If Callie’s reaction to her ultrasound and the fact that she was bleeding is any indication of what she’s going to be like during her pregnancy — when all sorts of weird things happen to your body, and pregnancy books can unhinge you with lists of all the horrific things that can go wrong — by the time the Cal-Sloan baby arrives, Callie’s going to have worked herself into being an over-the-top helicopter mom who’s petrified of everything. I sincerely hope that’s not the case.
About one thing she was right to be truly anxious: I, too, don’t trust Arizona not to muck up this very tenuous reconciliation, given her history.
The lesbian lover-baby daddy triangle is obviously going to be sticky and difficult, particularly if Arizona tries to shunt Mark aside as the “cool uncle” instead of acknowledging that he’s the father while she claims that the kid is “my baby.” I also think it’s unlikely that Lexi will come to terms with the fact that Mark’s having a baby with Callie. Sure, she may love Mark, but she’s not yet ready to do the settling down thing. I would be shocked if it turned out any other way or if she doesn’t wind up sleeping with Alex again.
The baby drama aside, the authentic emotional punch in this Grey’s episode came in the form of Derek’s Alzheimer’s clinical trial. It wasn’t just emotional punch, it was emotional brutality, knowing that you’re injecting someone with a placebo and that you have to lie to that patient’s family, as they talk about their hope that their loved one is receiving the miracle drug that’ll curb the disease that’s eating away at their memories and changing who they are.
This got to Alex more than he thought it would, after a wife — whose Alzheimer’s-afflicted husband has fallen in love with a dementia patient at his group home — begged him, tearfully pleaded with him, to give her husband the drug. When Alex learned that the husband had been randomly assigned to receive the placebo, he realized that this was too heavy for him to endure for the span of an entire clinical trial.
Derek reluctantly admitted that Meredith would provide him with great assistance on the trial, given her experience with her mother’s Alzheimer’s. This lays the groundwork for some treacherous material ahead as Meredith could be faced with re-living her time with her mother while both Derek and Meredith wonder whether this could be Meredith’s fate some day. Throw into the mix that Meredith hasn’t been able to get pregnant while McSteamy accidentally knocked up Callie, and Meredith and Derek are headed for unsettled waters.
On that Twitter storyline, I loved it. I’ve been following Grey’s showrunner Shonda Rhimes on Twitter for some time and she really gets into posting Tweets and engaging with folks. Seeing the Grey’s writers integrate some of the amazing possibilities of Twitter — receiving instant suggestions from other medical peers like they were in a giant brainstorming session with experts around the country — into a tricky surgical scene was a fresh way to incorporate the new technology into the story. And seeing the Chief go from not knowing what “Tweeter” was, to combing through Ellis Grey’s journals to find a specific surgical technique to share with Bailey’s Twitter followers, was classic.
The re-emergence of the dark and twisty — and amusingly crafty — Cristina — brought a smile to my face.
Clacked by Meredith O'Brien 
on Feb 04, 2011 @ 10:04 EST5EDT
