, which will be presided over by ""Evita Peron.""

Geiger's bravado is put to the test when hospital counsel Alan Birch is shot by street thugs. Meanwhile, Grad agonizes over not being able to help Alan and Watters regrets his recent harsh words with the lawyer.

Kate is stricken when she realizes that her negligence due to exhaustion caused the death of a young woman during surgery, and considers assuaging her guilt by informing the woman's parents of her error; Billy and Danny decide to help a teenager running a unlicensed clinic for indigent patients; Judge Aldrich retires from the bench and comes to work at the hospital as Alan's replacement; Camille's drug seeking behaviors continue; Diane has second thoughts about her research project when she realizes that she's become attached to the orangutan that she's successfully infected with AIDS.

Watters steps in and asks Geiger to take on Austin's transplant patient as she struggles with her ex husband for custody of their daughter. Sutton brings a brain-dead woman into the hospital to deliver her baby.

Aaron consults Dr. Gina Simon, a pediatric neurosurgeon after being presented with a 9-week old baby suffering from seizures. Jeffrey Geiger returns to the hospital and promptly fires half the staff, whom then sue to get their jobs back.

A priest is genitally mutilated during a mugging; a patient dies after a routine liposuction; Jeffrey refuses to perform surgery on a child.

The hospital is purchased by an HMO, and immediately suffers budget cuts. During an operation that Miller is filming for a documentary, the heart stops beating on both the patient and her unborn child.