Post by Leanne on Jan 16, 2009 6:42:14 GMT -5
Sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Sometimes it's nothing more than parts. Tonight, Grey's Anatomy was all about parts -- how they fit together, how they break apart, how they're cut away, and how we let go of them. Plus, we got to see the second part of the serial killer arc and watch a character who could've been just perky and annoying turn substantive and interesting. And Tyne Daley put in a fabulous guest appearance.
Bright and bubbly spoilers that your mom would like, straight ahead...
Let's start with our death row inmate, Dunn (Eric Stoltz). His brain's swelling, and Derek wants to operate. But the condemned killer would rather die in the hospital, so he's refusing treatment. Derek tasks Meredith and Cristina with closely monitoring his condition. When he becomes unconscious, two doctors can consent to treat him and overrule his wishes. Cristina's on board, but sensing a sympathetic soul, Dunn tries to appeal to Meredith, who's conflicted and doesn't have the same quest for justice that Derek does.
Bailey's getting impatient with Jackson's case, and she's getting emotional -- pushing Dr. Robbins to try to finagle a higher place on the transplant list for him. As Bailey wheels Jackson down the hallway and Meredith wheels Dunn from the opposite way, they meet, and Jackson's immediately fascinated by the bad guy he sees handcuffed to the cot. Dunn very creepily offers the kid his liver and intestine, which gets the kid's hopes up. Bailey, desperate, approaches Robbins with a stopgap plan, and the two end up duking it out when Bailey can't put aside her contempt for Robbins' wanting to trust the transplant process. Now, I hate the whole perky-blonde-doctor thing as much as the next person, but Robbins is actually quite sane, thoughtful and even-keeled. She's like the opposite of Dr. Sydney Heron, the terminally peppy resident who kept driving Bailey nuts last season.
Anyway, a donor comes up, and Robbins and Alex go to pick up the organs for Jackson. Robbins makes what's admittedly semi-inane small talk on the plane, and a resentful Alex is having none of it -- refusing to talk about Izzie, saying he never makes plans, and kind of getting back in touch with his jerky side. He gets pretty shaken up when he learns that the organs are coming from another kid, and he lashes out at Robbins on the flight back, unable to understand how she's not bothered by the fact they left behind another kid. You have to turn your back on the tiny coffins, even when they haunt you, she says, and keep going forward. Jessica Capshaw is very good in the scene -- quiet, unshakable, and pragmatic -- and I was totally won over. She also looks very much like her mother, but I'd argue that based on this performance, at least, she's a more nuanced actor.
Jackson's on the table and they do the transplant when something goes wrong -- there's a clot, and the intestines end up dead. Jackson's got 24 hours to live unless there's another donor. Of course, after Dunn saw Jackson in the hallway, he talked to Meredith about wanting to give the boy his organs. Let me save a life before I go, he pleads. It's the least I can do. Yep, they test him. And yep, he's a match. Saw that one coming a mile away, didn't you? Dunn, meanwhile, keeps pushing Derek's "we're not so different" buttons, and ends up in surgery. Derek has to take a piece of his skull off so his swollen brain has some room, and the bone is temporarily placed in his abdomen, where the circulation will preserve the bone marrow at the skull base.
Meanwhile, Derek's mom (Tyne Daly, looking great) comes to visit. Which has Meredith in an unbelievable twist, because she's not the girl that mothers like. The roommates are cleaning the house in preparation for her arrival, trapping Sloan up in the attic with Lexie (seriously, why don't they just go where roommates are not?). Mothers love Izzie, Meredith says. Izzie's gone through the house like a cleaning demon (remember how she loves to nest) -- she's hidden the tequila and the condoms, and replaced the trashy magazines with back issues of The Annals of Surgery. The whole scene feels very season 1 -- Meredith's an emotional mess, and there's an easy camraderie among all of them. Except now there's a dead guy shadowing Izzie, but all things change.
And since Cristina's not there to talk to about it, Meredith's left with getting impress-the-mother coaching from Izzie. Smile. Don't talk too much -- little bits of Meredith are plenty. And there's a very high ponytail in a pink scrunchy thing that's just painful to look at, but bless Meredith, she suffers through it.
So Meredith meets Mrs. Shepherd, and she doesn't talk too much, and she shows her teeth when she smiles, and she's got the dumb perky ponytail. As Cristina watches from afar, Hunt comes up, asks her to deal with his post-ops, and then asks her on a date, nearly giving Izzie and Denny whiplash. It's very cute, and I have the world's biggest soft spot for Hunt -- I'm totally pulling for him. Then he asks Cristina to give a patient an enema. There's some romance.
Lunch with Derek's mom goes semi-well as she asks all the usual mother getting-to-know-you questions: did you grow up here, tell me about your family, blah blah. Meredith suffers through, then goes to check on the serial killer. As Derek explains, his mom responds that she was thinking it must be hard for him to treat a murderer.
Mrs. Shepherd impacts more than just Meredith. She practically raised Mark Sloan, and since he's avoiding her and is walking around with the same guilty look he wore when he was a kid, she knows something's up. He confesses that he's sleeping with someone -- in a funny moment Mrs. Shepherd thinks he's talking about Meredith, until he admits it's her little sister. The one with the juice box. Did I mention we learn that Lexie's 24, which makes Mark feel like a guilty, dirty old man. So Mrs. Shepherd turns the mom spotlight on Lexie, quizzing her about sexual partners and trouble with the law -- and ends up liking her very much. Stop being a jerk, she tells Mark. Lexie's lovely, and you should start thinking enough of yourself to have some high self-expectations. She's only 24 but you've got the emotional maturity of a horny 15-year-old, so you need young. Go for it.
Which definitely props Mark up; Callie had admonished him for being with Lexie, and when he called her out for being scared to take a chance she agreed. She's been through one too many romantic disasters, she says. She used to walk tall, but after George and Erica she's definitely lost a few inches. The metaphor is a little too spot on to her case this week, of a man who at 5'3" underwent leg-lengthening surgery overseas so he could be two inches taller. The surgery went wrong, his legs got infected, and he ended up losing a quarter-inch of bone anyway. In the end, both the patient and Callie get bucked up a little. The patient's brother sets him straight about what a jerk he's been about his height his whole life. And Mark tells Callie to keep on walking tall, because she took a chance, she lost, and she survived.
Meanwhile, Meredith and Dunn get into a conversation about his execution. He can choose lethal injection or hanging; which would she choose? With only the slightest pause she runs down how each execution works physiologically -- calmly and methodically, while his facade seems to crack a little bit. I mention it because it's an extraordinary exchange between two actors who are doing very good work. Throughout this storyline, Ellen Pompeo uses a light touch; she's never fraught or overly emotional. And finding someone to listen to him seems to humanize Dunn a little -- Stoltz doesn't drop the unremorseful character, but he makes him a little less matter of fact, and it's very interesting.
Yet Meredith's bothered by the sympathy she does seem to feel for the guy. After Cristina -- and for that matter, both Derek and Dunn -- finally tells her to take out that stupid ponytail, Meredith 'fesses up to Mrs. Shepherd that she's not perky and she's not happy, but she's dark and cloudy and has sympathy for a serial killer. Derek's mother accepts this quietly and walks away -- and later, as she gives Derek a ring for "the right girl," explains to him why Meredith's that person. He sees the world in black and white, but Meredith gets the gray, and he needs that. It's a fabulously touching scene and I wish Tyne Daley would come back for more episodes.
She also turns out to have an effect on Hunt. Derek introduces them, and when his mother, a Navy nurse for 25 years, hears that Hunt's back from Iraq, she takes one look and zeroes in. How are you sleeping? she asks. He's thrown, but she's got him, and every second that she looks at him it seems as though he cracks a little bit more. Let me just say, I love Kevin McKidd. He turns up -- late -- to Cristina's door, looking very handsome in a suit and carrying flowers. As he staggers in, she realizes he's drunk. He hasn't had a date in five years, he says, and he needed to take the edge off and took it too far. He promises to make it up to Cristina. She tells him he needs a shower so he'll smell a little less like a distillery. So he heads to her bathroom. Later he calls her in, because he's thought of an answer to the "What was your best surgery?" date question that Izzie promised her to ask. Standing in the shower, fully clothed, he relays a story about a horrific casualty in Iraq -- a soldier whose life he saved by laying on him to apply enough pressure to keep the guy from bleeding out. The soldier made it home, wrote him a letter of thanks, then killed himself. It's a devastating scene, watching pieces of this brave, exhausted guy fall away. It also puts Cristina in a position to comfort him. I'm eager to see how this relationship develops, and I really really hope that future episodes do right by McKidd in particular.
And I hate to admit it, but I'm almost beginning to be OK with the Izzie-and-Denny show. I like their rapport, and his following her around was so matter of fact this week that it truly didn't bug me. And Jeffrey Dean Morgan is easy on the eyes, and has nice chemistry with Katherine Heigl. But Izzie's beginning to realize, as she watches the Der-Mer-mother situation unfold, that what she wants is a real live relationship with a real live man. And unfortunately, he can't give her that. She breaks it off, and in a sweet scene Alex suggests that they take a road trip to Iowa so she can meet his mother. She goes to find the hidden tequila, and Denny comes back and sits down. We gotta talk, he says to Alex. And just like that, we get our sweeps set-up: the countdown's on to figure out what's up with Izzie.
Finally, Meredith finds an upset Bailey in Jackson's room. Now they're waiting for a miracle, Bailey tells her. You can practically see the wheels turning in her head as she heads to Dunn's room and explains to him that when he was in surgery, Derek took a piece of his skull off. Which has left his brain basically exposed. And as your doctor I'm advising you to be very careful not to do anything to damage that exposed area, because it will cause brain death, she says. Meredith has learned a lot from the mistakes of the intern year, and is all cool, calm pro as she carefully chooses her words. Dunn gets the message, waiting until she leaves the room before throwing one of his pillows to the floor and banging his head on the bed frame.
zapit
Sometimes it's nothing more than parts. Tonight, Grey's Anatomy was all about parts -- how they fit together, how they break apart, how they're cut away, and how we let go of them. Plus, we got to see the second part of the serial killer arc and watch a character who could've been just perky and annoying turn substantive and interesting. And Tyne Daley put in a fabulous guest appearance.
Bright and bubbly spoilers that your mom would like, straight ahead...
Let's start with our death row inmate, Dunn (Eric Stoltz). His brain's swelling, and Derek wants to operate. But the condemned killer would rather die in the hospital, so he's refusing treatment. Derek tasks Meredith and Cristina with closely monitoring his condition. When he becomes unconscious, two doctors can consent to treat him and overrule his wishes. Cristina's on board, but sensing a sympathetic soul, Dunn tries to appeal to Meredith, who's conflicted and doesn't have the same quest for justice that Derek does.
Bailey's getting impatient with Jackson's case, and she's getting emotional -- pushing Dr. Robbins to try to finagle a higher place on the transplant list for him. As Bailey wheels Jackson down the hallway and Meredith wheels Dunn from the opposite way, they meet, and Jackson's immediately fascinated by the bad guy he sees handcuffed to the cot. Dunn very creepily offers the kid his liver and intestine, which gets the kid's hopes up. Bailey, desperate, approaches Robbins with a stopgap plan, and the two end up duking it out when Bailey can't put aside her contempt for Robbins' wanting to trust the transplant process. Now, I hate the whole perky-blonde-doctor thing as much as the next person, but Robbins is actually quite sane, thoughtful and even-keeled. She's like the opposite of Dr. Sydney Heron, the terminally peppy resident who kept driving Bailey nuts last season.
Anyway, a donor comes up, and Robbins and Alex go to pick up the organs for Jackson. Robbins makes what's admittedly semi-inane small talk on the plane, and a resentful Alex is having none of it -- refusing to talk about Izzie, saying he never makes plans, and kind of getting back in touch with his jerky side. He gets pretty shaken up when he learns that the organs are coming from another kid, and he lashes out at Robbins on the flight back, unable to understand how she's not bothered by the fact they left behind another kid. You have to turn your back on the tiny coffins, even when they haunt you, she says, and keep going forward. Jessica Capshaw is very good in the scene -- quiet, unshakable, and pragmatic -- and I was totally won over. She also looks very much like her mother, but I'd argue that based on this performance, at least, she's a more nuanced actor.
Jackson's on the table and they do the transplant when something goes wrong -- there's a clot, and the intestines end up dead. Jackson's got 24 hours to live unless there's another donor. Of course, after Dunn saw Jackson in the hallway, he talked to Meredith about wanting to give the boy his organs. Let me save a life before I go, he pleads. It's the least I can do. Yep, they test him. And yep, he's a match. Saw that one coming a mile away, didn't you? Dunn, meanwhile, keeps pushing Derek's "we're not so different" buttons, and ends up in surgery. Derek has to take a piece of his skull off so his swollen brain has some room, and the bone is temporarily placed in his abdomen, where the circulation will preserve the bone marrow at the skull base.
Meanwhile, Derek's mom (Tyne Daly, looking great) comes to visit. Which has Meredith in an unbelievable twist, because she's not the girl that mothers like. The roommates are cleaning the house in preparation for her arrival, trapping Sloan up in the attic with Lexie (seriously, why don't they just go where roommates are not?). Mothers love Izzie, Meredith says. Izzie's gone through the house like a cleaning demon (remember how she loves to nest) -- she's hidden the tequila and the condoms, and replaced the trashy magazines with back issues of The Annals of Surgery. The whole scene feels very season 1 -- Meredith's an emotional mess, and there's an easy camraderie among all of them. Except now there's a dead guy shadowing Izzie, but all things change.
And since Cristina's not there to talk to about it, Meredith's left with getting impress-the-mother coaching from Izzie. Smile. Don't talk too much -- little bits of Meredith are plenty. And there's a very high ponytail in a pink scrunchy thing that's just painful to look at, but bless Meredith, she suffers through it.
So Meredith meets Mrs. Shepherd, and she doesn't talk too much, and she shows her teeth when she smiles, and she's got the dumb perky ponytail. As Cristina watches from afar, Hunt comes up, asks her to deal with his post-ops, and then asks her on a date, nearly giving Izzie and Denny whiplash. It's very cute, and I have the world's biggest soft spot for Hunt -- I'm totally pulling for him. Then he asks Cristina to give a patient an enema. There's some romance.
Lunch with Derek's mom goes semi-well as she asks all the usual mother getting-to-know-you questions: did you grow up here, tell me about your family, blah blah. Meredith suffers through, then goes to check on the serial killer. As Derek explains, his mom responds that she was thinking it must be hard for him to treat a murderer.
Mrs. Shepherd impacts more than just Meredith. She practically raised Mark Sloan, and since he's avoiding her and is walking around with the same guilty look he wore when he was a kid, she knows something's up. He confesses that he's sleeping with someone -- in a funny moment Mrs. Shepherd thinks he's talking about Meredith, until he admits it's her little sister. The one with the juice box. Did I mention we learn that Lexie's 24, which makes Mark feel like a guilty, dirty old man. So Mrs. Shepherd turns the mom spotlight on Lexie, quizzing her about sexual partners and trouble with the law -- and ends up liking her very much. Stop being a jerk, she tells Mark. Lexie's lovely, and you should start thinking enough of yourself to have some high self-expectations. She's only 24 but you've got the emotional maturity of a horny 15-year-old, so you need young. Go for it.
Which definitely props Mark up; Callie had admonished him for being with Lexie, and when he called her out for being scared to take a chance she agreed. She's been through one too many romantic disasters, she says. She used to walk tall, but after George and Erica she's definitely lost a few inches. The metaphor is a little too spot on to her case this week, of a man who at 5'3" underwent leg-lengthening surgery overseas so he could be two inches taller. The surgery went wrong, his legs got infected, and he ended up losing a quarter-inch of bone anyway. In the end, both the patient and Callie get bucked up a little. The patient's brother sets him straight about what a jerk he's been about his height his whole life. And Mark tells Callie to keep on walking tall, because she took a chance, she lost, and she survived.
Meanwhile, Meredith and Dunn get into a conversation about his execution. He can choose lethal injection or hanging; which would she choose? With only the slightest pause she runs down how each execution works physiologically -- calmly and methodically, while his facade seems to crack a little bit. I mention it because it's an extraordinary exchange between two actors who are doing very good work. Throughout this storyline, Ellen Pompeo uses a light touch; she's never fraught or overly emotional. And finding someone to listen to him seems to humanize Dunn a little -- Stoltz doesn't drop the unremorseful character, but he makes him a little less matter of fact, and it's very interesting.
Yet Meredith's bothered by the sympathy she does seem to feel for the guy. After Cristina -- and for that matter, both Derek and Dunn -- finally tells her to take out that stupid ponytail, Meredith 'fesses up to Mrs. Shepherd that she's not perky and she's not happy, but she's dark and cloudy and has sympathy for a serial killer. Derek's mother accepts this quietly and walks away -- and later, as she gives Derek a ring for "the right girl," explains to him why Meredith's that person. He sees the world in black and white, but Meredith gets the gray, and he needs that. It's a fabulously touching scene and I wish Tyne Daley would come back for more episodes.
She also turns out to have an effect on Hunt. Derek introduces them, and when his mother, a Navy nurse for 25 years, hears that Hunt's back from Iraq, she takes one look and zeroes in. How are you sleeping? she asks. He's thrown, but she's got him, and every second that she looks at him it seems as though he cracks a little bit more. Let me just say, I love Kevin McKidd. He turns up -- late -- to Cristina's door, looking very handsome in a suit and carrying flowers. As he staggers in, she realizes he's drunk. He hasn't had a date in five years, he says, and he needed to take the edge off and took it too far. He promises to make it up to Cristina. She tells him he needs a shower so he'll smell a little less like a distillery. So he heads to her bathroom. Later he calls her in, because he's thought of an answer to the "What was your best surgery?" date question that Izzie promised her to ask. Standing in the shower, fully clothed, he relays a story about a horrific casualty in Iraq -- a soldier whose life he saved by laying on him to apply enough pressure to keep the guy from bleeding out. The soldier made it home, wrote him a letter of thanks, then killed himself. It's a devastating scene, watching pieces of this brave, exhausted guy fall away. It also puts Cristina in a position to comfort him. I'm eager to see how this relationship develops, and I really really hope that future episodes do right by McKidd in particular.
And I hate to admit it, but I'm almost beginning to be OK with the Izzie-and-Denny show. I like their rapport, and his following her around was so matter of fact this week that it truly didn't bug me. And Jeffrey Dean Morgan is easy on the eyes, and has nice chemistry with Katherine Heigl. But Izzie's beginning to realize, as she watches the Der-Mer-mother situation unfold, that what she wants is a real live relationship with a real live man. And unfortunately, he can't give her that. She breaks it off, and in a sweet scene Alex suggests that they take a road trip to Iowa so she can meet his mother. She goes to find the hidden tequila, and Denny comes back and sits down. We gotta talk, he says to Alex. And just like that, we get our sweeps set-up: the countdown's on to figure out what's up with Izzie.
Finally, Meredith finds an upset Bailey in Jackson's room. Now they're waiting for a miracle, Bailey tells her. You can practically see the wheels turning in her head as she heads to Dunn's room and explains to him that when he was in surgery, Derek took a piece of his skull off. Which has left his brain basically exposed. And as your doctor I'm advising you to be very careful not to do anything to damage that exposed area, because it will cause brain death, she says. Meredith has learned a lot from the mistakes of the intern year, and is all cool, calm pro as she carefully chooses her words. Dunn gets the message, waiting until she leaves the room before throwing one of his pillows to the floor and banging his head on the bed frame.
zapit