We all get at least one good wish a year, as Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) voiceovers at the beginning of tonight’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy. Cristina (Sandra Oh) stands over the whoosh! vent in the hospital basement where she kissed Major McHottie last, as we cut to Meredith and Derek (Patrick Dempsey) waking up with an early morning quickie before work. Except that the sun is already brightly streaming in through the windows. If the Grey’s Anatomy producers knew anything about Seattle, they would know that in January, sunlight is hard to come by. I would say that it looks to be about 10 in the morning. Slackers.
Meredith and Cristina are still in a fight, so things get tense when they are both assigned to the pit for a trauma patient with Derek and Major McHottie (Kevin McKidd). The patient is a PDR (patient, death-row) with major stab wounds. Richard (James Pickens Jr.) warns them to keep quiet about the case to everyone else, but we all know that you have to have loose lips in order to work at Seattle Grace, so there’s no chance of that happening. It’s also Izzie’s birthday today, but we’ll get to that later.
Lexie (Chyler Leigh) sidles up to Mark (Eric Dane) in the x-ray room to say a cute hi, but he immediately gets jumpy, saying that because of his promise to Derek not to put Little Sloan in Little Grey, their sex – as mind-blowing as it was – can’t happen again.
Alex (Justin Chambers) and Bailey (Chandra Wilson) have a little boy patient with severe bowel problems. Bailey has been treating him for the past three years and has grown very fond of him and his single mom. Dr. Kenley, the attending pediatric surgeon on the case whom we have curiously never met before, keels over from a heart attack in the middle of talking to the boy. Oh well, I guess we’ll never get to know him. Alex calls a code blue, but it’s too late because the old guy is gonzo. Richard doesn’t take the news very well and finds an empty room to retreat to for practically the entire episode.
Meanwhile, the boy is busy filling out paperwork to have a wish granted by the “wish people.” (Maybe Grey’s Anatomy wasn’t allowed to use the name of the Make-A-Wish Foundation?) Dr. Kenley was going to sign the application for him but now that he’s dead, the kid asks Alex to do it. But Alex refuses to because he doesn’t think the kid is dying and wants to help keep his spirits up.
George (T.R. Knight), Callie (Sara Ramirez) and Mark have a patient who has had six broken bones in the last ‘s patient is a woman who has had six broken bones in the last year due to a benign tumor near a gland that is leaching calcium from her bones. Every time this patient gets bad news, she raises her eyes and hands heavenward and yells, “Come on!” After like two or three times, it really starts to get annoying. Lexie and Sadie ask to be on the tumor removal with Callie and Mark, which results in a great little scene with Callie and Mark getting alternately tongue-tied due to the presence of their respective objects of lust. Mark explains to Callie about the “teach me” sex with Lexie: “I had no control. She violated me with her nakedness!”
Later on, Mark and Callie try making out in an on-call room to try to get their minds off of Lexie and Sadie, but they can’t stop thinking about all the naughty intern flesh. Callie suggests that they be each other’s sponsors, like a Sexaholics Anonymous program. These two are not technically a couple, but I think that Mark and Callie are my favorite pair in all of Grey’s Anatomy.
Dr. Arizona Robbins is the new pediatric surgeon who will taking over Dr. Kenley’s patients, including the boy with the bowel problems. She, however, doesn’t agree with the course of treatment that Kenley have been doing, and wants to try something new, ruffling Bailey’s feathers in the process. Robbins agrees to try operating on the boy one last time to appease Bailey, but in the middle of the surgery, she finds that there’s not much they can do, and that he should have been on the transplant list a year ago. Sad! Maybe the kid is dying after all, in which case Alex damn well better sign that wish application for him. After the operation, Bailey finds Richard lying alone in the dark to complain to him about Robbins, but Richard tells her to just deal with it.
The PDR patient is in a lot of pain. Meredith and Major McHottie remember that their role here is to save his life as they would save anyone else’s life, but Derek and Cristina are very unsympathetic and cruel towards him. The x-ray comes back and shows that the weapon he was stabbed with (a toothbrush that had been melted down and formed into a sharp point) is still lodged into his spine. The PDR patient, who is scheduled to be executed in a week, explains that if he is paralyzed (by keeping the object in his spine), he might be able to argue in court for a stay of execution. Derek doesn’t want to let him stay paralyzed because he’s pro-death penalty (or pro-punishment, as he puts it), but Meredith reminds them that they don’t know the circumstances of his incarceration and they shouldn’t judge him.
Izzie discusses at length with Ghost Denny (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) that she needs to tell Alex about their weird imaginary relationship. After much procrastinating, she finally tells him that she sees dead people. Alex is sweet but doesn’t really take her seriously.
The PDR patient notices that the interaction between Meredith and Cristina is extremely frosty. (You know what, though? For the life of me, I can’t really remember what it is that they are fighting about. Anyone?) He bonds with Meredith, telling her that he got into a fight with a friend who stabbed him in the back with the toothbrush. The patient wants more morphine because of all of his pain, but Derek refuses to administer any more because he doesn’t think he deserves to have his pain lessened. Behind Derek’s back, Meredith gives him more morphine, and Cristina asks him what he did to get on death row. He slit the throats of five women, just for the fun of it, just to see what it would feel like. Turned out that he quite enjoyed it, but then he got caught.
Derek seeks out Richard in the dark, empty room where he’s been hiding out all day. Richard confesses that he’s not moping and shirking work because of Kenley’s or anyone else’s mortality. He’s slacking off because he’s worried about the failure of the hospital. He says bitterly that they can’t keep attending surgeons on staff because they’re either quitting or dying, and it’s no wonder that Seattle Grace is number 12. No, Richard, maybe you’re number 12 because you’re sitting on your ass all day instead of working.
Izzie finds Alex again and explains just how much she sees Denny, even going so far as to tell him that they even have sex together. Alex is very understanding about it, and knows that sometimes people do weird things to get over the death of a loved one. Alex does some, um, naughty things to her to help her forget about him. Later on, Izzie, alone with Denny in the room after boinking Alex, tells Denny that she really wants to be with Alex, since he’s still alive and all.
Arizona Robbins says that the kid needs to go on the transplant list as soon as possible, but Bailey wants a second opinion. Robbins goes off on her, calling her out on the fact that Bailey has been second-guessing her all day. After getting the second opinion, Bailey realizes that she’s right and tells the boy and his mother about getting a transplant. It’s kind of heartbreaking the way Bailey chokes back her tears while talking to them. The kid asks Alex to sign his Wish Foundation form, which he does right away.
The surgery on the PDR patient was really awkward, with Cristina and Meredith passive-aggressively competing with each other. After the operation, Major McHottie finds Cristina looking a bit defeated and offers to talk about it with her. But she unleashes on him for being nice to her only when it’s convenient for him. (Only a little bit earlier, he blew her off because he was in work-mode.) She is sick of his hot-and-cold routine and tells him to leave her alone.
Sadie asks Meredith to get a drink, but she’s not in the mood. Sadie reminds her about the time they had a huge fight in the past, and warns her that if she doesn’t make things right with Cristina, then Cristina will never talk to her again. Either that, or she’ll stab her in the back with a toothbrush.
The tumor patient’s surgery goes well, and afterwards, she says that she’ll be moving to Denver as soon as she recovers to track down the man she loves. This inspires Mark, who is hanging out with Callie at the bar, to throw caution and one-step programs to the wind and get him some more Little Grey. Callie gulps down shot after shot to keep herself from going after Sadie, but hello, isn’t alcohol the absolute worst thing for her right now if she wants to withstand temptation?
At long last, Richard decides to come out of his dark, little room. Bailey admits to him that Robbins is a good doctor after all, but their patient might not make it. Richard helps her look through the boy’s file to see if there is anything they can do to save his life.
Derek comes home to tell Meredith why he is so “pro-punishment,” so to speak. He says that his father died because two guys shot him after he wouldn’t give up his watch, a watch that his mother had saved up a long time for. That’s why he is against criminals and doesn’t want to treat them like everybody else. Then, in an (admittedly adorable) effort to be a Cristina-like person for Meredith, he turns up the music really loud and invites her to dance to make her feel better. He’s a terrible dancer – he all but does the white man’s overbite – but it’s a really cute scene, and he does indeed seem to help elevate Meredith’s mood.
Elsewhere in the house, Alex presents Izzie with her birthday gift, which is cake with pink frosting that he made himself. Awww, so cute! Izzie doesn’t have a single thing she wants to wish for (she has everything she could ever want), so Alex advises her to wish that things stay exactly the same.
Next Thursday on Grey’s Anatomy, Meredith gets to meet Derek’s mother, and the PDR patient causes more strife between Meredith and Derek.
-Debbie Chang, BuddyTV Staff Writer
(Image courtesy of ABC)
Staff Writer, BuddyTV
