Season synopsis
Contains spoilers for this season and earlier seasons.
The season opens after Steve and his accomplices escape with Sam and Alex. Rafe dies in a crash, Steve kills Mary, and Sam shoots Steve after he rapes her. Alex survives. Luka and Abby’s premature baby Joe is delivered and needs intensive care, but recovers. Curtis Ames then sues Luka over the earlier delay in diagnosing his pneumonia. The jury finds Luka not liable, yet Ames later breaks into the family’s apartment, takes Luka at gunpoint and forces him to confront Ames’s pain; the standoff ends when Ames turns the gun on himself.
County faces budget cuts and Luka must eliminate an attending position. After Pratt is promoted, he and Hope become entangled in a church clinic that supplies medication; a patient dies, Pratt admits his role, and the medical board investigates him. With her position threatened, Kerry accepts a television job in Miami and leaves County. Meanwhile Abby and Luka’s relationship steadies as parents, Tony Gates joins the ER as an intern, and Neela’s surgical training continues alongside her unresolved feelings for Gates and Ray.
Luka surprises Abby with a wedding organized as a departmental dinner, and they become husband and wife. At the reception, Ray and Gates fight over Neela; Ray leaves drunk, is struck by a truck and is found in hospital with both legs amputated. In the finale, Neela attends an anti-war rally, where a blast triggers a crowd panic and people trample her as Gates tries to reach her. Luka postpones the honeymoon to visit his ailing father in Croatia, leaving Abby and Joe temporarily behind.