As Callie struggled mightily to prove, just a week after her nearly fatal car accident, that she was physically able to get out of her hospital bed and see her struggling daughter, Cristina, who provided much emotional comfort to Callie, gave it to her straight: “She’s mostly tubes and wires and she looks more like a chicken than a baby, like a featherless, beakless chicken. You want to wait ’til she’s cuter.”
Callie narrowed her eyes and said, “You’re the worst godmother ever.”
This Grey’s Anatomy episode did a fine job of depicting the newborn’s progress during the first 12 weeks of baby Sofia’s life as well as her mother’s own grueling, three-month-long recovery without sugarcoating it. For every moment of levity — like Callie working out by pushing a gurney carrying Cristina (then Meredith too) around the halls — there was a slice of seriousness, as Callie collapsed after she started bleeding because she’d pushed herself too hard physically.
The whole fragile baby storyline wasn’t too much, too emotional or too over-the-top even when Callie freaked out at the prospect of taking Sofia home in a car given that the last time she’d been in a car, both of them nearly died. It all felt right.
More emotional than Callie and Sofia’s story was the Post-It Note that fell off Richard Webber’s back: “This is Richard. Richard is your husband.”
As the episode leap-frogged ahead in time, Adele’s Alzheimer’s dramatically and rapidly worsened, just as little Sofia gained strength. Adele even confused Meredith with her dead mother Ellis and pleaded with her to give her back her husband. I was unsurprised that Meredith later risked the entire Alzheimer’s clinical study, and perhaps even her medical license, by making sure that the medicine she and Derek were testing was administered to Adele instead of the placebo for which she had been designated. In some ways, it’s almost as though Meredith felt some sort of debt toward Adele on behalf of her mother who caused Adele to suffer.
A review of this episode would be incomplete without a nod to Doris Roberts who kicked serious butt as the lonely, cantankerous, rich senior citizen dying of lung cancer. Her lines were priceless and delivered with aplomb, as she called Seattle Grace a “third rate crap factory” and, when Owen Hunt told her she wasn’t well enough to be discharged, she said, “This is not Guantanamo … Get me out of here before I sue your balls off.”
She was later redeemed for all her meanness, however, by capitulating to Alex’s savvy, albeit ethically and morally fuzzy pressure to hand over the $100,000 he needed to bring needy African children to the hospital for pro bono surgeries, which he hoped would cap his campaign to become chief resident.
And, against my better judgment, I’ve taken a shine to what the writers are doing with the Teddy-Henry story, mostly because he’s not lying in a hospital bed looking gray, hopeless and sunken-eyed like Denny Duquette. Instead, he’s preparing romantic meals bathed in candlelight for the woman whom he’s hoping will eventually warm to him, as I, cynical viewer, already have.
Clacked by Meredith O'Brien 
on Apr 29, 2011 @ 09:30 EST5EDT
