Vicky is going batshit over there trying to expel the kid from her birth canal. Carter very helpfully suggests that she push harder. If he tries to pull that with Kem, she will no doubt implant a tennis ball in his urethra and then laugh and taunt, "Yeah, push that harder" as he tries to squeeze it out. Vicky gives it the old heave-ho, and out pops her son. They wrap him and take him over to the table where they check him and clean him. "Neela, deliver the placenta," Susan orders. "Me?" Neela gapes. "Yes, you," snaps Susan. She's cranky today. Neela sits down and goes to work as Vicky watches her baby, worried. Carter explains that his heart's not beating terribly well because of the oxygen deprivation. "What about his brain?" Vicky frets. Neela's eyes flicker upward for a split-second, then refocus on her work; Vicky catches this, interprets it correctly, and gasps.

Weaver spouts off some of her arcane Theory of Hospital Management prattle about how an Attending's lateness sends an incorrect message about the amorphous nature of time -- when, in fact, 7 AM is 7 AM, no matter how you dress it up. Did ER just hire some ex-Star Trek writers? That, or someone over there's been at the Irish Mist. Weaver snits that Jerry must send tardy Luka to her as soon as he arrives. Then she orders Jerry not to surf the web on hospital time. Abby sprints up to Weaver next, and gets the warning that she's crabby because Henry was up all night with colic and she hasn't sufficiently caffeinated herself yet. God, what are you waiting for, woman? Oh, wait -- wading once more, briefly, through the thorny and pretentious space-time continuum mumbo-jumbo from before, I think what she's waiting for is Luka.

This is one of the sickest things I've ever seen on ER: a placenta, which Neela yanks out of Vicky and drops onto the scale, where it lands with a sickening splat. It looks like someone dumped out a can of tomato paste and stuck a blueberry Twizzler into it for color. Lauren and I shriek and cover our eyes, and I kid you not, it takes us ten minutes to stop moaning, "Oh, NO, sweet holy shit Jesus crap fuck, no!" We're eloquent when we're in agony. This only underscores how ignorant of childbirth and its intricacies I hope to remain, until such time as I'm in labor and so doped up that I won't even be able to lift my head to catch an accidental glimpse of my pasta explosion of an afterbirth. The baby is pinking up nicely, but his carbon monoxide levels are very, very high. Susan explains to Vicky that they need to clear that out of the baby's blood, and she starts to say, "One way of doing that is..." and then as she continues to describe hyperbaric therapy, Carter opens his fat yap and talks over her. "It's kind of like scuba diving," he says. Susan's still talking, by the way, and Carter keeps going with an explanation of how hyperbaric chambers take you down to a pressure that's like being under sixty-six feet of seawater, at which point your blood can absorb three times as much oxygen as it normally would. This speeds up the recovery and counteracts the toxins much more quickly than just hanging out in a trauma room. Susan trails off halfway through this speech; it's not played like she's annoyed at this or anything -- it's just a weird choice on behalf of the writer or director to have them speaking at the same time.