I really liked last week’s episode, but was completely afraid that this week’s would let me down. Luckily, unlike this week’s Heroes, Grey’s was just as good if not better than it was last week. Also, the title refers to a great Weezer song. Dare I say it? I think this show is back.
Anyway, this week’s episode, as the Mer VO helpfully points out, is all about the things that haunt us. Meredith is haunted by the mortifyingly cheese-tastic, “pick me, choose me, love me” line she gave to Derek, and also by her dead mother. Alex is haunted by Ava and Izzie is haunted by George. Interestingly, this manifests in a very cute late-night pumpkin carving/baking session between the two. I always kind of liked them together.
At the hospital, Cristina is looking to rent out Burke’s place. The Chief’s wife is filing for divorce—my guess is the whole allowing his niece to stop cancer treatment thing was the proverbial straw that broke the fed-up wife’s back. Cristina offers The Chief the apartment. Meredith has decided that dumping her mother’s ashes into a freezer bag and bringing them with her to the hospital is a good idea. Everybody else in the locker room disagrees. Bailey and Callie come in to give instructions for the day. It’s Halloween and Seattle’s annual chainsaw pumpkin-carving contest means it’s going to be a busy day. Izzie asks Callie a question and Callie tells her (and by extension everybody in the room) that she needs to direct all inquiries to Dr. Bailey, since Izzie is sleeping with her husband. Yikes. I agree with Cristina: “this is even more disturbing than your bag full of Mommy.”
Speaking of Mer’s “bag full of mommy,” she runs into Derek in the hall (literally) and spills her mom all over the floor. Just then a kid with no ears comes up to them and asks where Sloan is. He’s appropriately grossed out by said bag and its contents. The ear kid finds Sloan and calls him Daddy. Sloan looks like he’s going to need a new pair of scrubs, but Derek comes up laughing and gives the kid ten bucks. Heh. That’s awesome and I’m totally going to start doing that to people. So the kid doesn’t want Sloan to be his daddy, but he does want him to make him some ears. For free. Uh, reach for the stars there, kid. Sloan tells him that while he’s willing to volunteer his time, he can’t do the surgery solo. He also doesn’t have the social capital to ask for favors. The nurses, after all, have banded against him and created “Nurses United Against Mark Sloan,” because apparently they haven’t been paying attention for the last year and missed the whole part about how being a cad is kind of his thing. Pay attention next time ladies. Context clues: They’re not just for essay questions. Anyway, Meredith overhears this and decides to help the kid get some ears. Since nobody likes her either, she’s hoping to use her dead mother’s name to get people on board. Sounds like the most solid plan Meredith has ever had about anything.
Patient Roundup: Cristina awesomely tricks Lexie into dressing up for Halloween—a fact that does not exactly inspire confidence in a woman whose dad is waiting for a heart transplant. A well-dressed man comes into the clinic twitching and stomping his foot. He tells Bailey that it’s not his foot and that he has no control over it. He asks for a surgeon to cut it off. Bailey calls for a Psych consult and the diagnosis he comes up with is Body Dysmorphic Disorder. Bailey says that’s ridiculous, but when the first chainsaw pumpkin carvers come in with missing appendages, she gives foot guy a prescription for anti-anxiety meds so she can have fun with the blood and gore. Meanwhile, Meredith is trying very hard to make me like her by taking the kid trick or treating…for ears. It’s disturbing and hilarious. It’s also effective, as she convinces the Chief to donate resources and Bailey to donate her time as well as get some surgical nurses on board. It looks like the kid is going to get his ears after all. It’s a Halloween miracle!
Norman is following Alex around and complaining of feeling a little under the weather. Alex basically tells him that there’s no crying in baseball and that he needs to suck it up. He pulls back a curtain and there’s Ava! How convenient that she decides to drop by on the episode about things that haunt us. It’s like she and Mer’s VO planned it! She gives Alex crap for chickening out, but Alex is more interested in talking about making out. And of course, by “talking” I mean “doing it.” I guess Norman is on his own.
New patient: A woman comes through with head trauma. A bunch of kids screwing around on Halloween threw a brick through her windshield. Lexie and George recognize her as the woman from earlier, whose dad was in for a heart transplant. Izzie sees brain matter—basically she’s not going to make it, but she’s an organ donor. Hmm, I wonder what ever is going to happen next?
Oh wait. In a shocking surprise shocker, the doctors offer the heart to her dad. He’s creeped out about the whole thing and doesn’t want to take it. George has a nice speech about losing a parent and how if he could have saved his dad by giving him his heart, he would have. The dad agrees, and Dr. Hahn (who was Burke’s rival in season 2) is back to perform the surgery. She’s also back to give Cristina the smackdown about sleeping with her mentors to cover up the fact that she doesn’t have the surgical chops. Ooh, it is so on.
So, here’s something interesting. Meredith and Cristina are having lunch in the cafeteria and George and Izzie sit down. Together. Together, together. What? When did this happen? Apparently Meredith has the same question, because Izzie tells her she can ask. Meredith clarifies that they are in fact together and that it’s “sexy love,” not sibling love. Gross. I do not like this storyline, guys. These two do not need to be together. Although, it turns out they haven’t had sex (again) because of Callie’s feelings. I kind of think that ship has already sailed, but whatever.
Surgery Time: The kid gets his ears, although I’m kind of unclear as to where they came form. Did they take them off of that lady? Did they make them out of rib cartilage? If anybody can enlighten me on this, please do. Turns out foot guy was really serious about that amputation, because when Bailey blows him off, he takes matters into his own hands—literally. He steals one of the pumpkin-carver’s saws and starts the job himself. Bailey finds him, but he’s already sawed it half off. Callie has to finish the job. During surgery, Callie and Cristina bond over their marriage mishaps. George cheated on her! Burke sent Mama to say goodbye! Bad times were had by all—especially Norman, who interrupts the reminiscing by having a stroke. Alex leaves Ava to go tend to Norman, who ends up being okay. She waits for him, but doesn’t quite understand the nature of being a doctor, so when Alex doesn’t return right away, she leaves.
Bailey’s husband is also having a hard time understanding the nature of being a doctor. He and Bailey get into a fight about her missing her son’s first Halloween. Bailey tries to explain that she was giving a boy ears, but her husband isn’t having it. George comes out and apologizes for disappointing her by cheating on his wife. I’ve been vocal about hating how the George/Izzie storyline came out of nowhere, and I still think it did. However, Bailey manages to actually put the situation in context. She says she was there the day his father died and she was there when he came back from Vegas married to Callie. It’s not black and white. What he did was hurtful and unkind, but he’s not a bad guy.
Cristina, who is still haunted by Burke, has it out with Dr. Hahn. She calls her inappropriate and unprofessional. Of course, this is before the Chief tells her that Dr. Hahn is taking Burke’s place. I guess Cristina won’t be scrubbing in on many heart surgeries in the near future. She tells Chief he can’t have the apartment. Aw, that’s our Cristina.
Alex apologizes to Norman for choosing sex over answering his pages. Norman tells Alex that he chose surgery because he heard a voice inside his head that he thought was his dead wife telling him to choose surgery. He thinks that it was his wife’s way of making sure he was around world-renowned surgeons who could save his life. But now that he survived, he’s going to go into Psych so he can take care of the surgeons with all of their inappropriate sex in inappropriate places. Amen to that.
Meredith still hasn’t decided what to do with her mother. The ear boy tells her that when his goldfish died, they flushed him so he went back to the sea. “Back to the sea is better than your cubby.” Ear kid’s got a point. With the Chief’s help, Meredith flushes her mother down the sink in the OR. It’s where she would want to be.
Next week: The more available Derek is, the more Meredith pulls away! So, is it a clip show, then?
