Last week on Grey’s Anatomy, Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) doesn’t want to die emotionally crippled and alone, Hahn (Brooke Smith) is the new head of cardiothoracic surgery, Richard (James Pickens) is getting a divorce, Meredith is commitment phobic.
Tonight’s Grey’s Anatomy begins with Meredith telling Cristina (Sandra Oh) that she can’t sleep without nightmares and panic attacks. Cristina looks up in a psych book that she has severe abandonment issues, and suggests not having breakup sex with Derek (Patrick Dempsey). Meredith knows that the more Derek makes himself available, the more she pulls away, but she makes a sex date in the call room with him later that day anyway.
Richard, who is now crashing at Derek’s trailer in the wilderness, is whiny about eating trout for breakfast. He suggests to Derek that they have a “gentleman’s evening” to take their mind off of their lady troubles. This worries Derek, who is not familiar with the term “gentleman’s evening,” so he invites McSteamy (Eric Dane) along as backup. Naturally, McSteamy hopes that it will be a night of strippers. Bailey (Chandra Wilson) agrees that the first things she thinks of when she hears “gentleman’s evening” are shiny, sequined tassels and one dollar bills.
At the hospital, Izzie (Katherine Heigl) watches George (TR Knight) sleep and snoring in the on-call room. Izzie thinks it’s absurd that they aren’t having sex yet. She wants to have hot, perfect sex tonight, and stresses out about finding the time to shave her legs. Gizzie fans will be sad to know that no hot sex is actually going to take place.
There are several patients who arrive via ambulance to Seattle Grace. There are two women, a blond and a brunette, who are pretty beat up after getting into a fight over a wedding dress. They were engaged in a Hands on a Hard Body-type contest in which each has to hold onto the dress for as long as she can, and the last to let go wins $100,000 wedding. The two brides will be treated by Callie and Mark, who team up to humiliate George as much as possible. Mark tells George to be the blonde’s proxy by holding the dress while Callie (Sara Ramirez) treats her dislocated shoulder. He thus spends most of the episode holding onto a torn and bloody wedding dress.
Another patient named Rick (David Denman, who also plays Roy from The Office) is also brought in. Rick is a skydiver whose parachute didn’t open, and he fell 12,000 feet. Amazingly, he’s still lucid and talking. Even more amazingly, the doctors find out that the only injury he sustained was a ruptured appendix.
Izzie is on Hahn’s cardiothoracic service again tonight, much to Cristina’s dismay, and her patient, Mr. Arnold, needs to have an angioplasty done. Because Izzie has excellent bedside manner, she finds out that the man is a lifelong birdwatcher, and as soon as he’s out of the hospital, he’s going to scout the ivory-billed woodpecker, a very rare species. Cristina wants to switch patients, so she tells Izzie that she’s not hardcore enough to do cardio. She’s only flirting with cardio, while Cristina is married to cardio. Izzie takes this as an insult for her ongoing adultery. Cristina goes back to her skydiver and gets a hold of the video taken from his helmet camera. The fabulous five make some microwave popcorn and sit back to watch the video. They discover that Rick really had a thing for his skydiving instructor Sally, but Sally doesn’t yet know about it.
Hahn can’t get the stent into Mr. Arnold’s artery, but can’t open him up either because he’s allergic to the anesthesia. Cristina, trying to get back into Hahn’s good graces, does some research and finds that they can do the open-heart surgery while he’s awake, giving him an epidural to numb him. Hahn agrees to the surgery but picks Izzie to be her resident. This means that Izzie has to postpone the night of Gizzie sex. Because she can’t help stop thinking about what Mr. Arnold must be going through, she doubts that she is as hardcore as Cristina is. But George encourages her, in a dirty way, so Izzie decides to use her empathy for the patient as a strength. She goes to the trouble of finding a picture of an ivory-billed woodpecker and placing it in the OR where Mr. Arnold could see it.
Richard gets mad at Hahn for not running her awake open-heart surgery past him first, but Hahn bitches him out for running an old boys club, and says that inviting only the male attendings is akin to all-white country clubs denying membership to blacks. She had found out about the gentleman’s evening from McSteamy and Derek, whom she mistakenly assumes are a couple. It’s true that Eric Dane and Patrick Dempsey are awfully cute together. I could get behind this ‘ship.
Alex (Justin Chambers) finds Lexie (Chyler Leigh) hiding in a closet because she’s afraid of running into Cristina. Silly girl, doesn’t she know that supply closets on Grey’s Anatomy exist strictly for illicit sex? Alex finds her there and asks her to help work on the blonde bride, who refuses to have surgery to fix her shoulder. Lexie successfully convinces her to go through with the surgery by telling her that she’s going to have a hunchback if she doesn’t.
George and the brown-haired bride are still holding onto the wedding dress. She tells him that her mother works in a grocery store and has been going into serious debt for the wedding, so she’s doing the contest for her mother. It’s her mother’s dream to have a perfect wedding, so she doesn’t mind enduring the humiliation of the contest. She suddenly faints, and George orders a crash cart to revive her. I sort of missed what was wrong with her, but she’s hurt enough to need surgery. George and Richard operate on her. The chief praises George for being as hardcore as the bride and not buckling under the humiliation that Callie and McSteamy meted out.
Blond girl’s shoulder surgery also goes well, the first thing she asks after she wakes up is if she won. Callie bitches her out and tells her to frickin’ let go. If she has to fight that hard for a wedding, it’s not worth it. Speaking as much about her own situation as the blonde bride’s, Callie says that sometimes it’s not worth it even to fight for a marriage. Callie shares her resolve to let go with George later on, and they actually have a cute moment. George then tells the brown-haired bride that he let go of the dress first, a mild fib. The judge—has he been at the hospital this whole time?—gives her a check for $100,000.
While watching the awake open-heart surgery from the gallery, Derek tells Cristina that he can’t take care of Meredith anymore because she won’t let him. Cristina says that she’s taking care of Meredith. Below, in the OR, Mr. Arnold freaks out that everyone upstairs is watching him. He starts to have a panic attack and yells that he wants the surgery to stop. His blood pressure rises dangerously, and the beepy thing starts going crazy. Izzie calms him down by asking him to pretend the people in the gallery are birds and to tell her about birds. He says that Cristina, who is doing air-surgery, is a purple sandpiper, Derek is a black-headed nightingale thrush, and Richard is a great blue heron. He finally calms down.
Meredith, who has been talking all episode about the moment of clarity she felt after her near-death experience tells her skydiving patient that the clarity will soon go away, so he’s got to tell Sally how he feels right now before the feeling goes away.
Mark and Derek hang out outside the trailer, worrying about what to expect of their gentleman’s evening. Richard arrives to explain that a gentleman’s evening is simply an evening enjoyed by gentlemen, without any ladies present. But they’re not going to have one because Hahn shows up and mocks them. The four spend the night playing monopoly. I bet Hahn kicks everyone’s ass.
Outside the hospital, Lexie asks Alex what he’s doing tonight. He bluntly tells her that the only thing she’s ever going to get from him is sex, that’s it, and that’s not enough for girls like her. He says that he’s not a nice guy and won’t call her the next day and, moreover, he’s still not over someone else. I wonder if he’s talking about Izzie here, or the ghost of Ava?
Izzie and George are about to do the sex, with candles everywhere, but then she starts crying and says she’s so exhausted after spending six and a half hours on her feet in surgery. She’s really good at comic crying. She says their night of sex is like a rara avis and she wants to enjoy it, but she’s sobbing hysterically. George says his hand is killing form holding the dress all day. With a sore hand, what good will it really be for her anyway? So, they just decide to go to sleep, without blowing out their candles, in a sort of anti-PSA.
Meredith voiceovers that you have to give yourself permission not to be hardcore sometimes. She and Cristina snuggle in bed together. Aww, I kind of love them together. She tells Cristina that iit’s not about the sex, but she can’t stop seeing Derek. She feels safe with him and she’s not ready to give that up. Then she gets out of bed to find Lexie and Alex half-naked and fooling around in the hallway, much to Lexie’s chagrin.
-Debbie Chang, BuddyTV Staff Writer
(Image courtesy of ABC)
Staff Writer, BuddyTV
