Oh the tangled webs Naomi, Sam, Addison, Pete, Violet, Sheldon, Charlotte, Cooper, William and Gabriel weave when they combine work, friendship and sex lives together.
People get angry, betrayed, jealous, vengeful, attracted to one another and emotionally attached. Then things can really get ugly. As all of these things played out in Private Practice’s “Pulling the Plug” episode, it was amusing to watch the normally confident, well respected neo-natal surgeon Addison become unhinged by a sick baby who wouldn’t stop crying and who vigorously resisted her attempts to use the bulb syringe to clear his nose.
Seriously, watching a sleep-deprived Addison in her gray Yale sweatshirt — hair a mess, no make-up — pleading with Pete’s baby Lucas to please stop crying and then interpreting his continued wailing as him hating her brought me back to the days when I was working on precious little shut-eye and my own crying kids reduced me to a disheveled shell. “I’ve never felt so ineffective,” Addison said of her inability to console Lucas. “I don’t like it.” Welcome to child-rearing Addison, where you’re always feeling ineffective in one respect or another.
And while it was inevitable that the faux relationship between Addison and Pete was going to crumble at some point, and that Addison would get way too attached to Lucas and have her heart broken — particularly once Violet returned — it was still sad to see the look on her face when Pete, who was sick and kind of out of it, said to Addison, who was lying in bed next to him, “I love you Violet.”
Even more awkward was the scene where an ill and exhausted Addison was lying on the sofa — Lucas asleep in his port-a-crib, Pete asleep in Addison’s bed — and Sam, who’d brought Addison chicken soup, was caressing her face and tucking a blanket around her, all while realizing that another man, Addison’s lover, was asleep in the house. Clearly Sam and Addison want to be together, but they’re not because of Naomi, who’s already feeling angry and betrayed that Sam and Addison even have sexual chemistry, though they’ve yet to do the deed.
But there was even more awkwardness, oodles of it, to be had in this episode, like Gabriel finding Naomi’s manual on her desk about how to have sex with a person in a wheelchair, like Gabriel telling Naomi (after they’d slept together) that her boyfriend William was dying and seeking treatment in Switzerland, like Sheldon calling Charlotte on the fact that she loves Cooper and is using Sheldon for sex, and the shock when the husband of the comatose surrogate mother — pregnant with triplets — starting to breathe on her own after her husband illegally removed her court-ordered life support in an attempt to allow her to rest in peace.
Based on the previews, I’m guessing that Addison and Pete’s little insta-family charade is not long for this world and will bet that Addison will likely be crushed when Violet reacts to seeing another woman mothering her son. But I could be wrong about that. We’ll see.
Did Pete’s “I love you Violet” slip surprise you? How do you think the Naomi/William/Gabriel triangle will turn out?
Clacked by Meredith O'Brien 
on Mar 26, 2010 @ 13:30 EST5EDT
