Episode Report Card Joe R: B | 1 USERS: B YOU GRADE IT Once More With Healing
By Joe R | Season 7 | Episode 18 | Aired on 03.31.2011
Here's the other thing about this episode: Sara Ramirez is an insanely awesome singer. Tony-award-winner, all that. She got her job on this show because of that Tony-award-winning performance. And she's been an invaluable part of the show. But -- and this could just be me -- this show has rarely done right by Callie, sticking her in stupid storyline after stupid storyline, cutting off her relationships at the knees, half-assing her lesbian transition by keeping her glued to Mark Sloan's penis at all times. This is a beyond-talented woman who's so rarely been allowed to show the entire breadth of that talent. If this episode is the show's way of making all this up to Sara Ramirez, I am totally fine with that.
After the title card, it's Meredith's job to find Sloan and tell him about Callie's accident -- though he's so much his usual self, boasting like crazy after a surgery, that it takes her a minute to get a word in. Cut to Sloan and Meredith running out to the ambulance bay where the rest of the cast is waiting for Callie to arrive. He gets into a big argument with the Chief about whether he's going to take part in whatever they're going to need to do to save Callie; Mark's belligerent about it, but Chief makes him see reason, begrudgingly. The ambulance arrives, and Arizona is blasting out medical jargon from the second the doors open. Hunt -- who appears to be taking the lead position here -- tries to tell Callie that everything is going to be okay, but all Callie can do is mutter something about "music." She sees herself across the bay, where our first performance is about to begin.
Song: "Chasing Cars"
Original Artist: Snow Patrol
Performed by: Callie, Owen, Bailey
Most Portentous Lyric: "If I lay here ... if I just lay here..."
Here's something to know about me: I don't hate the genre of Grey's Anatomy music. Not all of it, anyway, and not in a kneejerk way. I had to take "Chasing Cars" out of my iPod shuffle rotation because I'd heard it too many damn places, but hearing it back now, after a few years of exile? It's pretty for my ears. And I will say, despite the obnoxiousness of this episode's self-congratulatory credit-taking for having used these songs in the past, it does give things an eerie, ethereal air -- like these songs have been swirling around Seattle Grace for years, unheard by anyone who isn't out-of-bodying it at the moment -- that's pretty effective.