"don't even get me started on the emergency contact of it all, oh man" may I interest you in,,, getting started on that 👀
well. y'know. since you asked 👀
knowing that it's actual, real life establish canon makes me feel insane honestly, like full on cuckoo bananas. it's like the writers dropped a load bearing lore pillar into their relationship and i'm support to be normal about that?
this is going to be long-winded, so...you have been warned lmao.
chances are we'll probably never ever get a full explanation of the whys and the whens outside of that one mention, but it's so important because it fully solidify something the show has given in drips and drabs so many times, moreso this season in particular, which is that jack and robby have years and years of history between them in and outside of the hospital and with that history has come understanding and a level almost thoughtless, second nature care that goes beyond friendly coworkers and teeters more firms into the 'close friends' territory at the very least and with this reveal maybe even solidifies 'best friends' (though i'd bet money robby would roll his eyes at the term and keep saying he didn't have one). even taking any shipping goggles off, this season establishes this specific friendship as maybe the singular closest within the general ensemble as of the end of the season and with the most evidence from canon to back that up.
without a doubt, the two people in the hospital who care about robby the most, who you could say genuinely love him and worry about his well being are dana and jack. they know this about one another too, and apparently often enough look to each other as touch points to keep an eye on robby. the show also backs up the idea that dana is aware that jack and robby are close, robby listens to jack, in situations where dana seems to think he will not listen to her. why that is, canon doesn't establish, but canon DOES very much establishes this is true. jack telling robby the hard truth about leah, jack telling robby to get some air after he yelled at gloria, jack breaking through robby's abject misery not once, but twice to pull him back from the ledge, all instances where anyone else would have hit the brick wall that is Chief of Emergency Medicine Michael Robinavitch. robby who is stubborn and a little bit of an asshole, and very territorial about his ED, hands it over to jack like it's no trouble at all, lets Jack take control gladly during the MCI. robby listens to jack's opinion during procedures and very clearly trusts his clinical decision making almost as much as his own, he's someone he doesn't have to babysit and it's a relief. they work together like one unit when they take on cases together, bantering (see: flirting) their way during traumas, seamlessly. they're equals, robby clearly considers them as such, and we as viewers have seen that robby viewing anyone as an equal is tantamount to adoration.
so even if we just look at them through the lense of their interactions as they relate to the hospital, well i mean, god damn, those are some compelling ass coworkers! but by making jack robby's emergency contact, the show has established something further, that this unsaid closeness goes BEYOND what has been seen on screen in the confines of the ED, and that the care between them is an implication, an afterthought, something long established and seldom discussed until it gets brought to the surface by robby's abnormal behavior. robby and dana absolutely have this too, i have no doubt they love and trust and respect each other and there absolutely is a relationship outside of the ED there, but this singular, specific detail is one of the only "officially" nods to an implied relationship with another ensemble character outside the ED for robby in particular, which i would say he really only had with with collins prior (heather collins i still think about you all the time 🥲).
robby who, has no wife, no kids, no dog, no family, though he clearly wanted them, robby who it wouldn't have been out of character to have done what louie did and make PTMC his emergency contact, instead jack is his emergency contact. and jack said "still" so it's clearly been that way for a while. the show will never tell us, it's not an important details, but if i had to guess i would say that jack and robby might have quarantined together during COVID, and it may have been in the aftermath of adamson's death and the one-two punch of that and jack's wife's dying that they decided to list each other for practicality. i'd bet money they didn't talk about it much, it was the sensible thing to do given their circumstances. it's also unclear if robby is also (still?) jack's emergency contact too. i'm 50/50 on that, part of me thinks not anymore and part of me thinks it's just another thing between them that they just don't talk about. "still" made me think that maybe jack expected robby to change it, after all this time and other seemingly serious relationships he's seen robby have, and robby just...never did. "still" almost felt like jack was reminding robby. "still" makes me thinks it's probably, up until this point, never been needed.
but establishing that as fact makes so. much. sense. robby seems to trust jack, willingly, with parts on himself he will not allow others to see unless his hand is forced. in s1, he TOLD jack about breaking down. jack didn't have to pull it out of him, it just flowed out of robby. "i choked", where he refused to even tell dana about what rumors that night shift nurse might have been spreading about him. robby has let himself cry in front of jack twice now. he's honest with him in ways i would bet money he doesn't trust himself to be with others because they're equals, to robby. robby generally seems to think his emotions, his grief are a burden and a weakness, and i can only imagine he would view someone having to show up for him, if he were hurt, as doubly so. but so much of robby's shit is jack's shit too and he gets it, maybe better than anyone in robby's circle, and robby seems to have internalized that. they both know they're different sides of the same fucked up coin, there is years of shared and individual trauma between them. their relationship is reciprocal, robby certainly worries about jack too, hell we open s1 with robby needing to be jack's support structure, but i'd wager not being direct with each other about the specificities of those worries is probably a central tenant of their friendship (they are, still, after all, two gen x dudes, though jack does seem more in touch with his emotions given the therapy of it all) and that being each others emergency contacts, at this point, is an out of sight out of mind thing.
anyway, all that is to say, i genuinely didn't think the show would go there and the fact that it did delights me. they could have kept jack and robby as this ambitious surface level "coworkers in arms" bit, but instead they gave them a shared, unspoken backstory. i love the implications of how deep their relationship is, i love there is a history there even if we never know it and i especially love that the show seems adamant to hammer home that of all people in the hospital these two guys seems to know each other the best, that they see each other and show up for each other. i could write hundreds of thousands of words about that because it truly endlessly compels me and i have so much to say about it.
and might, lets see how much my brain spins during the hiatus 🫣 lmao
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