Dr. Romano was a huge piece of shit. A bigot of every stripe, who never had a kind word for anyone, who became chief of surgery just to fuck with the career of a woman he had sexually harassed. Real psycho shit.

Season nine premiere, they need to evacuate the hospital for...reasons and he’s helping load some patients into the helicopter on the room when he forgets where he is and raises his arm a bit too high

He catches the rotor with his arm and presto, no more arm.

They reattach it but the reattachment doesn’t take and eventually he’s forced to have them re-amputate it, permanently ending his career as a surgeon.

All of this was an attempt by the writers to rescue this character, give him some emotional depth, make him sympathetic to the audience

It absolutely did not work

So the next step is of course to just write him out of the show. And my god what a way to do it.

He brings a patient up to the roof to be airlifted. The sight of the spinning rotor triggers a trauma reaction in him, and he goes downstairs to the ambulance bay to catch his breath

And while he does the helicopter fucking crashes, falls down in a huge pile of flaming wreckage, and falls directly on top of him, killing him instantly.

And the kicker? No other character fucking cared

Nobody showed up to his memorial service except the woman who organized it (who did so out of a sense of duty rather than affection).

It takes them like two days to even realize what had happened to him

The writers fucking hated this guy