Episode Report Card Lauren S: B+ | 1 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Ashes To Ashes
By Lauren S | Season 4 | Episode 5 | Aired on 10.24.2007
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.It's Halloween, which I expected to be an excuse for a super-gimmicky hour, but which turned out to be the backdrop for a great episode. I know! Bailey is extremely excited for the carnage that's going to come in from Seattle's chainsaw pumpkin-carving contest, which she tells the residents with glee as she and Callie address them in the morning. Callie manages to steal the show, however, by announcing to all and sundry that Izzie and George have been sleeping together. It would have been worth it just to not have this giant tortured secret storyline any more, but there was more than just that to enjoy. Alex gets a surprise visit from Ava, and they put off talking about their relationship by having sex in the on-call room. He's finally pulled away by a page -- Norm, who had been complaining all day of not feeling well, collapsed while assisting with a surgery from what turned out to be a massive stroke. Thankfully, Derek was there to work his magic and remove the clot from his brain, so Norm will be fine when he changes his course from surgery to psych. When Alex goes back to his love nest, he finds Ava gone and just her shirt to comfort him. Which fails to answer the question -- just what did she wear to leave the hospital?
Meredith feels her mother's ashes are haunting her, so she brings them to work, which unsurprisingly creeps out all of her co-workers. She meets a little boy who literally has no ears and asks her and Sloane to do a pro bono surgery to make some for him. Sloane agrees to do it if Meredith can drum up the OR and all the personnel they'll need, so she and the boy go trick-or-treating for ears. It totally works, and when he wakes up after surgery, he advises Mere to send her mom's ashes back to the sea rather than leaving them in her cubby. Between that and a nice moment between Mere and Lexie, she realizes her mom was happiest in the hospital, and washes her ashes down the drain in the scrub room of an OR. Richard comes across her doing so and helps out, which is for him the last task of a big day that involves admitting Adele filed for divorce, and looking for a place to live. Cristina agrees to rent him Burke's apartment, but then takes it back at the end of the day when she finds out he hired Dr. Hahn to replace Burke. She's a little bent out of shape since Hahn arrived that morning to do a heart transplant and accused Cristina of sleeping with her mentors to get ahead. Instead, she ends up inviting Callie to be her new roommate since they wound up bonding over their failed relationships. All in all, it actually had the feel of Grey's of yore, when it used to be a good show, and when you throw in Izzie getting shunned by Cristina for the affair…well, that's just icing on the Halloween cake. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
I'm giving up on these far-reaching previouslys. I mean, really? Meredith's mom died? I think we all remember that, right?
From the strange camera effects, lighting, and white scrubs, we can tell that Meredith is having a dream where she's walking down a hospital hallway, and as she walks there are flashbacks to her and Derek's difficulties. "Pick me. Choose me. Love me." Derek pulls her out of the bathtub. Derek pulls her out of Puget Sound. And finally him telling her that she's constantly leaving him. It's like having an extra "previously on" segment, just in case there wasn't anything they fit in the first time. DreamMere just keeps eerily walking down the hall. Her mother joins the Painful Flashback Fun by telling her how disappointed she is that Meredith is only ordinary. This is definitely not a good dream. As she walks into the Dream Morgue, her voice-over narrates. "There's a reason surgeons like to wield scalpels. We like to pretend we're hard, cold scientists. We like to pretend we're fearless." Illustrating the "hard, cold" part, she opens a door and pulls out a tray with her own body on it, grey except for auburn hair and blue eyes that open as she tells herself, "Pick me. Choose me. Love me." At that, Living Mere wakes up with a jolt. And her VO, nicely concise this week, ends, "But the truth is, we become surgeons because somewhere, deep down, we think we can cut away that which haunts us." Her own cutting away begins with Mere digging manically through her closet.
Downstairs, Alex is carving a pumpkin (helloooo again, black tank top and delicious arms) and Izzie is baking. Neither of them could sleep either. Mere VO ends as she tells us what can haunt us. "Weakness. Frailty. Death." Izzie looks up in time to see Meredith grab a baggie and upend the urn into it. She asks what it is, and Meredith simply replies, "My mother." Alex looks incredibly repulsed, and announces, "Happy freakin' Halloween."
At the hospital, Cristina takes a look at the bulletin board, removes the flyer advertising "adorable kittens" for adoption, and puts up an "apartment for rent" flyer. I did a little slo-mo on the DVR to catch the price -- $1800/month, for those who are curious to compare to their own rental markets. Richard sees her and notes that she's moving out of Burke's place, which is a good segue into mentioning that Adele has filed for divorce and he's looking for a place to live, and that he saw Burke's once and thought it was nice. When he catches himself and calls it her apartment, Cristina tells him he was right the first time. She then rips down the flyer and hands it to him, telling him that now it's his place, which seems to please him.
She then heads into the locker room, where everyone sits spellbound, watching Meredith fiddle with the bag of ashes. Cristina, not present at Insomniacs Anonymous, asks what's up, and Izzie explains that Meredith put her mom in a baggie and brought her to work. Meredith defends herself, explaining, "I had to get her out of my closet. She was haunting me." Alex adds, "And now she's haunting us all." Meredith calls it putting her mother to rest, and Sydney explains that she's cleansing. "In tribal culture, when one wants to cleanse the past, one cuts off all one's hair and buries it in the earth. You might try that too!" She looks much less put together and much more haggard than usual, despite the trademark peppiness. But it's actually not a bad thing -- it makes her look more like an actual doctor than ever before. Callie and Bailey then come in for morning announcements. Callie talks about all the crazies that will be coming in on account of it being a holiday, and Bailey excitedly adds that today is Seattle's famous Chainsaw Pumpkin Carving Contest. She's wiggling like an excited puppy as she adds, "I love this city." Callie dismisses them, but Izzie calls out a question about rounds. She's told to direct her questions to Bailey, and after some confusion Callie specifies that only Izzie will be directing her questions to Bailey. When Bailey asks why this is, Callie replies, "Because she's been sleeping with my husband." To the slack-jawed faces staring at her, Callie adds, "All righty then. Have a good day," and leaves. Everyone directs said slack jaws in Izzie's direction; she gives a nervous laugh and bolts through another door. Cristina tells Meredith, "This is even more disturbing than your bag full of Mommy." Oh, she doesn't even know the half of it, either.