Grey’s Anatomy – A very bad night

What a way to leave Grey’s Anatomy fans hanging until 2012.

With death. With dead bodies strewn about. With a very sick newborn. With a woman nearly dying due to a surgical mistake. With Derek and Meredith being told that Zola would never again be theirs. With heartbreak.

You’ve gotta hope that things start to look up next year because, man, this was a horribly bleak episode.

First there was Teddy’s hubby Henry dying. Now we all knew that he wasn’t long for this world. Denny Duquette laid the groundwork on this front; if one of the main Grey’s characters falls in love with a patient, that patient is either going to die in dramatic fashion or, in the case of Alex’s “Ava,” be committed to a psychiatric facility. Amping up the Teddy-Henry lovey-dovey quotient in recent episodes only to kill him off so swiftly? That’s just cold.

And when we left Teddy at the end of the episode, she didn’t know that Henry had died on the operating table. She was still happily chattering away as she schemed about how she’d try to persuade Henry to go back to school for something other than medicine as her best friend Owen (why did he go into Teddy’s OR a second time and be forced to tell dreadful lies?) pretended as though everything was okay because Teddy was the only one who could repair a patient’s shredded heart. It was literally shredded, not metaphorically, because Avery, who’s mourning the loss of Lexie, screwed up during the patient’s initial back surgery while Callie flipped through a magazine, unaware. I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of this debacle.

Secondly, you’ve got poor Meredith not only being told by the social worker that the child protective services folks don’t think she’d make a good mother for Zola after all, but having to care for a critically ill preemie, who very well may die in Meredith’s arms, not long after getting the bad news about her own baby. One minute Meredith’s telling a suddenly compassionate Derek that she’s done, that she doesn’t want to try for any more babies, the next minute, she’s telling a woman who just gave birth not to worry because her baby is in Meredith’s capable, loving hands. Oh, the cruel irony. (It’s so deeply sad that it makes me wonder if Grey’s writers have some sort of side deal with anti-depressant manufacturers because all these characters sure seem like they’re going to need them.)

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the bodies that Meredith and Alex saw lying across the darkened, rain-soaked road after the broken-down ambulance they’d been in with the baby was struck by another vehicle. Were those dead bodies also supposed to be a metaphor of some kind, or were they just extraneous carnage in the context of an overall tragic episode?

Lastly, there was Cristina, who likes to walk around pretending as though she’s unfazed by patients’ stories, that she just likes to cut and not bother dealing with all that messy emotional stuff. But we know better. We watched her struggle all last season with her paralyzing fear and her post-traumatic stress in the wake of the mass shooting. We saw Cristina acting practically catatonic. We laughed as she “tended” bar (very badly at that). We witnessed her mentally check-out, vowing not to return to surgery, never mind to being the “hardcore” Cristina she’d been before the shooting. Then, finally, she healed and got her groove back, only to have her colleagues trick her into operating on her mentor’s husband who died on the table, through no fault of Cristina’s.

The grief that Cristina wore on her face — Sandra Oh was magnificent — the emotional reaction she had to learning that the man on the table was Teddy’s husband, was loud, even without hearing her utter a single word. This, I predict, will not be something from which Cristina will effortlessly just bounce back. She’s been through too much.

How about you guys, any thoughts on this swan song episode of 2011?

Clacked by Meredith O'Brien
on Nov 11, 2011 @ 13:46 EST5EDT