Meredith and Derek freak out over Ellis Grey's diary - will Derek have to move out? Izzie finally stands up for herself with Alex - cut his ass! Hahn and Torres have a lack of progress in their non-relationship - damn I'm bored! Cristina begins to expand her interests but she'll never leave surgery. George finds out the results of his exam - I can't believe he didn't pass last time. All that, and this is probably the calmest episode this season!
Meredith freaks out that Derek found her mom's diary when he was trying to find a place for his clothes. Cue an entire episode of them whining to their friends and having anxiety attacks over the memory of Mrs. Gray.
Hahn asks Callie out on a date and though she accepts, she spends the entire episode agonizing over it and whining to other surgeons, going as far as outing herself to Bailey. Bailey draws some kind of analogy to exploring the undiscovered country of Africa and suggests that they set up ground rules. In the end, we find out that Hahn is still just as freaked out as Callie and they smile at eachother and this storyline has still really gone nowhere. Honestly, I'm so bored with this storyline that I feel stupid even writing about it at this point.
Chief is pissed because people keep requesting to be assigned to their preferred specialties.
Since Yang always avoids the clinic, that's where she's assigned this week, with Lexie. Yang is so desperate for action that she misdiagnoses a woman's rash as narcoleptic something something and asks Sloan to operate. Instead, he sends her to Dermatology to get some ointment for the patient.
When Yang arrives in Dermatology, she's amazed by the slower pace of the department. One resident is complaining of getting too much sleep, doctors are baking cakes for eachother's birthdays, and they have a massage therapist on staff to "keep their hands healthy". Gradually, Meredith and Izzy both filter in, coming to gripe about their days to Cristina and staying to marvel at the strangeness of the Dermatology department.
FInally, George comes in and gets them all back to work, at which point Cristina finds out that Lexie has been paging her for almost an hour because the rash patient is steadily getting worse, finally going into respiratory distress just before Cristina arrives. How a rash leads to respiratory distress, I'm not sure, but Christina looks up the symptoms in a Physicians Desk Reference and administers medication to pull the patient out of stress. Somehow, this leads to the patient needing a biopsy and Cristina wanting to do it so she can learn more about Dermatology.
Alex and Izzie are sent to the Pit, where Alex dumps all of the assignments off on Izzie because he's a douche. This will probably be the cause of her oft-edited and re-edited "It's one thing to treat me like a doormat..." quote.
Or maybe it will be that Alex jacked the CT scan that she ordered on a patient with a muscle twitch. Alex takes the results, which indicate a baseball tumor, to Derek and Shepherd naturally asks Alex to scrub in on the surgery, since he thinks it's Alex's patient. Oh yeah, this will definitely be the cause of that quote.
Izzy inevitably finds out what Alex did and seems to confuse Derek's willingness to help out a roommate at home with actually giving a shit about her problems at work with other residents. In short, he verbally smacks her down and tells her to handle her own shit. Through a series of advisers, Izzie decides to sabotage Alex by mentioning to the patient that Alex has been off his game lately. The patient requests that Izzie be put back on his case rather than Alex. Alex tries to bitch to Shepherd, but he gets the same verbal smackdown as Izzie. We then get the speech from Izzie that's been shown in all of the commercials. To summarize, Izzie's tired of wiping his ass and taking his shit and it is now on like Donkey Kong.
Meredith and George are assigned to help Hahn. We're introduced to their patient of the week when they have to help the kid's parents chase him down while he attempts to evade surgery. Predictably, Hahn and the Chief bitch at both of them for not being able to control the kid, because it's totally their fault. Meredith freaks out that Hahn may think she's an idiot and gets Yang to give her a crash course in cardiology so that she can impress Hahn. Hahn's so impressed that she allows Meredith to reattach one of the kid's arteries, which Meredith has no idea how to do and has to go back and ask Yang to teach her. During the surgery, Hahn reveals that she knew Grey was bullshitting her all along, but is impressed with Yang's teaching skill.
Before Meredith could be called out in the surgery, though, the kid had to get there. That's where George comes in. First he shows the kid that IV's aren't anything to be scared of by giving himself one. Once the kid sees that George is okay, he agrees to have the IV put in. Inspired, George gets Hahn and The Chief to let the kid watch a minor surgery, figuring that being able to see a surgery may make him less afraid of his own. Unfortunately, George accidentally takes the kid into Izzy and Derek's surgery room, where they've had to peel forward the patient's face and open his skull. Compared to this, the kid finds the minor surgery boring but still feels better about his own.
At this point, I would like to file my prediction that George will become a pediatric surgeon.
Speaking of George's future, he's spent the entire episode waiting to hear if he passed his residency exam from the end of last episode. Finally, in the last ten minutes or so, he finds out that he is now a resident. Lexie wants to take him out to celebrate, but he's too excited to really pay attention and runs off to tell Meredith and Izzie. Poor heartbroken Lexie finally runs into everyone celebrating at the bar, but decides to sit at the bar rather than be a....*counts* fifth (?) wheel.
Alex is also drinking alone at the bar. Izzie tries to invite him over while she's getting a drink, but he's keeping up the douche act. As she's about to walk away, he somewhat apologizes to her by saying he can't help being a douche because he can't take out the anger he's so full of on the person who deserves it because you can't be pissed at a crazy chick for being crazy, so the only person left is Izzie. That must be the lamest excuse in the history of man, but Izzie at least hears him out.
In the end, Meredith curls up on the couch with Yang to finally confront her mother's memory by reading her diary. There will likely be more fall-out from this in future episodes, either with more tension with The Chief, more sessions with the shrink, or both.
