As Wells told reporters in the months leading up to the finale, he figured that the show wouldn't make it past season eight. "So I started doing some planning, and I still have those notes," he said. "They've gotten a little old and smudged, but one of the reasons Noah Wyle is coming back at the very end is we had always planned that the end of the series would involve Noah returning because he was so central as a character at the very beginning."
It had been a final season of returning favorites, stopping by for one final appearance—all the all-stars were there: George Clooney, Julianna Marguiles, even Anthony Edwards' deceased Dr. Mark Greene popped up in a flashback episode—but none more central than Wyle's Carter. While the show's pilot focused on the then-third-year medical student arriving at County for his rocky first day, the final season saw the seasoned vet—who'd seen some things over the last 15 years—return to County in episode 16 to work, get a kidney transplant, and, in the finale, open his very own clinic for the underprivileged, prompting the influx of familiar faces, there to celebrate their former colleague, in those last two hours.
With Carter in the role of County's elder statesman, Wells was able to neatly allow the finale, entitled "And in the End...," to not only be structured like that game-changing first episode from 1994—which was filmed nearly word-for-word from creator Michael Crichton's original screenplay written all the back in 1974—but directly call back to it in ways both big and small.
