Doug Ross - Plot Details

Plot Details

Doug Ross was raised by his mother, Sarah, after his father, Ray, abandoned their family. In Season 1, he revealed to a patient that he had a son, and he tells nurse Wendy that he doesn't know his son's name as he's never seen him. Not much else is known about Doug's past. Despite his jumbled personal life, Ross is a dedicated ER pediatrician. He has always been committed to medicine and children and to helping no matter the rules or consequences. During Season 2, Doug rescued a boy trapped in a flooding storm drain during a rainstorm. His heroic efforts were filmed on local television thus making him a media star. This event helped him earn back his job at County, because his supervisor in pediatrics wasn't going to renew his fellowship on account of his disrespect to authority, but the hospital administration forced the supervisor to offer Doug a deal to return which he accepted.

During Season 2, Ray, Doug's father, tries to reconcile with his estranged son. Doug has difficulty reconnecting with the man who abandoned him and his mother. Ray has made something of himself by owning a very ritzy hotel in Chicago, and Doug lets his guard down a little, but is disappointed yet again when his father offers to take him to a Chicago Bulls game and then stands him up. Doug later reveals the reason why he is so finicky about child abuse because he and his mother were abused by his father. Doug later has an affair with Ray's girlfriend, a woman who Ray stole money from, but ends the relationship when it becomes clear she has a lot of problems herself. Doug gets a phone call one day informing him of his father's death, and that someone would need to pick up the cremated remains. He goes to California on a road trip with friend and colleague Dr. Mark Greene to collect his remains. Ross finds out that his father was killed in an automobile accident; he had been drunk at the wheel and killed the other driver, himself and his new wife. Doug visits the funeral ceremony to express his sorrow to the victim's family, but ultimately does not and tells the priest overseeing the ceremony that his father was responsible. When Doug and Mark find the hotel his father stayed in, he finds his father's car and belongings. They discover home movies that Ray had taken of Doug and his mother. Later on, Doug finds his girlfriend, nurse Carol Hathaway, waiting for him and they kiss passionately.

Doug is a womanizer, who has dated and left many women throughout the course of the show. Doug's womanizing days come to an abrupt end after a one night stand with an epileptic woman who hides her condition and dies in the ER. Doug never even knew her name until after she dies, after which Doug stops dating for awhile until he gets back together with Carol. Doug has an on-again, off-again relationship with Carol Hathaway, the head nurse of the ER at County. He pursued her constantly when she was trying to move on with her life after their horrible break-up. After a while, they become a couple and are even engaged. They seem happy, and were also supporting each other in the ER. Doug was always an advocate for his patients, and often broke the rules to help them. Eventually, his attempts to help his patients went too far - leading to reprisals and the closure of Hathaway's clinic - and he decided to leave Chicago for Seattle halfway into Season 5. Carol decided not to go with him to Seattle, but he shared a drink with his best friend, Dr. Mark Greene, before he leaves. Carol discovers she is pregnant with his twin girls, named Tess and Kate, and these daughters are born after Doug leaves. He's last seen in the Season 6 episode "Such Sweet Sorrow", in which Hathaway leaves Chicago to reunite with him. She finds him working on his boat behind his house in Seattle and the two embrace and kiss. It is later revealed in Season 8 that Hathaway sent for the twins the next day and has been living with Ross in Seattle since.

Warner Bros. Television, the studio which produces ER for NBC, kept Dr. Ross's cameo in "Such Sweet Sorrow" a secret from NBC, which promoted the episode as Carol Hathaway's goodbye, with no mention of Dr. Ross's appearance. In fact, the original version of "Such Sweet Sorrow" that Warner Bros. sent to NBC ended right after the scene where we see Hathaway on the plane to Seattle. At the 11th hour Warner Bros. messengered an "edited" version of the episode to NBC headquarters in New York for broadcast — NBC had no time to preview the episode prior to airing what turned out to be an extended episode in which Clooney appears. NBC was miffed that it was kept in the dark as it lost valuable ad revenue it could have generated if it had aired promos that the episode would mark the return of George Clooney. Clooney cited the fans of the show for his reason as to why he agreed to make the cameo (he wanted Hathaway and Ross's characters to get back together, as most fans always had hoped for). Clooney reportedly only asked to be paid scale for the cameo.

In the 11th season finale "The Show Must Go On" Dr. Ross was briefly shown in a photograph that was part of a slide show at Dr. John Carter's farewell party.

In the season 14 episode, "Status Quo", Jeanie Boulet mentions Doug and Carol when she returns to the ER. Nurse Haleh Adams states that they are living happily in Seattle and that their daughters are now in 3rd grade.

In the Season 15 episode The Book of Abby, long-serving nurse Haleh Adams shows the departing Abby Lockhart a closet wall where all the past doctors and employees have put their locker name tags. Amongst them, the tag "Ross" can be seen.

In the season 15 episode "Old Times," Dr. Doug Ross is working as an attending physician at the University of Washington Medical Center. He is helping a grieving grandmother (Susan Sarandon), whose grandson was gravely injured in a bicycle accident. He talks to Sam and Neela (after finding out they were from County), asking them if any of his old colleagues still worked there. Doug and Carol are directly responsible for getting the kidney for Carter and a heart for another County patient, but they never discovered who received the organs.