If there is one thing we know about Grey's Anatomy, it's that they like to make their catastrophes BIG. And this season premiere is no exception, as a sinkhole the size of half a football field opens up in a Seattle street and swallows a married couple, Danny and Susannah (as well as a bunch of other folks), who had been bitterly fighting right before the ground swallowed them whole. Susannah winds up pinned under her car, unconscious, and the only way to get her out is to amputate her leg. Owen and Callie are called to the scene but it's too dangerous to send them down below, so they are to talk this poor dude through cutting off his wife's leg. Danny does an admirable job and makes it to the bone before melting down, so Owen goes in and finishes the job, and they all make it to the hospital.
Meredith and Cristina are living together and seem to have fallen into a pattern of taking care of Zola. Their men, meanwhile, are working together on Derek's house and telling each other they don't care about the women. I actually kind of believe Derek, but not Owen. Derek's still livid and it makes him even pettier than usual as he refuses to even speak to or look at his wife once they get to work and she hands over their daughter. Meredith's day doesn't get any better when Richard calls her in and tells her that the Board ordered him to fire her. When Cristina finds out, she wants Meredith to come up with plan; when Meredith finally decides her plan is to try just being a mom, Cristina thinks she is joking. Cristina, despite Teddy having finally taken her back on to her service, is having her own hard day as she hasn't yet terminated the pregnancy, but has it scheduled for that evening. She's still torn up inside and heartbroken about her crumbled relationship, but Owen won't even take her calls so he has no idea she hasn't gone through with it yet. At the end of her own crappy day, Meredith can't handle it anymore and orders Owen to at least talk to his wife: she tells him that the termination hasn't yet happened yet but implores him to try and understand Cristina. She has a unique perspective, as the child of a career-driven surgeon who never wanted a child.
Meredith's outburst also has to do with the stress of having run into Janet, who is finishing up the home study so Zola can become a permanent Grey-Shepherd. Because Meredith is a horrible liar, Janet can tell something is wrong. She also asks Derek some questions, and Derek blows his lid with Meredith for possibly screwing up the adoption. Meredith also neglected to mention her firing, so when Janet finds out she starts to make some very worried noises. Mere says she's going to get Derek so that they can all talk about it together, but instead she grabs Zola from the nursery and sneaks out of the hospital.
Finally, everybody except for Arizona hates Alex, a new batch of interns has arrived, and it's April's first day as Chief Resident. She's predictably ineffective since no one will listen to anything she says, but things reach a boiling point when there's a mix-up and Bailey and Lexie almost end up operating on the wrong patient. Bailey, tired of watching this parade of ineptitude, has been saying all day they need a "Gunther," what- or whoever that might be. She finally calls all of the residents together and storms around the ER, checking out different patients' charts looking for some unknown until she finds Callie working on Susannah and declares that she's finally got their Gunther.
Welcome to season 8, dear readers! I hope everyone had a good summer -- I spent mine moving from one coast to the other, so now I watch Grey's three hours earlier than I used to. I live in the FUTURE. Because of everything that went on with my summer, when this episode started with Mackenzie Astin eating a bowl of cereal I had a moment where I worried that I had completely forgotten some new character already. I mean, it seemed a little weird for the opening shot to be of some random new guy. His name is Danny, and his wife Susannah walks into the room and they bicker about his not buying groceries. It seems that Danny is out of work. Once I realized that I wasn't suffering memory loss and that these really were two random people I expected something horrible to befall one or both of them, but they just argue and Meredith starts her voiceover about good marriages that fail: one minute you're on solid ground, and the you are not.
At the Broken Home for Wayward Doctors, Zola starts to cry and Mere jumps right out of bed, saying she'll get the bottle while her bedmate changes Zola's diaper. Her bedmate isn't her husband, though -- it's Cristina, and the two of them seem to have their system pretty down pat so it's unclear how long this has been going on. Mere voiceovers about how there are always two versions of the story of a breakup: yours and theirs.
Speaking of "theirs," Derek and Owen are doing some kind of stonework at Derek's house. I think maybe he's building a big backyard grill? Which might make more sense if he'd made any more headway on getting actual walls put up in the actual house first? Derek asks Owen how Meredith is doing but Owen hasn't actually spoken to his own wife and insists he doesn't care. Make a note of the moment when Derek asked that question, because it will be the only moment that he seems to genuinely be concerned even a tiny smidgen how Meredith is actually doing. Owen asks, too quickly, if Derek wants him to ask but Derek says he doesn't care, and while Owen is clearly trying to convince himself of his hardened feelings, Derek seems to mean it quite honestly.
With the sound of Zola's crying come from the room, a sweaty and naked Lexie gives up on the sex she was trying to have, insisting she can't do it with a baby from a broken home in the room. I like the idea that she could totally do it if Meredith and Derek were still getting along, though. She and her kicky new bangs fall back into bed beside Jackson. He's got no problems with crying children and manages to use his sexy voice and gorgeous eyes to convince Lexie it's just the two of them and they get back down to business.
Alex wakes up to an alarm but since he was kicked out of Mere's house at the end of last season, he now seems to be living in the hospital. (Again.) Not only that, he's sharing a room with an actual patient, who snores more than Alex would like. Man, when I was in the hospital no one that looked like that was sleeping in the second bed in my room, which I find to be a great pity.
Arizona and Callie arrive at work with the always-cute Sofia, and they run into Teddy who is extra gooey about how cute the baby is. Callie raises her eyebrows at this full-baby-talk Teddy and Arizona has to explain that Teddy is having sex now, so she's unnaturally happy. They all turn around when Lexie leads a group of brand-new interns down the stairs and while Callie gripes that she hates them, Teddy tells Sofia that she loves them, because they are the future, and full of promise. Even Arizona thinks this is veering into insanity and she remarks that the sex with Henry must be phenomenal. Teddy declares it's, "earth-shattering." Arizona covers Sofia's ears for "earth-shattering" but she says "sex" into her small daughter's ear nice and clearly. She might want to work on her timing for when Sofia actually starts remembering things, and especially when she reaches the fun, "repeating everything adults say" phase. I imagine that in this hospital, that could get especially risqué for a toddler. (But comedy gold for television!)
It seems to not be that long after the events of the season finale -- I'm guessing maybe a few weeks? April is practicing her Welcome from Your Chief Resident speech that she'll be delivering at some breakfast function. Unfortunately for her it sounds like the main draw for this breakfast is the rumored omelet station rather than her speech. I ask you, though, who doesn't love an omelet station? That's going to win out over most anything, really.
Mere and Cristina arrive at work with Zola and of course are laughing and happy while their estranged husbands are conveniently right there to witness the happy display. Seeing Cristina kiss a baby is way too much for Owen, who immediately takes off; Cristina sees him leave and she herself deflates and heads off the other way. Derek walks up and looks only at Zola as Mere hands her over and updates him that she slept through the night. She wants to talk but he makes a point of not once looking at her and just leaves to spend time with their daughter before he takes her to daycare. And now Meredith is unhappy too. Someone is going to have to make up with someone else or this is going to be a very long season watching all of the wounded glares everyone is constantly shooting at one another.
Danny and Susannah head out to their car, still arguing about his lack of employment and what she thinks is him not working hard enough to find a new job. But the scene ends with neither of them having any sort of catastrophic medical incident, though it surely must be coming. For some reason, they really want us to get to know and like these too, though they're trying really hard to make Susannah especially seem like a shrew.
Once at the omelet station breakfast, April gets up on a stool to make her speech but not a single person in the room listens to her as she welcomes them into their fifth and last year of residency. The breakfast seems designed for residents to mingle with the attendings and ask questions, get advice, etc. But there's a giant pan of free bacon, so it's understandable that no one is thinking about their career right now. A frustrated April sees Bailey and walks over to ask her how she does it. Bailey gives her a full tutorial on how to make the perfect breakfast sandwich (the secret is in not one, but two layers of bacon, and is now yet another reason that Bailey is the most awesome person in this hospital -- not only can she operate and put people in their place, but she can assemble a McMuffin like pro) and when April tries to get her back onto the subject of controlling her peers, Bailey shuts her right down so that she can eat in peace. Mere arrives and she and Cristina compare notes on their crappy mornings -- this which really is just a way to run down what's going on for anyone who missed the finale. (Mere messed up Derek's clinical trial and he can't forgive even though she did it for Adele; she regrets messing up the trial but doesn't regret her actions. Cristina is pregnant and wants an abortion and Owen can't forgive her for that and so he's ignoring her blah blah blah relationship discord-cakes.) The one interesting new piece of information to come out of the conversation is that Cristina hasn't actually had the abortion yet, but Owen doesn't know this on account of the ignoring. Mere asks if she's really going to do it and implies that they have been there and not actually gone through with it at least once before; Cristina asserts that she's keeping her appointment at 6 that evening. She then sees Teddy walk in and excuses herself to go suck up to her former mentor.
Jackson also has to fight for his place with his would-be attending -- he wants to work with Mark, but Mark thinks Jackson isn't good enough for the lucky role as Mark's protégé. Jackson rightly guesses that this is more about Lexie and less about his supposed ineptitude but Mark denies it. Of course, Mark undermines himself just a tad by then making it totally about Lexie again and finally asking how she is doing. Finally, a fed-up Jackson just walks away. Can we get a rule that he not wear a lab coat when he walks away? It obstructs the nice view.
When Cristina walks up to Teddy, Teddy moans, "Oh God, what's she doing here." Cristina is taken aback but Teddy turns back into the sexed-up, perky version of herself that we saw earlier and guesses that's what Cristina is thinking. She explains to a speechless Cristina that she's in a happy place now and over the drama, so if Cristina wants to learn, she wants to teach. Cristina is stunned and skeptical, but she says she does and Teddy lets out a chipper, "Yay!" before heading off.
Arizona is trying to take the purpose of the breakfast seriously, and is harshing Alex's omelet bar buzz as she hounds him about doing more if he wants to win the pediatrics fellowship. He's coasting on bringing over all of the African kids for surgery but Arizona suggests he publish about it if he wants to keep up with the other resumes she's already getting. She claims to not want to kick him while he's down, but reminds him that everyone else hates him for narcing on a fellow surgeon. Has this slightly-forced backstory-feeding happened in season premieres and I just didn't realize it? Or were there previously-ons? Because it's almost comical how everyone at this breakfast is having those conversations only had on television, where they rehash every single detail that normally all of the participants in a conversation would know so that the audience can catch up with everything. Alex, I'm sure, remembers very clearly that he told on Meredith for tampering with the trial and that now everyone hates him. She also exposits that he's living at the hospital and consequently looks and smells like a bum. Alex did probably need to be told that, and he at least looks a bit ashamed about his nasty breath. The Chief walks in and April starts dancing about like a puppy, asking him to share some words. Distractedly, he tells everyone to keep doing what they are doing and not kill anyone. He then sees Mere and calls her to his office. With everyone already gathered in the cafeteria to witness this, it feels even more like high school than this show normally does, with Meredith getting called to the principal's office.
Danny and Susannah. Still driving. Still fighting. They fight about the big wedding that had that took all of their savings, and Danny points out that it wasn't his decision but was just between Susannah and her mother. This appears to be finally way over her personal line, and she yells at Danny to stop the car. Still no accident. And I just don't care about their wedding, sorry.
In Richard's office, Meredith guesses that Derek is refusing to work with her. So maybe no time at all has passed? Wouldn't this have come up already? Regardless, that's not why she was called there. Richard tells her that the Board had a meeting that morning and thought that Richard's suspending Meredith wasn't nearly enough punishment for someone who so disgraced the hospital. Which is totally true, but yet given everything everyone gets away with on this show it wasn't going to be super surprising if Mere got off with a wrist slap. Meredith somehow doesn't get his point so he has to come out and point-blank tell her that he's very sorry, but she's fired effective immediately.
Danny and Susannah. Yet more fighting. It's hard enough watching characters in whom we are invested fight this much -- I need something horrible to happen to these guys, stat, if they are going to stay on my TV screen any longer. She is demanding that he stop the car and he yells at her that if she gets out that's it, and they are done. She gets out and stands near the front of the car, and then after a brief rumble she disappears out of view. Danny jumps out of the car to see what happened to her and he falls too, into a giant sinkhole that has opened up beneath them. Because this is TV -- and not just any TV, but Grey's Anatomy -- it's not enough to just have them fall into a suddenly-formed crater formed in a city street. No, after a moment, their car tips into the hole and finally falls in on top of them. Mere repeats the idea that one moment you can be on solid ground and then suddenly you're not. We're going super extra literal for the launch of season 8, it seems. We go to the white title screen which now includes, "Created by Shonda Rhimes."
Word of the sinkhole has made it to the hospital and Owen and Callie are gearing up to go perform an on-site amputation while the others prepare to receive tons of injured people. I'm thinking that we are just a couple weeks removed from the season finale, which means that we are just a couple of weeks since a plane crashed nearby. This is not working as a very good sales pitch for living in Seattle. Owen leaves April in charge. Mere then comes out and Cristina starts talking to her about all the head wounds that will surely be arriving but Mere angrily announces that she was fired. Alex is rewarded with a lot of pointed dirty looks at the news, but Cristina can't settle for just looks and starts punching and screaming at him. Bailey yells at April to break it up but she's of course totally ineffective, so Bailey finally grabs Cristina by the scruff of her neck and pulls her away. Alex decides to go out to the accident scene, totally ignoring April's squeaky protests that she didn't give him permission to do so. Hey April, remember when you turned out to be awesome at running traumas? Yeah, I barely do either. But let's call on some of those reserves so we don't have to suffer through more April-is-useless storylines. When an ambulance pulls up Meredith instinctively joins the other docs around the patients but Bailey shoos her away. After everyone has gone inside, Meredith is left standing alone, so very alone, in the ambulance bay. It's all so meaningful as the camera pans back and the only company she has is the flashing ambulance light. I think there's actually a chapter in the great Medical Show Bible that says that says that the best way to convey loneliness/a sense of being lost is to pan back slowly as touching music plays over a character standing alone in the ambulance bay.
Out at the scene, there is an awesome extra who is super excited for his shot at time on-camera, making grand, "Oh my gosh, what is this chaos?" gestures towards the sinkhole. That guy is SELLING it. Callie and Owen meet Karen, who is in charge of search and rescue. Danny has a slight head injury and a dodgy ankle but seems to be generally okay, and they would normally bring him up but he's refusing to leave Susannah. She's the amputation in question since her leg is trapped under their car. They all walk up to the barricades to view this sinkhole that is seriously not fucking around. It's about the size of half of a football field, and has gone so far as to take the edge of a building down with it. It reminds me of those chalk paintings that make their way around the internet via email forwards every so often -- the amazing ones that look totally 3D but are really just chalk on a flat sidewalk. (Those are a bit more realistic.) (Sorry, show -- this looks really amazing too! But there's just a bit of an unreal sheen to it that makes me imagine the actors all looking really worriedly at a green screen.)
April is directing people in the ER as paramedics are bringing in lots of dirty, bloody patients. Bailey asks her for a resident that isn't a newbie and April is totally befuddled when she sees that Bailey had been originally assigned Meredith for the day. She tries to call after some of the others but no one accepts her orders, and Bailey is not amused by the staggering display of meekness which she is witnessing. She looks around and sees Lexie, who she informs is now on her service. April looks stunned that it was that easy; she's clearly in over her head. Again.
Karen pulls a monitor around and Callie and Owen can now see Danny, who is talking with the emergency personnel via a camera and microphone. They've got him in a harness so that once he does agree to leave, they can pull him right up. The docs put on headsets so that they can talk to him and Owen stays very calm as he asks Danny to read some numbers off of the monitor that they sent down. The readings are bad but the most obvious sign that Susannah isn't doing well is the fact that she's now unconscious. Owen wants to go right down there but Karen drops a bomb -- it's too unstable to lower the docs into the hole, so they were actually called there to talk Danny through amputating his own wife's leg. Owen and Callie just stare dumbly at the screen as Danny pleads for help.
Teddy is watching as Cristina puts a chest tube in a patient and asks her why she's doing what she's doing. Cristina is immediately worried that she's doing something wrong and can't seem to comprehend that Teddy just wants her to walk through her thinking as if she is a newbie herself. Every time Teddy asks her something she sounds more like a toddler, asking back, "Why?" Teddy insists she just wants to make sure that Cristina has a solid medical foundation, and Cristina just continues to act like Teddy is speaking a foreign language.
Derek has been in surgery but runs out of the OR to answer a page from Meredith, thinking something happened to Zola. Meredith immediately assures him that the baby is fine, and it's about her. Derek, though, has no time for the frivolous concerns of the woman who he has known for years, been through numerous giant ups and down with, and whom he just finally married so that they could have a child together. He tries to walk away so Meredith has to announce that she got fired. Derek finally looks at his wife and helpfully sneers, "What did you think was going to happen?" This is win-win for Derek: the person who ruined his trial is adequately punished while he still gets to play the poor, wronged husband with an immoral wife. He walks off in a huff like he does so perfectly. Remember those five minutes last season when I finally stopped hating Derek? I miss those minutes. Now he's back to being the Brandon Walsh of this show -- insufferably condescending and only seeing things in black and white.
The doctors tell Danny they are going to talk him through everything and he seems game, but it seems like maybe they haven't told him exactly what it is that they are going to be talking him through just yet. He opens the box of supplies that they have sent down and when he sees a box full of scalpels and saws, he gets it and understandably starts to panic. Owen stays calm and assures him he can do it, finally telling him point blank that the only way to get them both up to the surface is if he amputates Susannah's leg.
Callie has told Alex that he has to go back to the hospital, but Alex takes the long way, wandering through triage hoping to find someone who needs help. He finally sees some paramedics loading up a guy and concedes defeat, walking up to them for a lift back. But then he sees that the patient has a number of Silly Bandz on his fingers and realizes that the guy must have a kid. And yes, I did know that "Bandz" ends with a z. Why can I not remember someone's name ten seconds after I've met them but I have a spot in my head that remembers not only the name of these little things, but that they are inexplicably misspelled?
Alex runs over to where the guy was found and starts looking around to see if he notices anything that might lead him to a child. He then sees a hand sticking up out of the dirt and runs towards it and starts to dig. A HAND. I get that this situation is chaotic and that the kid's poor little appendage was covered in dirt and not totally easy to spot, but at the same time, it was A HUMAN HAND. Well, kudos to Alex for finding him but shame on literally every single other person with eyes who is at the scene.
Owen runs over to help Alex, and they get the kid partially dug out but he's not breathing so Alex starts mouth to mouth.
So, if I heard the words "fired effective immediately," I would probably assume this meant, well, "immediately." If a doctor is fired immediately, are they even allowed to hang around afterward, must less in scrubs? This seems rather like flirting with disaster. And it proves to be so, as Meredith is still in her scrubs, finishing up her charts (okay, so that part is responsible of her, I guess) while hanging out in what appears to be a patient's room. With a patient in it. I don't believe this scenario for a second, precisely because of what happens . One of the interns is with the patient, and alarms start to ring by his bedside. The newbie is freaking out since it's his first day and so Meredith starts asking him questions to help him get through it. Unfortunately for the poor dude in the bed, the intern is overwhelmed and everything he answers is in the form of another question rather than his being sure about anything. Finally, Meredith gives up and goes over to listen to the guy's chest. Bailey walks by and notices the commotion just as Meredith diagnoses the guy and calls for a giant needle. Bailey immediately takes over and orders Meredith away, but Mere is hovering and yelling directions at the flustered intern who doesn't seem to understand what they mean by the confusing description, "The biggest needle you can find." Once they drain the excess air from the patient's chest cavity, Bailey admonishes the guy to call his own resident the time something happens, which gives him an opportunity to lamely reply that he thought Meredith was a resident. Bailey informs him that she is not, and that if the patient had died the hospital and probably all of them personally could have been sued. Mere puts on her pouty face, but... come on, Meredith. You're in enough trouble already and you're a smart girl. Let's not cause more problems for the hospital. All of the actual employees there regularly do a good enough job causing problems on their own. I want to defend her (I know, I'm as surprised as you) because she had good, if intensely misguided, reasons for doing what she did in the trial. But this is just dumb and after all that, you think she'd have learned to at least be marginally more careful about her actions, especially when they don't involve someone she holds dear.
Alex and the others have somehow learned that the kid's name is Nicky, and he's pinned under what appears to be a big chunk of asphalt and is still not breathing. Alex and Owen think it could possibly be somethingcomplicatedsoundingitis that is causing his body to shut down, and that bilateral medicalsomethingotomys might help. Owen has Alex do the procedure and so Alex proceeds to slice down each forearm, relieving some sort of pressure so that Nicky's vitals come back and he wakes up, albeit in shock. Owen leaves Alex to it to get back to his dial-in amputation.
Back at the hospital, Bailey has decided they need something called a Gunther, but Richard isn't interested despite Bailey pointing out that the fifth-year residents are about to kill each other (and, let's face it, will probably take some patients down with them). He doesn't really listen because he's preoccupied with trying to find a new job for Meredith, and he tells Bailey to write a recommendation letter for her. Bailey looks at him as if he's been having a good time sampling a bunch of wares from the pharmacy, but he's dead serious. She finally spits out a very concise, well-said, oral letter that involves warning a hospital that they never want to hire someone like Meredith because she has no respect for the rules, etc., and would likely tarnish their reputation. Sincerely, Miranda Bailey. Richard is shocked at her attitude but Bailey finishes that Meredith is the reason they need a Gunther.
Mark and Jackson are taking care of Jerry, Nicky's father, and Derek is there to check out his head injuries. Jerry has a big cut across his cheek that Jackson sewed up but when Mark looks at his handiwork he exclaims over how horrifically sloppy it is and isn't interested in Jackson's lame excuses as to why. Jackson promises to fix it but when April runs up and begs for Jackson's help, Mark happily dismisses him. Once they are gone, Derek asks Mark if he's being too hard on Jackson. Ladies and gentlemen: Derek Shepherd, the most self-unaware, self-centered doctor ever to doc. Mark gripes that Derek is lucky to have Meredith as a resident and Derek replies with news of the firing. Mark asks worriedly if she's okay and Derek at least has the good grace to seem a tad sheepish when he admits he doesn't know. Jerry wakes up then, saving Derek a potential lecture, and they promise him that they will take good care of him and his son.
Nicky is brought in at that moment and Alex has already called Arizona and Derek to let them know. Supposedly a room was set up but when he asks April which one, she looks frantically at the board and admits she has no idea. She then gets angry and yells uselessly at everyone that they have to update the board. She's not new here, and Seattle Grace is no stranger to mass trauma, but she's so in over her head that keeping order via the board is all she can process, it seems. Meredith then walks up with her stack of charts and has finally found enough good sense to tell April to reassign all of her cases. Cristina walks up, drinking a bottle of water, but when April tries to give her the stack of charts Cristina refuses and adds that Mere should keep her cases. That's all well and good, but let these people who need to go under the knife at least momentarily have a doctor who actually still works for the hospital. April yells that she's Chief Resident so Cristina has to do what she says -- always an effective leadership technique. Meredith just jumps in to tell April that it's fine and she can wait.
After April leaves, Cristina asks Mere if she's just going to give up and suggests she talk to the Board. Meredith tells her with mounting frustration that the Board is in fact who fired her so that is a no-go. Teddy sees what looks like Cristina just visiting with her friend and walks up to admonish her, so Cristina gives her an official medical analysis of the situation: she presented as thirsty so she treated herself with water and now will recycle the bottle to avoid landfill strain. Teddy just kind of looks at her and with a slightly strained smile drawls that she's a funny girl. It's a weird delivery, one that makes her seem more drugged than strained, but either way her resident is severely testing her good mood. Before she leaves, Cristina hisses at Meredith to come up with a plan. As Meredith's name is the title of the show, I found I wasn't super worried about her employment this episode, but I did keep wishing she'd work a plan elsewhere because I want to understand her and am getting frustrated with her increasing lack of good judgment that gets herself and everyone around her in hot water. Stay away from the patients, lady.
Down in the sinkhole, it's Cuttin' Time. Callie is talking Danny through the prep, and then warns him that once he starts he is going to have to put his weight into the cuts. Danny is game but once he's hovering over his wife's thigh with a sharp blade, he starts to lose his resolve again. Owen jumps in and suggests he cover Susannah's face with a towel so that he doesn't think so much about the fact that he's slicing into his own wife's flesh. He and Callie are obviously both upset for Danny but Owen is especially affected by what is about to happen. Callie gives Danny a countdown and finally he sticks in the knife, screaming his way through the first cut. I saw Aron Ralston speak once and when he talked about his own ordeal -- which culminated in his amputating his own arm after days of being trapped with no hope of rescue -- he said that after it was all over, when he was having a crummy day, he'd just think to himself, "Did I have to drink my own urine today? No? I guess today is still a pretty good day." Mentally, I added that he might also ask, "Did I have to cut off my own arm today?" Now Danny gets his own version of that. Did he have to cut off his wife's leg today? Yes? Okay, then yes, this is possibly the worst day ever. For truly reals.
Danny hits the bone and starts to freak out again, while Callie assures him that that is a good thing. She then instructs him to take a clamp and work it back and forth underneath the bone. He struggles and can't really get it, which is frustrating, but when Callie tells him to put his hand in the incision to get some traction, it causes the last bit of courage that was holding him together to melt away. Quite understandably, I might add. He begins to scream that he's going to kill his wife and he can't do this, and Owen has seen enough. He declares he's going down there and while Karen protests, it's pretty weak sauce and Owen pretty much ignores her. Callie tries to convince him that Danny can do it but Owen says that they are asking too much of the poor guy. Callie points out that she should probably be the one to go but since she has a wife and baby, that outweighs his just having an estranged wife so he does the job.
Meredith has finally removed herself from the vicinity of patients and is watching her daughter in daycare through the window. Cristina comes up, responding to a page, and Mere announces that she has a plan: to just be a mom. Cristina thinks it's a joke but Mere is serious, even though she's still such a damaged person that she doesn't know the saying, "Blessing in disguise," and Cristina has to provide it for her. (Her voice is dripping with disdain as she says the words.) The kooky music starts up so we know for sure that the idea of Meredith driving carpool is hilaaarious. Cristina excuses herself to vomit and go back to work, but Mere calls after her that maybe Cristina wants to be a mom too and that's why she can't go through with the abortion. That's a pretty low blow on Mere's part, since we all know Cristina so well at this point to know that she sticks to her guns. We didn't need the music to turn suddenly somber to really hammer us over the head with the point, Show. Cristina earnestly tells Meredith that she wishes she wanted the baby because that would make everything easy and she'd be happy. But she doesn't want a child and doesn't want to be a mother, just a surgeon. She sincerely asks Meredith to understand because Owen doesn't and that's ripping Cristina apart. She needs someone to understand and that person should be Mere, since she is her Person. No matter how stupid the writers make these women act sometimes, I appreciate that they have always kept the thread of how these two are even closer than sisters; they are really all each other has. She tells Meredith that she is sad and scared, and needs Mere to be there with her through the procedure to hold her hand. Mere now looks like she's the one who is going to vomit.
Lexie winds up being the one to win the surgery lottery in the form of all of Meredith's cases. She feels like she's a terrible person to be getting joy from her sister's firing, which gives Jackson a chance to be a cute boyfriend and assure her that a terrible person wouldn't feel bad about it. April shows up and again wants him to help with a patient and it's only after lots of incredibly pathetic begging that he agrees to do that when he'd rather fix up poor Jerry's ugly facial sutures. Lexie then tells April that Bailey needs her spleen patient taken to the OR. April panics and looks at the board to figure out where Bailey's patient is -- the board might as well have "GUESS WHAT, WE'RE GOING TO HAVE A PATIENT MIX-UP" written across it for all of the subtlety of this set-up. April reminds them that the patient needs a consent form, so Lexie makes sure that the nurse will put it in his chart.
Meredith is sitting on the floor of the nursery, playing with the head-explodingly cute Zola, when Janet walks in. Seriously, this is obviously the same baby that played Zola last season and it's like she's been genetically engineered from daisies and kittens with a dash of pixie dust. Every little facial expression just makes me melt. Janet is just finishing up the home study and when she expresses surprise that Mere isn't busy with sinkhole victims, Meredith recognizes that witholding the truth would be a terrible thing, especially after what happened with the trial, and she confesses to Janet that she was fired. Oh wait, no, she doesn't do that AT ALL. Meredith keeps a smile on her face as she lies that she's on a break in between surgeries. In answer to Janet's question she also mentions that Zola isn't really sleeping through the night, which is weird since that morning she told Derek that she was. Is that just a brain fart? Because if it's intentional I can't figure out why she would lie. The nursery worker then asks Mere if she is taking Zola home now, because it's actually Derek's night with her. Janet's eyebrows nearly pop off of her forehead as Meredith lamely tells her that the two of them just take turns picking up and dropping off the baby. The dumbfounded look on the nursery worker's face shows that she thinks this is a terrible lie too. Mere then makes her excuses and flees, but Janet's radar has been clearly alerted to shenanigans.
Derek, unaware that his adoption is falling apart by the moment, goes in to check on Nicky's surgery since he's got to swoop in and work on the boy when Arizona and Alex are done. Arizona tells him what an amazing job Alex is doing with the surgery but Derek is not interested in hearing about it whatsoever. A nurse calls over to him that Janet needs to speak to him in the lobby, and Arizona uses that moment to express her condolences about what happened to Meredith; she somehow hasn't picked up on the fact that Derek probably considers the firing the best news he's heard in weeks. Alex yells at both of them to shut up, because the guilt is ringing too loud in his ears and he needs to concentrate.
Owen gets lowered down into the sinkhole, and when he gets there Danny keeps apologizing and shuffling around like a kicked puppy. Owen assures him that he did an amazing job, and then gives Danny the job of protecting Susannah's head while he does the rest of the work. He then sternly orders Danny to look away as he fires up the bone saw. It's quick work for him to finish things up and he calls up that Danny can be brought out now, assuring him that he will be right behind with Susannah. As Danny gets pathetically hoisted out of the hole, my heart just aches for him. Whatever my issues with the show are, they can do a very good job wrenching my heart for many of these guest stars. (Though I also stand by my original opinion that we didn't need quite such a drawn-out setup of their marital problems.)
Meredith has finally changed out of her scrubs and back into street clothes, and Derek finds her cleaning out her locker. He's not there for some sort of touching goodbye, though; he demands angrily to know what she said to Janet. Mere is surprised and sincerely tells him that she said nothing, but Derek spits that he just answered a ton of questions about Zola's sleeping arrangements, and that he was told there were inconsistencies with their stories. Well yes. When both of you have decided that lies are the best option, but you refuse to speak to one another to coordinate those lies, that's going to happen. It's extra dumb because Meredith once again, however misguided it may be, was lying to protect the ones she loved who in this case are Derek and Zola. He gets a page and Mere tells him that she'll go talk to Janet but he sharply informs her that she'll do no such thing, and that he will take care of it. Because he's done such a good job of it up until now, you know.
Jackson finally had a chance to re-do Jerry's sutures, and he's wriggling with excitement to show off his work to Mark. They walk over to Jerry's bed and he pulls back the curtain... to reveal a very confused old lady. Mark mocks him some more for now losing a patient and storms off. April then runs up to ask another favor and Jackson snaps and yells at her to do her own work. He also asks where his patient might be and April is thoroughly confused for a moment because her precious board says that he should be right there. After a beat, she realizes that this might have caused a very big, very serious problems, and she yells, "OH NO!" repeatedly as she sprints away.
At that moment, Lexie and Bailey are preparing to do a spleenectomy on some guy named Chuck. Bailey's impatient to get the show on the road, but Lexie actually follows April's checklist and looks at his release form first. Bailey is hovering over Chuck with a scalpel like a starving man over a Renaissance Faire-sized turkey leg, when Lexie realizes that something might be wrong. She tells Bailey to hold up and then finally realizes that they have totally the wrong patient on the table in front of them. She's freaked out and repeatedly apologizes, then is interrupted by April who runs in screaming to stop because this is the wrong guy. Bailey very slowly and carefully hands the scalpel back to a nurse.
Meredith seals the last of her hospital-issue bits and bobs in an envelope and hands them over to someone to turn in for her. Alex sees her and calls after her but when she actually turns to give him a moment, he chickens out and says nothing. Owen is back and calls to Mere to help him out, but Mere just glumly informs him that she was fired. He gets a page and is about to leave but Mere calls after him and blurts out that Cristina hasn't had the abortion; she wants to but she can't because she loves him. She calls Owen out for punishing Cristina for just being the woman that he fell in love with in the first place, and that's something Owen really doesn't want to hear. He tries to get Mere out of his business but she presses on, because she has a rather unique perspective on the situation that has nothing to do with being Cristina's Person. She warns Owen that if Cristina has this child, it will kill her to pretend for his sake that she loves the kid as much as she loves surgery, and that growing up like that will kill the child too. She knows, because she was that kid and her mother was a Cristina. Owen finally sees Danny arrive and runs off, but it's very good food for thought and one of the more sensible things Mere has done in the past few episodes, even if it is betraying Cristina's confidence a little bit.
April runs after a fuming Bailey, trying to blame the others for not updating the board as they should have done. But what's extra galling is when April tries to put a positive spin on the situation -- the wrong surgery was stopped in time because of a checklist that she implemented! She realizes quickly that this wasn't a good approach to take and tells Bailey to go ahead and yell at her, but Bailey is so mad she is beyond words, and can only gesticulate a little bit in April's direction before the elevator doors close between them.
Cristina is working on putting in a chest tube while Teddy peppers her with more questions. Finally, Cristina spits that the reason she's doing things a certain way is because she's a fifth-year resident who knows what she is doing already. Teddy finally explains her actions and tells Cristina that she's treating her like a first-year student now because she bets that no one else ever did, and while Cristina was allowed to do all sorts of advanced procedures, Teddy thinks she may have skipped some of the basics. Teddy somehow relates this to her now having a happy personal life -- she now sees that Cristina's arrogance isn't her fault but rather the fault of all of the people who let her skip the easy steps. It doesn't really hold together but it's an interesting idea so let's go with it. She adds that she thinks Cristina could perform heart surgery but can't actually articulate why she chooses one size chest tube over another. Cristina obviously wants to argue, but her silence proves Teddy's point quite handily.
Richard is in his office, fighting with someone on the phone to try and get them to consider Meredith for a job. But his efforts obviously fail, and his mood isn't helped when Alex walks in as soon as he hangs up the phone. Alex tells Richard that Meredith can't just have any job, she needs this job. He then offers to talk to the Board and suggests maybe he was wrong about what he saw or that he lied. Richard sees what he's doing and softens, telling Alex he can't let him say that. Alex spits back that he can, but Richard just replies sadly that what happened isn't on Alex. Alex, though, believes it's entirely on him, and he then leaves to answer a page.
Jackson finally located Jerry, and Mark looks at his sutures and tells Jerry they look great. Jackson is beaming but once the guys are (totally not, but supposedly) out of Jerry's earshot Mark tells him the job is better but not good. Jackson is surprised that Mark told Jerry it looked great, then, but Mark points out that Jerry's son is in surgery so he needs a little bit of good news -- especially now that he's going to have a scar for the rest of his life. Eh, take it from me, scars add character. Mark sends Jackson to go check on Nicky's surgery, but Jackson gets a page and goes to answer it instead.
It turns out that Bailey paged all of the fifth years, and April is not totally unrealistic with her worry that they are all about to get fired. The four of them fight as they make their way down the hall and fall into line behind Bailey, who starts going from bed to bed reading everyone's charts. None of the residents have any idea what is going on, especially when Bailey gets to Susannah's room and seems to find what she was looking for. She tells Callie this could be a Gunther. Callie's surprised but kind of excited about whatever a Gunther might be; though she also seems skeptical that this group of misfits can handle it. Bailey just tells her that they need it.
Mere, meanwhile, gets a message from Janet and has the sense to at least answer it rather than leave her hanging and angry while waiting for Derek and his superpowers to save the day. Janet wants to speak to them both but Meredith tells her that his surgery could take hours, so she wants to know what's going on now. Janet reluctantly admits that after all of the weirdness of the morning, she made some calls and discovered that Mere was fired and she and Derek aren't even living together, which was an extra-bad discovery because Meredith obviously withheld all of this information deliberately. Mere says she can explain but Janet cuts her off; it's too little, too late, though Mere seems determined not to realize that. Mere wants to know what the worst thing is that could happen, but Janet refuses to discuss it. When Mere asks for confirmation that at least they can't take Zola away, Janet refuses to discuss it. Meredith finally says that since this is urgent, she'll go get Derek out of surgery right now.
She walks quickly down the hall in the basement, as her voiceover asks questions about if your marriage can weather a storm. There's a not-convincing fakeout that Derek might be glad to see her when she walks in the OR, and it's not surprising at all that he's actually talking to Arizona and that Mere doesn't seem to have gone to find him after all. She's walking down an unending maze of corridors, and it's almost comical how they feel like they keep growing and shifting. As Mere VOs about having faith, and trust, and surviving together, the camera pans back to show her holding on to Zola, powerwalking along and asking herself, "What did I do?" Well, it seems rather obvious that the answer to that is, "Kidnapping." Well, that's certainly only going to make things go even better with Janet in the future.
Lauren S is a writer and gal-about-town who lives and works in Atlanta with her two cats, and even they agree that Derek is the most insufferable television character since Brandon Walsh. She wants everyone to know: "The views expressed in my recaps and anything else I might write on TWoP are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer."