It was nearly impossible for me not to think about Izzie Stevens while watching the recent episode of Grey’s Anatomy. I’m talking Izzie in the pink prom gown, after Denny died, when she couldn’t get up off the floor, when she needed dark and twisty Meredith Grey to talk her back into quasi-sanity and help her start taking baby steps forward.
Even though what happened in this episode felt very deja vu-ish, I was surprisingly okay with that.
It may, at first blush, seem counterintuitive for Cristina Yang to pull an Izzie. Cristina’s the strong one, the one who’s an expert at compartmentalizing her feelings, shutting them down, being cool and sharp as steel (except when she needed to be cut out of a wedding dress), always lustful for surgery so much so that she was once willing to “give” her boyfriend to her “cardio god” mentor at Seattle Grace in order to keep her there. Cristina’s so hardcore about surgery that she went to the hospital and reported to work within hours of marrying Owen Hunt.
But there she was demonstrating her fragile humanity, hitting the deck on the operating room floor after an instrument tray was suddenly and loudly knocked to the floor during Cristina’s first surgery since the shooting. There she was handing her wedding ring back to Owen in the locker room saying she couldn’t do it. There she and Meredith were, lying on the floor again, this time in Meredith’s living room, as Meredith of the Post-It Note marriage urged Cristina to stick with it, at least with Owen.
Surprisingly, even though this felt like well-trod Grey’s material — Izzie and Alex Karev also impulsively got married in the wake of the life-altering trauma of potentially deadly cancer — it felt right for Cristina. The Cristina we’ve come to know would go back to surgery as soon as possible and would marry Owen (she did agree to marry Burke even though she wasn’t crazy about the institution of marriage). These things are all in character for her. It also seems right that Cristina would attempt to bury the shock and fear she experienced while being forced to operate at gunpoint only to have it backfire and re-surface in some fashion. To observe her feeling paralyzed in terror in the one place in which she’d felt most at home, made sense.
Apparently getting back up on that surgical horse wasn’t what hardcore surgeon Cristina needed, however I hope that Cristina’s road to emotional recovery doesn’t too closely mirror Izzie’s when Izzie briefly contemplated leaving surgery as she waded through the emotional fall-out of Denny’s death, as was suggested by the previews.
By the way, loved the scene in the living room where Owen spoke passionately about how he was going to stand by Cristina and love her no matter what and Meredith replied with, “I already fixed her before you came, but that was a nice speech.”
“That idiot is clearing everyone for surgery like they’re fine, and they’re not fine.”
Meredith shouted that line to Derek Sherpherd in the hall during the Meredith-Derek scene where she finally told him she’d been pregnant and lost the baby during the shooting. Their brief discussion — capped by Meredith’s emotional appeal to Derek to stop recklessly endangering his life by speeding like a maniac — was disappointingly anti-climatic, left me wanting more than Derek’s handful of words and the hug he gave his wife. (I was, however, fond of the earlier scene where Meredith fake-cried and purposefully smudged her mascara in a lame attempt to persuade the trauma counselor to clear her for surgery.) Hopefully Shonda Rhimes & Co. are going to slowly ratchet up the Derek’s-not-really-okay-either story and that’s the explanation for the less-than-satisfying Meredith-Derek arc during this episode.
Clacked by Meredith O'Brien 
on Oct 01, 2010 @ 10:42 EST5EDT
I actually liked Derek’s response to Meredith in that scene … It was just … well, Derek-like to me.
That being said, it could have just as easily been Derek-like-he’s-blowing-it-off-and-will-keep-driving-fast as it was Derek-being-all-contrite-like.
I really like this Cristina storyline. It’s fascinating to see this different side of her– and her relationship with Owen is more interesting then I’ve ever found it before (I hate love triangles).