Jeffrey strongly objects when his old nemesis is hired into the plastic surgery department, but they are able to set aside their differences to bring some peace to the mother of a young girl who dies during surgery; a nurse impedes Aaron's plan to allow Karen to die peacefully.

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.

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.