Just in case anyone has forgotten since last week’s Grey’s Anatomy, Derek is terrible. I know it, you know it, Meredith knows it. His kid, who for once in his short life is not invisible, knows it too. He senses that Derek is in the house, and starts crying. Meredith has her issues, but she knows that when your kid wakes up crying, you’ve got a Code Yellow, which calls for an immediate Diaperectomy. But Terrible Derek hasn’t parented a day in his life, and thinks you’re allowed to just turn the baby monitor off and go back to sexy times. No, Derek. You’re terrible.
RIGHT. SO. Derek is home from DC (Still? Again? IDK, I’ve lost all interest in his whereabouts.) but has to make one last trip there to make his presentation to the President’s Council, and then he’s back to Seattle for good. Hooray? Or no. Except how he keeps saying he’ll be right back, like some kind of Tom Hanks Castaway, so I think we all know that it’s not going to be that simple.
Amelia bursts into Derek and Meredith’s house, dressed in yesterday’s clothes with Owen hot on her heels. Meredith and Derek give her A Look, which is a bit rich, coming from these two. She scoops little Bailey out of his high chair, where he’s adorably vacuuming up chunks of cantaloupe, and uses him as a human shield. Good thinking, lady.
I guess when Christina left, she tasked Meredith with keeping up with Terrible Owen’s assholery. I love Christina, but seriously, babe? Meredith’s got enough to keeping track of with Terrible Derek. She can’t possibly keep up with Terrible Owen as well. But that doesn’t stop her from herding Amelia into a corner and reality checking her. Amelia would like Meredith to leave her the hell alone, thank you. Edwards scoots in at that exact moment (girl has got the worst timing in the whole wide world) and starts poking around. Amelia makes a muderface and sends her on her way.
At Grey Sloan Memorial Drama Bomb Warehouse, sweet Amelia is so adrift. She’s in the deep water, and she can’t get her bearings, and the Patient of the Week isn’t going to help at all. It’s a teenager named Marissa who has some severe abnormalities in her spine, but that hasn’t stopped her from becoming the best junior golfer in the country. When Callie, Amelia and Ben express surprise that she’s been able to play through the pain, she sits them all down and tells them if she was a dude, no one would be surprised. She is excellent, and she’s not ashamed of it. Oh, Marissa. I wish you were not the Patient of the Week! Please don’t die!
Callie and Amelia bounce to discuss Marissa’s treatment options. Amelia wants to do one thing, and Callie wants to do something much more aggressive in hopes of further stabilizing Marissa’s spine. Amelia says that the point is to preserve range of motion so she can keep playing golf, and Callie says, I shit you not, “She might have to let that go.” Haha, because Callie is so good at letting things go. The best at it. Her second doctorate is in Dropping It. It’s her favorite hobby.
Terrible Owen lurks in, points at Amelia, and grunts. Callie spits fire from her eyeballs. Looks like they’re going with Amelia’s plan.
WHO IS READY WITH PENIS JOKES? I hope you’ve got plenty, because Jo, April, Edwards, and Bailey catch the incoming trauma of the week, and it’s a dude whose willy has been removed from the rest of his person. His wife walked in on him getting steamy with his sous chef, and whacked it off with a knife. Talk about Kitchen Nightmares ba-dum-ba-bom! Luckily, he keeps his knives properly sharpened, so it’s a clean cut. April does something called the Groin Tourniquet Method which sounds HORRIFYING, while Edwards attends to the guy’s wedding tackle. Apparently they don’t have a doctor who specializes in reattaching penises (peni?) so April suggests calling Catherine Avery. Webber pitches a tantrum because of something that happened with Catherine that I can’t remember, but let’s just assume it was her undermining his authority in some way.
You are such a baby, Webber. All you boys are such big dumb babies.
April tells Edwards to flee with the penis, because Jackson is waiting on it. Edwards puts it in pan and starts hauling ass through the hospital, bobbing and weaving and dodging around all comers. It is the greatest tragedy of my life that she doesn’t trip and send that penis flying through the lobby. Moment of silence for the gifs we’ll never have. (Remember when that happened on One Tree Hill? Remember when that dog ate Dan’s heart transplant?)
Anyway, April isn’t an intern anymore. I’m not even sure if Webber is her boss. She’s going to do what’s best for her patient, and what’s best for her patient is Catherine Avery. She calls her, and Catherine helicopters in. April meets her on the roof, and there is this wonderful, lovely moment between the two of them. It’s so loud and they can’t really speak, and I’m not sure there are even words for what April has been through, so Catherine just cradles April’s face and April nods, her eyes full of tears. Some tremendous chemistry between those two ladies in this scene.
Elsewhere in the hospital, Maggie bumps into Ethan the x-ray tech/radiologist she went on a date with. Dude literally just looks at her and walks off. Um? She turns to the nearest available body, Alex in this instance, and starts demanding to know The Fuck, bro? Alex has no answers. Callie wanders in and exposits to us that she too went out on a crappy date, this one with Officer Dan. He was stupid, and she doesn’t have time for stupid, so there. Welp. I guess we all processed our feelings about that for nothing, eh?
Maggie rocks up into Ethan’s little cubicle and demands to know why he never called her after their date. Ethan tells her—get this—it’s because she talks too much. Apparently she didn’t ask enough questions about his feelings, and he didn’t like it. His other sticking point is that Maggie paid. He says it two times. “You paid. YOU PAID.” Maggie, baby, get out now before you’re married to this guy. Terrible Owen and Terrible Derek are all I can take. Please don’t make us suffer Terrible Ethan too.
O.R. Time!
Arizona, Callie, Bailey, and Meredith are all in the gallery, watching the penis reattachment, discussing how pissed off you have to be to cut off a person’s junk. Arizona is adorably confused about the whole situation. She can’t fathom what the big deal is.
Arizona: It’s just his penis! He doesn’t even need it! It’s not like it’s his leg! That’s some shit, right there, when your spouse cuts off your leg.
Callie: Girl! I was trying to save your actual life!
Arizona: A life without leg is no life at all! And anyway, I only almost killed you once.
Meredith: I almost killed Terrible Derek once.
Everyone: Same, girl. Same.
Bailey and Meredith are about to get into a Strangers On A Train situation when Ben comes bursting in, looking for Callie. Turns out Marissa’s deformity was much more severe than Amelia anticipated, and she’s in danger of being paralyzed. Amelia and Callie holler at one another for a hot second before settling into a game plan. Om nom nom that tension was delicious. Another round for the table. They save Marissa’s life, but she’s never going to play golf again. Marissa’s mom flips out on them. Callie knows they did all they could, but Amelia internalizes everything. She heads straight to Terrible Owen to tell him off for jumping into her and Callie’s initial discussion about treatment plans. She says that if he didn’t have all of these feelings in his pants, he’d have stayed the hell out of it (Owen has never stayed out of anything in his life) and she wouldn’t have ruined this girl’s life.
Okay, somehow Alex and Maggie are in an O.R. together. Maggie is still upset about that crap Ethan said, but Alex, out of the middle of fucking nowhere, has got aaaaall kinds of feelings he wants to share with Maggie. He thinks she’s beautiful and cute and sexy and her hair and her eyes and if Ethan doesn’t get that, then screw him. It would be really nice if it weren’t for, you know, his girlfriend.
Maggie goes to tell Ethan that she maybe shouldn’t have brought quite so much thunder. Ethan is placated. He tells Maggie that next time, he’ll bring the thunder. We’ll all bring our barf bags.
Hey, so, what’s worse than getting your penis cut off? Getting your penis cut off twice! Penis Guy and his wife reconcile — maybe not the kind of decision to make hopped up on morphine, but okay — much to the displeasure of his girlfriend/sous chef. Her best means of retaliation is to just whack the guy’s willy off again. No points for originality, but it doesn’t make a statement, I guess. Edwards grabs a latex glove and chases the woman through the hospital, catching her just before she flushes the penis down the toilet. Catherine, much impressed with Edwards’s surgical skills, quick thinking, and penis retrievable abilities, offers her a spot in her program in Boston. While everyone else thinks it’s great, Edwards is not so sure she wants a career handling penises.
Amelia tells Meredith that since she’s never cried over the body of the person she loves most (uh-oh) and since she’s never clawed her way back from losing the love of her life (oh dear) she should cut her a little slack.
Back at the hospital (What day even is this?) the phone rings. It’s the White House looking for Derek, who never showed up for his meeting.
Next week: Another g-d plane crash!
I would say no way in hell is Shonda killing off Derek, but then again, we never saw Will’s death coming on The Good Wife, so maybe Grey’s is just keeping Patrick Dempsey’s impending departure from the show reaaaally under wraps. There have been rumours about him leaving the show every year for a while now, and he’s barely been around this season anyway, so who knows.
I would say his death would be AWESOME, but I’m really loving confident, talented, running shit, got-her-life-together Meredith, so I don’t really want her to become all dark and twisty again, which will be sort of inevitable if they kill Derek. If Patrick Dempsey IS leaving the show, I really rather that they just get divorced and he moves to DC. But then it wouldn’t be Grey’s, would it? Ugh, they had them reconcile, JUST so that it would be extra heartbreaking when he dies. Just like Tara on Buffy. Oh god, he is totally dead.
What I’m MOST excited for about next week’s episode, however, is that it looks like Arizona is going to finally have a real storyline again! We just haven’t seen enough of her since Dr. Geena Davis left.
And lastly – I can’t believe Shonda made us process Policeman Dan for no reason. What a waste of feelings!
ONE MORE THING:
Alex! You are the last decent guy on this show! Do not touch Maggie until/unless you break up with Jo!
FEELINGS ARE NEVER WASTED! But yeah, no. So long, Officer Dan. See you never.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Patrick did leave after this season. He has barely been around and is apparently going through some personal shit. His wife filed for divorce. I don’t know if that has anything to do with the lack of episodes he’s been in lately or nah.
I’m pretty sure I ship Amelia with just about every woman on this show. The entire time she was arguing with Callie I was willing them just to shut up and kiss already. Okay – not the whole time – I’m glad they saved the tiny golfer’s, but they probably should have made out after that…
Obviously that should read “saved the tiny golfer’s life” or just “saved the tiny golfer”. That’s what I get for jumping ahead to Callie/Amelia hotness instead of proof reading. Oh well – I’m sure y’all knew what I meant and it was absolutely worth it.
oh man I am reeeeeeeeeeeally feeling Callie/Amelia. But when Amelia was saving Dr. GD, I was really feeling her with Arizona, so idk, idk. Let’s have everyone kiss and see how we feel at the end of it.
I really loved this episode; it felt like one of the best and funniest in a while, BUT all the foreshadowing is giving me some nerves.
There’s the super heavy Derek stuff at the beginning and the end of the episode (“wait for me” is just asking to be famous last words, especially given that the last time Derek said that to Meredith, she then had nightmares about him dying in a car accident on the way back to her. Tempting fate is all I’m sayin’ here).
I’m curious to see where Callie goes. For all the processing about her date with the cop, it was kind of a relief to see that storyline dealt with so quickly. She’s dated at least two people since she and Arizona split, so maybe this season will end with her realizing that no one makes her as happy as Arizona? BUT, there was also that scene where she was talking about how you might think there’s going to be the one and you’ll never find something else, but someday you do, so maybe that is an indicator that she and Arizona really are over. Too many feels.
I don’t think this necessarily means that Callie and Arizona are over. Lexie had a similar speech back in Season 7 after she broke up with Mark, and those two became endgame (and Shonda has basically said that they would have ended up together, and we were just about to see them together for real again, if she hadn’t had to write their characters off the show when Chyler Leigh decided to leave the show to spend more time with her family). Jackson had a similar speech as well about believing in having more than one soulmate, so I think it’s just the show (the writers, really) expressing an opinion. So I still believe and think that there is hope for Calzona as endgame.
I’m not ready to hate Ethan quite yet — I mean it does suck if your date doesn’t let you get a word in, even if your date is Maggie Pierce. Or so I would imagine. I don’t actually know for sure how the Maggie Pierce factor tips the scales.
So relieved that we don’t have to make policeman Dan voodoo dolls. I liked him in True Blood…
Also also also Derek is so dead… I won’t miss him but Greys without him will be weird. Just like it’s still weird without Yang
When I had first seen little Bailey in his high chair while watching the episode, I was wondering “What in the world is that kid doing? Has he fallen over because he’s so sleepy or something?”, so thank you for explaining that he was (adorably) “vacuuming up chunks of cantaloupe”. Also, that caption (“I can’t believe these people are my parents.”) was absolute perfection, Jenn.
That short little scene/moment between April and Catherine on the rooftop was so powerful/beautiful/gorgeous/brilliant/moving. It’s just amazing how they said everything and more with just their faces.
(Jenn, if you’re interested, here’s the basic recap of what happened between Richard and Catherine. Last season, Richard went to Boston to propose to Catherine. She thought he had come to talk to her about why Cristina didn’t win the Harper Avery Award. This conversation led to a huge argument between the two of them. Catherine couldn’t give Cristina the award, even though she admitted she would have won it, because it was a conflict of interest, since her family’s foundation is part owner of Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital. Richard believes Cristina rightly deserved to win it, and he is indignant that no doctor at GSM, the hospital that he helped build and create and shape and influence, will ever be able to win a Harper Avery, the highest award in the medical field, because of this situation.)