Notice how good Grey’s Anatomy gets when it focuses on the medicine and ignores people’s drama?
“Everyone was everywhere,” Owen (Kevin McKidd) told the Chief (James Pickens, Jr.) last night on Grey’s Anatomy. That, in a nutshell, is what happened to Seattle Grace following the so-called invasion last week. Everyone was competing for surgeries, trying to one-up each other, and essentially acting like dogs peeing to assert their territory.
On “I Saw What I Saw”, an otherwise routine burn patient died, and while the cause was quite explicit (bleeding due to multiple organ failure, I think), no one knew exactly what happened, no one knew how she went from point A to point B, from simple enough burn victim to a casualty. Why? Because she was passed on from one doctor to another with no one really taking charge to oversee everything. And when someone noticed, it was too late.
In the midst of the chaos, the dozen hands trying to revive her, the droning lull of the sound of flat-lining, the message of the whole episode became clear – the case was the representative and ultimate result of all the squabbling, the ugly competition, the insensitive selfishness.
And Derek (Patrick Dempsey) gave the chief the blinding flash of the obvious: there are simply too many doctors who don’t know each other, who don’t trust each other. And because of the merger, the chaos that characterized that fateful OR became systematized and maybe even encouraged a little bit.
In the end, when the person who was fired was indeed fired (no spoilers please), my very first thought bubble was: will Grey’s do a Survivor-like kind of thing to deal with the blatant overcrowding, eliminating one person after another until we have the toughest group?
Otherwise, it was an awesome episode. Flashbacks are made of win, especially when you sort of know the ending, and everything feels like a gradual build-up to it.
And what a gruesome, gruesome episode, too! Axes lodged on chests, exposed burnt skin being sliced, and throats being slit without so much as a hey. It’s one of the more blood-, exposed skin-, and organs-laden episode we’ve seen in a while on Grey’s, and while a medical show is not all about that, you kind of look for it.
What did you think of tonight’s episode?
PS. Guess what, the title of the episode next week is “Give Peace a Chance” – see how quickly predictable that became?
– Glenn Diaz, BuddyTV Staff Columnist
(Image courtesy of ABC)
Staff Writer, BuddyTV
