While most patients' stories ended well, ''Emergency!'' never shied away from showing the harsher side of emergency medicine, and its effects on the people involved.
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* In the movie pilot: Johnny leaves the ER exam room after finding out that the lineman he just brought in has died of his injuries. He walks down the hall, passing the grieving wife and daughter of the dead lineman, along with Dr. Brackett, who gave them the terrible news. He goes into the garage exit, looks down at his truck, directly at the word, '''RESCUE'''. Disappointed, angry, and defeated, Johnny mutters:
-->- '''Johnny:''' [[AllForNothing "Rescue", hell... All we rescued was a corpse.]]
* In the episode "Dealer's Wild", the paramedics and doctors go to extreme lengths to save a man who had a heart attack while flying in a small plane with his son. First Roy has to [[CrashCourseLanding talk the son through the process of landing the plane]], then the paramedics have to get the man stabilized, then the doctors fight ''hard'' to keep the man alive at the hospital. Sadly, it proves to be a losing fight. The scene of Dr. Brackett telling the boy that his father had died would make anyone want to shed a tear or two.
* In "Frequency," a friend of Johnny's is injured in a car crash and later dies on the operating table. Johnny volunteers to inform the wife that she's now a widow and does so in a very quiet, heart-wrenching scene.
* In the season 2 episode "Show Biz", one of the Rampart Emergency subplots involves a woman whose car went out of control and hit a little girl. The woman was injured, while the girl died en route to the hospital. Later, the girl's father storms into Rampart and demands to see the woman who hit his daughter -- just as the woman's body is being wheeled down the corridor to the morgue after she died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
* Roy's distress in "The Virus" after Johnny collapses during a rescue and is brought to the hospital. You can feel the emotion when Roy is told his partner is out in the squad and he replies "''temporary'' partner" because he is essentially emphasizing that he won't accept Gage dying.
* In one episode, the paramedics brought in a young, pregnant woman. She and her husband had eloped without her very religious parents' approval, and promptly hit a streak of terrible luck that ended with the destruction of their apartment and all their belongings by fire, and ''then'' her baby was born with a cleft palate. It's a relatively common birth defect that can be fixed with surgery, but the woman believed it was a sign from God, and rejected her baby. The doctors and her husband persuaded her to change her mind, but the scene of her telling the doctor to "take the baby away" is still gut-wrenching.
* The end of the "Greatest Rescues" movie. It's easy to get teary-eyed thinking of them having their own stations and not being partners, though it's obvious the friendship would continue.
* One of the subplots in "Messin' Around" has Roy and Johnny respond to a boy who has drunk ant poison, only for the mother to [[RestrictedRescueOperation interfere with them helping]] because [[CryingWolf he had prank called 911 before]]. By the time they bypass her and finally get him to the hospital, it's too late. The look on the mother's face as she's told he's died is a mixture of disbelief and [[MyGodWhatHaveIDone the realization that she has helped cause her son's death]].
-->"I thought he was just trying to get attention... He was always just trying to get attention..."
* In one case, a high school girl took an overdose of downers (strong depressants). The paramedics didn't get her to the hospital fast enough, and she died in the E.R. Her mother walked in and began telling Dixie that her daughter was "a good girl" who didn't use drugs ... just as Dr. Brackett came out of the exam room where her daughter had just died. The expression on her face is brutal.
* In one subplot of "Communications", an airline stewardess took a whole bottle of pills. Determined to die, she refused to let Roy and Johnny give her aid, forcing them to wait until she lost consciousness. Unfortunately, by then it was too late and she died at the hospital. Even worse, nobody ever learned ''why'' she wanted to commit suicide.
* In the two-hour special "''Survival on Charter #220''", the couple who collided with the passenger jet and crashed into the L.A. River channel. Moments before the collision, the couple were having an argument with the male, Tom, telling the female, Mary, "You can't get rid of me that easily.", with her sarcastically replying back, "Wanna bet?" After the crash, once they are extracted from the wreckage, the rescuers find that Tom is dead at the scene. As they cover his corpse with the fire blanket, Mary breaks down in grief in PartingWordsRegret, devastated over how she was unable to make amends with Tom before it was too late before she has to be dragged away by the fire crew to be treated for her own injuries. Fate can truly be cruel sometimes...
* In one episode, Dr. Brackett is in a collision with another car, which was carrying a man and his daughter. Brackett and the little girl are both hurt; the other driver is killed. Throughout the episode, Brackett is seen in a state of remorse, blaming himself for what happened even though the other driver was clearly the one at fault. When he eventually approaches the little girl and apologizes for the accident, she assures him it wasn't his fault: her father had been in a drunken rage just before the crash. While it does lessen Brackett's guilt over the incident, it doesn't mitigate the fact that a little girl lost her father because he was intoxicated.