Episode Report Card 51 USERS: B+ YOU GRADE IT We Want Post-Nup!
By Lauren S | Season 10 | Episode 16 | Aired on 03.20.2014
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.On the downside, Arizona is hardly in the episode at all. Upside, that gives her less time to do horrible, awkward things that make Callie yell. Luckily, Callie still has Derek to yell at: She threatens a lawsuit if he doesn't give her back her interest in their sensors that he sold to the government. After a terrifically insightful read on his character -- essentially that, as a god, he has never answered to anyone before now, with the White House -- he agrees, and demonstrates his grace with a Post-It once again, sticking the word BULLIES with a line through it on the monitor to keep them both brave as they eventually win a standoff with that mean Skype man that always yells at him. Their research will continue, and the devices are no longer proprietary.
Richard's birthday begins the episode, as he arrives to the inexplicable dick move of Owen handing him a brochure about retirement and suggesting they lessen his surgical hours. When a formerly uninsured American comes in with strange pains, Internal Medicine is excited to find he has an absorbed twin, and Bailey gives Webber the surgery. It's nice because Bailey, Meredith and Richard are such a sweet little family, and also because he does the typical thing of overidentifying with the patient and deciding that if the guy wants to keep his fetus from inside his body in a jar, obviously he should do that.
The guy eventually rejects the curiosity once they get it out of him, hilariously, and a still-mopey Webber is urged to keep working by Catherine Avery before she adorably tricks him into his surprise party, where everybody shows him love and Owen explains his plan to put Richard in charge of the Residency program, because he is the greatest teacher of the whole hospital. If you're counting, that's several happy endings so far.
Ross brings a patient to Yang's study that is not qualified for her study, and both he and the patient spend the entire episode refusing to comprehend that fact, and it's fairly obnoxious. She has a baby, and probably she will die of her heart defect, which is a problem and very sad -- and, dumbly, why she got knocked up in the first place -- but what is not actually a problem is not getting into a study that you don't qualify for, even if you are played by the lovely and talented Keke Palmer. Luckily, Yang doesn't give a shit about this girl's problems either way, because she is Yang.
What Cristina does have time for is -- in preparation for her big Sliding Doors thing next week -- trying to lock down an internet girlfriend for Owen, to square everything away. There's a touching scene where he describes his perfect girlfriend, who is Yang obviously, and at the end of the episode he asks her to hook up some more, so I guess he's going to swing for the fences one more time on that one. One thing women really like is when you ignore what they're explicitly telling you, over and over, because of your dumb romantic ideas that are more important than their personhood. Just ask Burke.
Stephanie meets a cute and funny scientist who is studying Meredith's printer, who makes Meredith very grumpy because Meredith is still trying to figure out the difference between "passive" and "aggressive" lately, when it comes to everybody on the show doing medical studies at the same time. Eventually, because of Webber's thing with the Dark Half guy, she realizes she's letting her printer love get dark and twisty down in the basement, and joins the two down there to make friends with the printer again.
Oh, and then another happy ending also: Jo throws one of her Oliver Twist fits about being "in the system" and how growing up "in the system" makes you afraid of signing documents -- even Love Contracts with Alex -- because then you are "in the system" and whatever, but then eventually she signs it and they make out, because a piece of paper does not stop either of them from being hot, which is really the important thing.
But my favorite part of the episode, weirdly, is the Kepner stuff. Catherine Avery comes after her ass hardcore with a post-nup, which April smartly redirects by seeing that Catherine's real problem is that Jackson cut her out of his wedding, which if you think about it is kind of a Doomsday scenario for that lady. (April works her ass so well, it's amazing how great her whole down-home "apologize to your mother" thing goes over. Not surprising, just a joy to watch.) But Catherine also goes after April on the thing that is both the worst and the best thing about her, her faith, and brings up a lot of questions about how their kids will be raised.
Of course it's obligatory with elopements that you have this "Are we in fact Dharma and Greg" kind of storyline, but it's a fresh trick on it because of the particulars: Kepner is a homeschooled lunatic from the prairie, and Avery is a boarding-school Richie Rich who started sitting in on Avery Foundation board meetings when he was fifteen. April is personally anti-choice, of course, while her husband and eventually children have to be agnostic about those matters because of what their family and foundation do. And will the kids be Christian or what? I like these questions, I like thinking about raising babies, and I like what the crux ends up pinned on: April's weird idea of how families work vs. Catherine's very weird idea of how families work.
And I hate to say it, but I also kind of like that it -- being the messiest problem, in real-life terms -- meant the only not-entirely-happy ending of the episode, which was so buoyant and comforting and un-Grey's in some ways that I fully expected a plane to crash through the restaurant at the end during Richard's birthday party, killing everybody, like usually happens. But instead, no. They get to be happy -- even Meredith and Callie got to be happy this week, which is rare this season -- and Richard is at this transitional place in his life, where the boundless exuberance of Catherine could either set him free or possibly drive him off a cliff, and that's a neat place to end on.
(I also liked how Catherine said, "Pretend to be surprised!" right before pushing him into the room, because it was cute and weird -- he would have been surprised -- but also cracked me up, because what if instead she had said, "Pretend to be shocked!")
Anyway, Lauren's back for the recap later in the week, but thank you for letting me talk about my favorite TV show for a minute. Next week is Cristina's big thing, which is beyond exciting. -- Jacob Clifton
Want more? The full recap starts right below!First of all, a huge thanks to Al and Jacob for emergency subbing for me this week when I came down with the worst stomach flu I've had since I was a child. As I lay there getting my IV fluids and meds and generally being pathetic, I was totally eavesdropping on all of the nurses and I must say, their conversations were incredibly boring and only related to things like work or Girl Scout cookies. Does this mean that everything we've been sold on this show about the non-stop saucy, sex-at-work lives of doctors and nurses has been a LIE??
Richard arrives at work to lots of happy birthday wishes from Bailey, Arizona and Owen, though he figures Owen didn't remember and is just faking it because he heard the others say it. Owen then tells Richard he wants to talk later regarding Richard's surgical schedule. Owen seems nervous, but Richard knows Catherine is coming to town and assumes all of this is a cover for a surprise party, seemingly forgetting that Catherine might also have other business to attend to as well, namely, her son's elopement. But Owen tells Richard that he really does want to talk, and then hands over a package which contains a retirement proposal pamphlet. Richard's good birthday mood is immediately washed away, while Mere tells us that the toughest stage of childbirth is the "Transition Stage," where you're exhausted and been pushing forever with nothing to show for it yet.
Mere appears to have found her bioengineer, a cute young guy named Eric who helpfully exposits that he beat out 100 other engineers for the position. The only problem is that Mere doesn't actually want to let him get his hands on the printer and informs him that all he'll be doing to start is reading every word of their research thus far. She's so serious that he not touch her baby that she assigns Stephanie the boring task of watching him read while she continues to voiceover about the frustration of childbirth.
Because this season is All About Research, Cristina's conduit project is full steam ahead and Smash is interviewing prospective subjects -- or rather, their parents, since their test subjects will be children. Cristina is in another room only looking at scans of the kids' hearts because she wants to make a totally unbiased decision on who gets to participate without any messy outside factors like emotions or relationships getting in the way. Owen comes in to see how it's all going and she starts musing about finding him a new girlfriend and figures there must be some scientific way to find him the perfect mate, where she could just punch in a bunch of criteria and choose from the results to find him the ideal woman. It takes Owen to point out that she's describing online dating, and he assures her that he needs nothing of the sort.