I’m a big fan of Owen Hunt’s character on Grey’s Anatomy. He burst onto the Seattle Grace scene full of bravado, ingenuity, and sexual energy, drawing the tough-minded Cristina Yang into his vortex. And since he became a full-time member of the hospital staff, the emotional damage he sustained from his time as an Army physician in Iraq has been revealed in glimpses, most jarringly when, while struggling with a post-traumatic stress flashback, he choked Cristina while she lay in bed next to him.
To see this Owen-centric episode — which gave a respectful nod to the Army doctors of M*A*S*H with its title, “Suicide is Painless” — where we got to see Owen and Teddy Altman at work in Iraq pleased me greatly.
Grey’s has been taking some risks lately with a handful of unorthodox episodes this season. There was that tri-flashback episode where we saw Richard Webber, Miranda Bailey, and Callie Torres working on pivotal cases. There was the episode where the same scenes were played out over and over from different points of view until the entire picture of what happened in the wake of a hotel fire became clear. Then along came this Owen/Teddy Iraq episode. (I like Teddy a great deal too. Still hate the Mercy Westers though.)
As Teddy dragged Owen onto a doctor-assisted suicide case (it’s legal in Washington), Owen was reminded of the fatal wound his colleague Dan sustained in Iraq. Both stories were poignant — the woman dying of cancer (Sara Gilbert who played Darlene in Roseanne) choosing to commit suicide while her terrified and grief-stricken husband held her, and Owen feeling responsible for agreeing to do as Dan wanted, allowing him to die to escape the tremendous pain, only to have help arrive shortly after Owen stopped his life-saving intervention. The crushing guilt Owen feels for going along with Dan’s suicide request, when had Owen blown him off and held on a bit longer help would have arrived, haunts him. And Owen refusing to talk about it just lets the toxic stress build up inside him while he does push-ups in the middle of the wee hours of the morning.
This only made me more convinced than ever that Owen’s going to inevitably wind up with Teddy, because she’s the only one who understands what he’s experienced. For all of Cristina’s hardcore surgeon attitude, she simply cannot relate.
Fold in Arizona Robbins’ chilly reaction to Callie’s declaration that she wants to have a baby, and this episode was extremely heavy. Very tissue-worthy. The only thing that lightened it up a bit was Richard trying to be cool by saying of an attractive colleague after she left the operating room that he wanted to “hit her hard” (as opposed to saying, “hit that”).
What did you think of “Suicide is Painless?” Think this means that Owen and Teddy are destined to be together?
Clacked by Meredith O'Brien 
on Mar 26, 2010 @ 11:30 EST5EDT
