Holy crap, people. Two hours. Are you ready for this? Because I don’t know if I am. We begin this episode with death. Meredith and Derek’s clinical trial is not going well—they keep on losing their patients. When she’s not busy with that, she’s telling her psychiatrist about how her mother slit her wrists with a scalpel in front of her and she had to wait until she passed out before she could call 911. So…not exactly a cheerful episode so far.
Speaking of depression, Cristina is still in her deep Burke-induced funk. Only the offer of the magical sparkle pager seems to get her out of it. Derek isn’t doing so well either—he tells Sloan and the Chief that he’s selling the land he was going to build his dream home on. Both men are aghast at his decision. Sloan tells him, “but this land and ferry boats are who you are!” Hee. I think it’s hilarious that Derek’s best friend sums him up by his love of ferry boats.
I’m really interested in this whole Alex/Rebecca storyline. Alex doesn’t seem like the rescuing type—that’s more Derek’s gig. So I’m really curious as to why he’s in such deep denial about Rebecca’s well-being. She’s sitting at the breakfast table in what appears to be a near-catatonic state. Alex has to remind her to take a bite of her eggs, and yet when Izzie remarks that she doesn’t look so good, Alex says that she’s fine. It doesn’t even seem like a “shut up and leave us alone” “she’s fine” either. It’s definitely more of a “what are you talking about” “it’s fine.”
For a second it looks as though someone is having a good time in this hospital. Callie and Sloan are together in the on-call room. Unfortunately for Callie, Sloan’s dirty talk involves the two of them with Hahn, which is really freaking Callie out. I don’t know if it’s because she’s so uncomfortable with the feelings she thinks Hahn has for her or because she’s having some weird feelings herself, but in any case. She uses her pager going off as an excuse to flee the room.
Fortunately or unfortunately, she flees right into a “really big trauma.” It’s so big, in fact, that it renders Bailey speechless. This poor kid is encased from the neck down in a giant block of hardening cement. Turns out, the poor kid was dared to lay in a vat of cement by some jackhole classmates of his who thought it would be funny. So the punchline of this joke is that Bailey doesn’t know what to do and the cement is leeching all of the water out of this poor kid’s body. Even worse, all of the doctors abandon him so they can fight over where to start. Nothing’s getting done and this poor kid is probably dying.
So here’s an interesting love connection: Meredith and Derek’s new patient gets to Seattle Grace and she’s a spunky teenager—who just so happens to be “in love with” their other clinical trial patient, a boy she met while undergoing Chemo at the Mayo clinic. It’s really kind of sweet and tragic, considering that one or both of them is probably going to die by the end of the day.
Back at Alex’s house, things are only getting worse for Rebecca. He leaves her alone to take a phone call, and when he gets back, she tells him she’s afraid that she wet her pants. Now that is most definitely not a symptom of “fine.” Also, by the way, I totally think something’s happened to her baby. Not the one she wasn’t pregnant with, but the real one. I have a feeling something tragic happened that led her back to Seattle. Just mark my words.
Back at the hospital, things are not going very well. The Chief tells Meredith that her and Derek’s clinical trials are going to be shut down at midnight if they keep on killing people. Apparently 11 deaths in a row don’t instill confidence in the group that oversees such things. The solution is to risk the lives of the two kids hoping that they can save at least one of them so they can continue the trial. Meanwhile, the doctors finally start chipping the poor boy out of the cement, as he reveals that he jumped in the vat to impress the mean girl from earlier. Poor kid.
So tumor girl’s parents don’t really want her hanging out with tumor boy since there’s a pretty good chance that he’s going to die. They’re afraid that if he does, she won’t want to live, so she won’t be able to fight her tumor. I understand their fears, but come on. She’s young and there’s a very good chance that she’s going to die regardless. Let her have some fun. Meredith and Derek seem to be on board with this, as they help her sneak into his room so they can do it. Now, I’m sure that there are rules against this, but since it’s Seattle Grace, I’m sure they don’t apply. Ethics, shmethics. Somebody needs to have sex, STAT!
Not that anyone had any doubt, but Rebecca isn’t the only crazy one hanging around. Lexie is a complete Klepto. Not only did she steal everything that wasn’t nailed down in order to decorate her apartment a few episodes back, but now she’s stealing files from The Chief’s office. George finds her and is horrified. He tries to get the files back to the Chief’s office, but it doesn’t matter—she’s already read them, and since she has a photographic memory, the files are burned onto her brain. Among the juicy tidbits of information is the fact that George only failed the intern test by one point. That’s gotta hurt.
More trouble for cement boy. Bailey is standing outside of his room watching the progress, but she’s convinced they’re missing something. She keeps going over everything in her head, trying to figure out what they’re forgetting. Then it comes to her: bladder. They’ve been hydrating him for over four hours, but his bladder is still encased in cement. If they don’t get a catheter into him soon, then it’s going to explode.
The first hour of the finale ends on the same sad note that it began. Tumor boy dies in surgery, devastating tumor girl. Izzie finally gets ahold of Alex. While they’re arguing about whether or not she’s butting in, Rebecca slits her wrist with a butcher knife Alex was using to make sandwiches. Whoo! One more hour to go. This is going to be…fun.
As we begin the second hour, Alex brings Rebecca into the hospital and tries to convince Izzie that the fact that she slashed her wrist with a butcher knife was an accident. Tumor girl decides that she wants to go ahead with the surgery, even though there’s a very good chance she’ll die. Cement boy is asking for his Mean Girl, but even though Callie can tell that she cares for him, Mean Girl won’t go hold his hand because she’s afraid of how she’ll look in front of her jackhole friends.
One of the only moments of levity comes when Lexie starts blurting out what she read in everybody’s files. We already knew that Izzie went to school at night and that it took her six years to graduate, but we find out that Cristina is dyslexic and Alex wrote an essay about how he had testicular cancer in med school and lost a ball. This is completely untrue as well as completely hilarious.
Ohhhhh, snap. Alex is stitching Rebecca up and Izzie comes down to tell him that she’s gotten some drugs for her and has scheduled a psych consult. Alex tells her that Rebecca doesn’t need one and that he’s taking her home. Izzie points out that Rebecca is technically her patient, so she gets to make that decision. He yells at her—and when I say that, I mean he yells at her, saying, “just leave us alone, you stupid bitch!” Now I know we’re in the 10:00 hour, but damn. That’s harsh.
OR time: The glitter pager definitely helped, but it looks like Cristina is going to truly get out of her funk by getting to do a heart procedure on cement boy since Hahn isn’t there anymore. When Hahn gets there and attempts to butt in, Cristina tells her to shut up and let her work—and the Chief backs her up.
We finally get to the bottom of the whole Alex thing. It turns out he’s so desperate to make everything okay with Rebecca because he’s done this before. He says that she’s just going through a bad patch and that he can feed her and bathe her and change her until the bad patch is over. He knows he can do this because he did it for his mom when he was a kid. Aw, poor Alex.
Yay Georgie! He uses the information that Lexie got from his file to build some self-confidence. He tells the Chief that he’s excellent at his job and deserves the second chance that everyone else seems to get on a regular basis. The Chief agrees and tells him he can re-take his test. George might become a resident!
Okay, so apparently I’m not all knowing. I kind of thought Rebecca’s baby was dead, but it turns out her husband took the baby and left Rebecca two months ago. This is probably due to the fact that Rebecca has underlying Borderline Personality Disorder. Alex tells her that this has probably been coming on since her accident. He also admits that he can’t help her. She’s going to stay in the hospital tonight and then be transferred to a psychiatric facility in the morning. She apologizes for not being someone he could depend on, since she knows how hard it is for him to trust people.
Everything finally comes together for Meredith. After confronting the Chief about her mother’s suicide attempt and finding out that he didn’t know anything about it, she realizes that her mother wasn’t actually trying to kill herself. Since she was a surgeon, she knew that slicing her carotid artery is a much more efficient way to commit suicide than slitting her wrists. She didn’t want to die at all—she wanted the Chief to come back.
Meredith’s psychiatrist points out the fact that Meredith is exactly the same, but she gets to learn from her mother’s mistakes. Her mother was too proud to ask for the Chief to come back to her, but something tells me Meredith isn’t going to make that mistake.
Cement boy wakes up and his Mean Girl finally comes to visit him. Not only that, but she gives him the kiss he’s been waiting his whole life for. Eh. He can do better. Tumor girl is also having a pretty good day—she’s alive. Derek grabs the bottle of celebratory champagne from the trash.
Aw, Bailey finally sees the bigger picture. She realizes that she can’t do everything, so in an effort to saver he surgical career and her family, she gives the clinic to Izzie. So what does this mean for Izzie’s surgical career?
Meanwhile, with the help of Sloan, Callie finally understands something as well. Maybe she and Hahn are more than just friends. Callie wasn’t uncomfortable because Hahn kissed her, she was uncomfortable because she liked it. She tests this theory by kissing Hahn. It’s really hot and lasts for a very long time.
There’s more love in the air. George kisses Lexie! The Chief goes back to his wife! Meredith and Derek are searching for each other! Alex kisses Izzie! Except it’s weird because he’s really sad. It looks like they’re going to sleep together, but Alex is kind of weeping and not even Izzie can deal with that.
Ugh, this is annoying. Apparently, Meredith and Derek do not have cell phones. They’ve been looking for each other, and instead of calling and saying, “hey, where are you?” they run all around Seattle looking for each other. Now it doesn’t seem like a whole lot of time has passed, but somehow Meredith manages to find a freakin’ candle factory and make a floor plan for their dream house out of like, 200 white candles in glass vases. She’s blah-blahing about a room where their kids can play, and he walks over and kisses her. I know this is supposed to be sweet and romantic, but damn, is it annoying. All I can think about is how there is no way she found all of those candles in such a short period of time.
We end the season with Derek going to break up with Rose so he can do it to Meredith.
So there you have it. This season was really uneven for me. We started out with the whole George/Izzie debacle, and now Callie is a lesbian, Izzie is a shrill harpy and Meredith is suicidal because her mother was suicidal. At least they finally ended the whole Meredith/Derek back and forth and put them together. I just hope they stay that way and we can move on to something else. Something else like more Bailey.
