Noah Wyle

for wanting to keep their father alive, that have an emotional core to them that gets revealed in subsequent episodes.

So you want everybody in these scenes to have a real point of view that's legitimate to who they are.

And then when those three truths come out and they are in conflict with each other, as they often are, that makes for good drama.

This is the five-year anniversary of him taking his mentor off life support, which during the height of COVID, you know, he had to be put on.

And then ultimately in our backstory, he had to be taken off the life support to give it to another patient who had a better chance of survival.

And then everybody died.

And it was a traumatic memory that my character has just not really ever dealt with.

He's moved on, and today is a day he probably should have stayed home, but today he went to work.

And as a result, he's just getting triggered by different things.

And those memories begin to come up with greater and greater frequency and greater and greater poignancy to the point where he becomes totally debilitated by them.

And the aggregate of all of that grief and all of that suppressed emotion just overwhelms him.

And it was interesting.

My mother was an orthopedic nurse and an operating room nurse.

She worked for 20 years at a hospital in Hollywood.

And she came over for breakfast last Sunday, and she came into the kitchen, and within five seconds of being there, she said, you know, Noah, I can't stop thinking about last week's episode.

in that scene where you were listing all the people who died.

And I think I had my own PTSD reaction.

I suddenly remembered everybody.

I remembered the four-year-old.

I remembered the pregnant woman with the baby.