The episode begins with a family of four coming into the hospital; the younger daughter has an ear infection and while her parents go in to see the doctors, the older daughter remains in the waiting room. An older woman awaiting treatment is sitting in the waiting room with her pet rabbit and agrees to watch the older daughter, Myra. Although the old woman supposedly had pneumonia, she soon collapses on the floor and begins vomiting up blood. While the doctors are coming to her aid, her rabbit escapes and Myra follows it, thus disappearing in the hospital. Eventually the woman dies.
Oblivious to all of this are Gina and Aaron, who are talking in the hallway. Aaron reveals that he had a meeting with the IRS yesterday and Gina tells him that she woke up with a feeling of impending doom. Later on, Jack also talks to Aaron about being attracted to Hamlin, and Aaron coughs during the conversation. At any rate, more patients come in with symptoms similar to the first old woman, and one of them vomits on Alberghetti. Eventually the doctors realize that the symptoms are synonymous with those of the plague, or the "Black Death", and of course this is very traumatizing for the doctors, who later discover that it is a humanly created form of the plague. As patients are dropping like flies from the plague, Aaron soon becomes ill as well, and his life hangs in the balance.
Meanwhile, a man comes into the hospital after being completely speared by a tree while four-wheeling. Alberghetti informs him that the limb has missed all major organs but that he will need surgery to remove the tree. She begins operating, but right after removing the last piece of wood from the man's chest, she collapses and begins seizing and vomiting, apparently also having contracted the plague.
Gina begins freaking out about Aaron's condition (which of course does not surprise me at all), and Hamlin begins to lose control over her emotions as well, when she tells Keith: "It's like we've stepped through the looking glass." As usual, Jack does not seem to be feeling any pain, or at least he won't reveal it to his co-workers. He does, though, call up his lawyer and arrange to modify his will to include his niece and nephew. Jack also tells Hamlin that a feeling of imminent death brings on a desire to reproduce, but Hamlin says that she'll discuss getting laid with him after the plague is over. Also, Stu (the hospital lawyer, in case you don't know) begins to feel ill and questions his role in the hospital. He states that his heart is a "cold and dark place", a "lawyer's heart", as he is concerned that he may have the plague. Also, the father from the beginning of the episode searches the hospital for Myra, and he also grows sick with plague. Eventually he finds her, but she has to call a doctor for him as he has collapsed in the hallway.
Anyway, a quarantine is placed on the hospital and the Centers for Disease Control and the FBI come in. The army has antidotes, but they are untested and thus could cause severe damage to the people who take them, and the army isn't sure which one to use because they aren't aware of the exact strain of plague. Eventually, though, Aaron's IRS guy comes in and it becomes obvious that all of the people who contracted the plague visited the same federal building within the last 24 hours. It turns out that a group of people deposited the plague in the federal building after buying it, but that they, too, were accidentally killed by the plague. Eventually, an antidote is tested on Aaron (he offers himself) and it turns out to be the correct one, and all the patients are saved. At the end, it turns out that Stu wasn't infected, but instead he has the measles and Hamlin tells Jack that she will go out with him.
Well, as is often the case, this week's Chicago Hope has a problem with plot recycling. The main problem is that the hospital has already been under quarantine before (I don't know if this is a regular occurrence in hospitals, but anyway the general idea has been done on the show already). Also, Gina is always crying in the episodes and getting distraught about one thing or another; it's as though she has no idea how to be calm under pressure. I am under the impression that doctors are supposed to be cool in tough situations, but Gina certainly isn't. I'm simply getting tired of always seeing her on the verge of losing control, and I hope that this problem does not persist any longer. Also, I don't know where Jack's niece and nephew came from. From earlier seasons, it seemed that he only had one brother, who did not have children, so I don't know if there's some sibling that we never knew about or if these children magically appeared, but it bothers me when stories aren't backed up by things that the audience was told previously. It just makes the t.v. shows less believable.
Other than that, the episode was alright. I found the part with Stu contemplating the purpose of his life entertaining and I sort of like the idea of Jack and Hamlin dating; that should prove interesting. All in all, this wasn't a magnificent episode, but it could have been worse. Oh, and by the way, the whole man-speared-with-a-tree plot seems a little over-the-top to me…how is it possible that someone could have a tree that thick go all the way through their torso and yet not suffer any serious organ trauma?!? It must be practically impossible. But anyway, that's Chicago Hope for you, and I've come to expect these radical plotlines from them.
