Episode Report Card Lauren S: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Disappearing Act
By Lauren S | Season 3 | Episode 15 | Aired on 02.07.2007
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.The GREY'S ANATOMY EVENT day starts off with everyone kind of moping and/or on edge for various personal reasons, and the only ones who seem to be happy are George, who is loving marriage, and Cristina, who is excited to tell Meredith her news. She never gets a chance, though, since Mere is busy being upset, and then Bailey and the interns minus Cristina are sent into the field to the mass casualty incident. That turns out to be a ferry (boat) accident and the scene is chaos. They immediately spread out and each get their own patients -- George finds a woman with a gaping wound looking for her son and convinces her he'll find the boy if she'll just get treatment; Izzie goes down below to help a man crushed under a car, whose friends don't do much more than yell at her to help him without actually doing anything useful; Alex lifts a concrete pylon off of a pregnant woman; and Meredith finds a lost little girl who is silent and completely unemotional and would be better placed creeping people out a horror movie, and who won't leave her side. Nothing much gets solved in the hour, as it ends with everyone's patients either going into surgery or still pinned beneath vehicles. The biggest question, however, is what's going to happen to Meredith. While treating a patient, she falls off the dock and into the ocean, and only creepy silent girl saw her fall, and seems fairly unconcerned about it. I certainly hope Mere can hold her breath longer than she could last week in toxic blood girl's operating room, because it looks like it's going to be a while before anyone realizes she's gone. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Previously on Grey's Anatomy, Burke and Cristina got engaged, George and Callie got married, Richard and Adele are getting a divorce, Alex claims to not be interested in Addison, and Meredith had the worst mother in the world, who used her few moments of lucidity to berate everything about her daughter.
Mere sits in her gorgeous claw-foot bathtub, contemplating this week's narration. "Disappearances happen in science. Disease can suddenly fade away. Tumors go missing. We open someone up to discover the cancer is..." (At this point my DVR decided to skip a moment and make a pleasing sound like a record scratch that sent the cats running underneath the bed, but I'm going to assume the word I missed is "gone.") "It's unexplained, it's rare, but it happens. We call it misdiagnosis. Say we never saw it in the first place. Any explanation but the truth. That life is full of vanishing acts." With that, she pulls her own, sliding completely under the water. "If something that we didn't know we had disappears, do we miss it?" If an intern drowns herself in the tub, will we notice? She stares up through the water at the ceiling, and then Derek walks in, staring at the tub. He calls her name and gets no response, and the shot changes again to Meredith's point of view as he leans over and sees her, then grabs her arms and pulls her up. She looks stunned, and he asks what exactly she was doing.
The camera pans around George's empty room and stripped bed. Izzie's hanging out, leaning against the doorway with a coffee cup and staring sadly at the room. Mere and Derek come arguing down the hallway, she insisting she was just taking a bath (and maybe doing some breath-holding exercises in case another patient with toxic blood is admitted? Come on, Mere, you can think up a better excuse than that) while he argues it wasn't just a bath. He mentions her mother, and she cuts him off, but he forges ahead, pointing out that her mom was awake and said some awful things and is now gone again. Meredith tries to insist everything is back to normal, but it's quite obvious that she's a gigantic mess. Derek mentions that Ellis' heart surgery is that day. He puts his hands on her face and asks sweetly if he should ask the chief to give her the day off. I guess they have triage training that day, but he could probably get her out of it. Hmm, triage. We haven't seen them have to really put that system to use yet, I wonder if that might be pertinent down the line sometime. Meredith is aggravated, and instead of thanking him, she insists she doesn't' need rescuing, while he begs to differ. She asserts, "I'm a surgeon. I do the rescuing. You are not my knight in shining... whatever." She continues to pick a fight with him, but he seems to have recovered from the dressing-down Ellis gave him the day before and insists he's not going anywhere. "This is the happ[il]y ever after part. And in the happ[il]y ever after part, the guy is there all the time, saying things. And the girls love it." Instead of pausing to consider that once again, he's proving he's going to stick around through her very many different moods, she sends him to work. He leaves but insists, "Just for the record, I am your knight in shining whatever." Her knight in shiny, McDreamy flowing locks.