Kerry Weaver
Kerry Weaver is a fictional character, a physician, in the NBC television series ER. Dr. Weaver first appears as a recurring character in the second-season episode "Welcome Back, Carter!", which aired on September 21, 1995. Dr. Weaver is portrayed by Laura Innes, who was promoted to the role of series regular beginning with the third-season episode "Dr. Carter, I Presume", which aired on September 26, 1996. Innes made her last regular appearance in the thirteenth-season episode "A House Divided", which aired on January 11, 2007.
During the series' fifteenth season, Innes made guest appearances in the episodes "Heal Thyself", which aired on November 13, 2008, and the series finale, "And in the End...", which aired on April 2, 2009.
Very little of Weaver’s background is revealed to the audience in her early episodes. The character exhibits a limp in her gait, which is aided by the use of a forearm crutch. This was later revealed to be caused by congenital hip dysplasia in episode 14 of season 11, in addition to the fact that she had lived for a period in Africa.
Weaver arrives at County General as Chief Resident, and later becomes an attending physician, is promoted to Chief of Emergency Medicine, and finally becomes the Hospital Chief of Staff. She is ambitious, craves authority, and tends to be excessively bureaucratic in her approach. Her administrative position often requires her to make unpleasant decisions that draw hostility from her fellow physicians, as when she fires Jeanie Boulet in Season 4. However, she also engages in administrative politics to protect herself, sometimes at the expense of others. Although an excellent physician, she is portrayed as the villain in many episodes. She is a dynamic character who struggles with which choice is the right one to make.
Although Weaver has been involved in some heterosexual relationships, she eventually comes out as a lesbian. Her sexual orientation is a key point in some episodes, particularly when she fights in court to keep her son, Henry. She was included in AfterEllen.com's Top 50 Lesbian and Bisexual Characters.
Seasons two through six
During Innes' first five seasons on the show, little was revealed about the details of Weaver's background which would later become some of her defining traits: her sexual orientation, political beliefs, and even the precise nature of her disability. She kept her personal details largely private to prevent discrimination and protect her career. She was also unable to fully confront internalized homophobia and regretted that she never knew her birth parents.When she was first hired by Mark Greene as chief resident in 1995 most ER staff were unhappy. Early in her position, she regularly clashed with Doug Ross and Susan Lewis. In addition, her obsession with bureaucratic policies irritated and confused the entire staff. In Season 3 Weaver became an ER attending physician alongside Greene, with whom she began to compete to curry favor with hospital leadership. As a result, Weaver was not understood beyond her career ambitions and bureaucratic obsessions.
Weaver began to show her underlying kindness and sensitivity when she supported Jeanie Boulet, a physician assistant who contracted HIV from her adulterous husband. Boulet fought to keep her job and dignity in the face of the liability of an HIV-positive employee in the ER. Weaver was the first person in a position of power to side with Boulet, and the two remained friends until Jeanie's budget-related firing and her successful PR pressure campaign to be reinstated. They later reconciled when Jeanie left the ER.
Weaver demonstrated compassion and a moral commitment to civil rights prompting her and Greene to draft a policy for HIV-positive employees. This storyline developed Weaver's character beyond that of a stoic, abrasive bureaucrat. In a future episode she agreed to look the other way when John Carter helped a teenage runaway escape her homophobic parents who sent her to a conversion therapy facility.
In 1997, Weaver had a brief relationship with Ellis West, an M.D. working for a company under consideration for a contract to take over management the ER. She eventually came to the conclusion that West had begun a relationship with her in order to gain her approval of the contract.
When Carter needed to find housing he answered an ad which led him to Weaver's house; she had been renting out her basement apartment to college students. The episode shows her as single and independent, living in an upscale home, and with a unique taste in music. Weaver also hired a private investigator to locate her birth mother, an effort that initially failed and revealed Weaver's fear that she was raised by adoptive parents because her mother could not accept a disabled daughter.
In 1998, during Season 4, Weaver suffered a debilitating convulsive seizure from the effects of toxic benzene spill in the ER. She was treated by Carter and Anna Del Amico. With Weaver debilitated and Greene out of town, Carter was forced to take charge of the ER for the first time.
Weaver was politically ambitious and regularly pursued higher administrative titles. She was named acting Chief of Emergency Medicine during David Morgenstern's extended absence. After an incident involving the hiring of a mentally-ill fraudulent doctor for the role, Weaver saw an opportunity to take the role permanently. However, she discovered the hospital wasn't seriously considering her for the position and immediately quit the interim chief role; Robert Romano immediately took the opportunity to replace her. At the start of Season 6, rumors spread that Romano was being considered for hospital Chief of Staff which both Weaver and Greene agreed to oppose. However, during a meeting in which Greene opposed Romano's promotion, Weaver decided to support Romano as a political maneuver and in return he awarded her the position of Chief of Emergency Medicine. Despite this, Weaver and Romano thereafter engaged in numerous power struggles.
In 1999, Weaver welcomed the chance to hire Gabe Lawrence, a famous ER physician who had been her mentor. After Lawrence makes several errors and displays odd behavior she initially refused to accept Greene's assertion that Lawrence was suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. But after investigating why he was fired from his prior role, then confronting Lawrence who admitted he had been diagnosed, she ultimately accepted it and fired him.
Season seven
In mid-season, Weaver fell in love with staff psychiatrist Kim Legaspi, but was afraid to accept it. While Legaspi was openly lesbian and willing to pursue a romantic relationship with Weaver, she became frustrated that Weaver was closeted and homophobic, thus the relationship was rocky. When Weaver finally accepted that she was gay she was still uncomfortable about coming out to her coworkers. Despite this, the relationship was "open secret" among most of the people in the ER. This storyline also reveals that Weaver had been married to a surgical resident before working at County General.The first coworker Weaver came out to was Dr. Robert Romano, who planned to fire Legaspi over trumped up allegations that she sexually harassed a patient. Weaver's statement prevented Romano from firing Legaspi, but it also emotionally drained Weaver, whose fears of discrimination ruining her career resurfaced. She was unable to provide emotional support to Legaspi, who kept her job, but at the cost of seeing the entrenched homophobia of the hospital administration and her own girlfriend, who remained in the closet. Legaspi broke up with Weaver and decided to take a job offer in San Francisco rather than face the administration's homophobia or the lack of support she received from Weaver.
Weaver also ran afoul of Elizabeth Corday in Season 7 when she assigned Mark Greene to a mandatory professional competency exam after brain tumor surgery resulted in personality changes. As a result, Weaver was not invited to Corday and Greene's wedding; her relationship with Corday was permanently strained thereafter.
Season eight
Weaver was still officially closeted to everyone with the exceptions of Romano and Luka Kovač. Weaver begins a new relationship with firefighter Lt. Sandy Lopez whom she met during a rainstorm while trying to rescue a pregnant woman from a crashed ambulance. Lopez eventually told Weaver she refused to date a woman who was in the closet. Lopez forcibly outed Weaver with a passionate kiss in front of the ER staff. The romance between the two women was portrayed with the courtship, passion and arguments typically reserved for heterosexual couples. Lopez said, "I did you a huge favor," after the kiss in the ER; a few episodes later, Weaver admitted to her that she was right. At the season's end, Weaver accepted herself as a lesbian, and became eager to oppose homophobia.In Season Eight's second episode "The Longer You Stay", Weaver failed to answer repeated pages from Drs. Malucci and Chen when their patient had complications. Weaver was finally retrieved from Doc Magoo's by Carter who slips on wet pavement and injures his back in the process. After the patient died and she flatly said to the three "you killed him", she returns to Doc Magoo's and retrieves her pager she had forgotten in a restroom stall. Desperate to cover up her irresponsibility when the hospital was sued by the patient's family, Weaver fired Malucci in the third episode "Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magic" on a charge of misconduct, and by the fourth episode "Never Say Never", scapegoated Malucci and Chen with the malpractice; Chen was offered a demotion from her Chief Resident position and instead quit entirely. Later in the season, Chen obtains proof of Weaver's dishonesty and brings it to Romano; he orders Weaver to rehire Chen as an attending physician and comply with her demands or face a reopened lawsuit from the dead patient's family.
In "Bygones", Weaver was stunned when she realized a lonely young woman murdered her roommate because of unrequited love. She then reconciled with Lopez and the two of them made their first social appearance at an impromptu drinking party after Mark Greene died. Weaver was visibly saddened by Greene's death and broke down after hearing the news of his passing. She later told Sandy she knew his demise was coming but never thought it would affect her as deeply as it did. She realized she had lost a friend and regretted the years they spent in competition for various ER posts and promotions.