By: Stephanie Sigafoos
When Grey’s Anatomy is good, it’s very good. Thursday night, it was season one kind of good — where the drama, comedy and acting all come together seamlessly to tell a memorable story (or three). Where patients wake up in the middle of surgery, parents are freaking out about their sick kids, surgeons are using the on-call rooms for anything but sleeping and the balance of power is abruptly shifted from Chief to Interim Chief.
Have I mentioned how glad I am that they’re finally giving Patrick Dempsey something to do on this show besides stand there and look pretty? So what if he’s ratting out the boss to the hospital board, stealing his job and giving crappy speeches to the staff while using note cards. He had it all figured out by the end of the episode, didn’t he? Inside of a day he had talked Webber into rehab, rehired the fired, potentially avoided a lawsuit and gave his McChiefy speech a second go-round (sans note cards). Not bad for a first day on the job, right?
Meanwhile Bailey dealt with traumatized-lady-who-woke-up-with-a-surgeon’s-hands-redacting-her tumor, and she did it with her normal style and grace. (Which is to say she yelled loudly, blamed the Anesthesiologist and then proceeded to lecture him with one of those infamous Bailey speeches in which she talks and talks and manages to never run out of breath). And of course you can see their potential hookup coming a mile away, but I’ll let it slide since “Gas man” actually has a personality and a sense of humor.
What else happened? We saw Alex breeze through the world of pediatrics this week, dressing down the parents of a teenager before slicing the kid open (post-op), sticking his hand inside the abdomen and locating the source of internal bleeding presumably by the tips of his fingers. And then Arizona called him “hardcore” and practically glowed at his ability to advocate for tiny humans, and right there and then I decided we need to see more cases of Alex-as-good-guy and not Alex-as-angry-sulking-husband. Anyone else miss Katherine Heigl this week? Nope. Me either.
And finally, we were treated to a brutally honest monologue from Cristina to Owen after they spent the entire episode engaged in ridiculously aggressive sex just about everywhere. (Only on Grey’s will you have a character being treated for vent burns below the waistline, with said character muttering things like “Please don’t cry on my ass” while keeping a straight face). When Cristina told Owen she would never choose sex over surgery again, all while explaining what tore apart her relationship with Preston Burke, it was a beautiful wrap to a great episode. Definitely one of those “For Your Consideration” moments from Sandra Oh, because she really knocked it out of the park.
Other thoughts:
- The Mark/Lexie story bores me. The writers will obviously never let Sloan grow up, and so he’s always going to be the womanizing, whiny gifted plastics God now saddled down with a teenage daughter. The resident man-whore thing has gotten really old, and just when you thought he’d turned the corner, we’re back to square one. *yawn* Ship him off to California and be done with it already.
- Don’t you love when the hospital calls staff meetings and the screen fills up with a hundred people you’ve never seen before? I’m presuming half of them are Mercy Westers with even less to do than the actual pain in the ass residents we’ve already been introduced to. Any chance McDreamy can undo that merger like it never, ever happened?
- Next week: restaurant roof collapse on Valentine’s Day. This one looks like the chaos of “Into You Like a Train” except it might be …. Into you like a fork?
What did you think of last night’s Grey’s?
