On tonight’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy, Dead!Denny! takes over voiceover duties for Meredith. He says something about believing in both heaven and hell, despite not having seen them. Wait, so is it really Izzie who is voiceovering? Or does Dead!Denny! actually exist in his own right?
There’s scary music and scenes of PDR Guy bashing his head in. He starts seizing, but Meredith ignores her page. Sadie (Melissa George) and a murse respond to the call, but Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) tells Sadie to go find something else to do. Meredith wants to stall a bit to make sure that PDR Guy is good and brain dead so that his organs can be put into Bailey’s little boy patient, Jackson. Let me just say that if you thought that Eric Stoltz was creepy in his first two episodes, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. He’s seizing and bleeding out from the back of his skull and his eyes are rolling all around inside his head. Yeesh.
Meanwhile, at home, Izzie (Katherine Heigl) is trying to sleep, but she can’t make Dead!Denny! go away. She wants to know why he’s still here, even after she broke up with him. He says that can’t go because he’s here for her. You know, with all this dark lighting and ghosts not going away, it’s looking like pretty a Supernatural-y Grey’s Anatomy. Izzie should watch her back.
At the hospital, Alex (Justin Chambers) tells Bailey (Chandra Wilson) that Jackson is now officially at the top of the list for a liver and small bowel transplant, but even that can’t help him. He needs a miracle, probably in the form of a suicidal serial killer, now.
Meredith finally goes in to attend to her PDR patient. She pages Bailey, not Derek. PDR Guy is hanging onto consciousness by a thread and tells Bailey that he’s an organ match for Jackson, and he’s ready to die. The two doctors take their conversation out into the hallway where Bailey orders Meredith to do everything she can to save her patient’s life. They are doctors, not executioners. But the conviction in Bailey’s voice falters.
Major McHottie (Kevin McKidd) has slept off his drunkenness from last episode of Grey’s Anatomy in Cristina’s bed. He wakes up, but nobody is beside him.
Bailey puts Izzie on Jackson-watch duty, but Izzie is still being haunted by Dead!Denny! Arizona Robbins and Richard suggest that they try using a liver dialysis machine to buy them a few more hours. Bailey has a little breakdown in front of Robbins about not wanting Jackson to die. She wants off the case, and Robbins tells her that she needs to get some rest. Predictably, Bailey does no such thing.
Derek (Patrick Dempsey) shows up to work and immediately makes with the smooching with Meredith. He’s all in a good mood because McMommy likes Meredith and gave him her engagement ring for when he proposes. Meredith gets avoidy because she doesn’t want to tell him what she did to the PDR Guy, but he hardly notices.
The semi-comic relief portion of this very intense episode involves Mark (Eric Dane) and Lexie (Chyler Leigh). They very formally call each other Dr. Sloan and Dr. Grey, respectively, and flounce through the hallway into an on-call room. They make no effort to do the deed with any discretion, as the other interns observe, because their sex sounds are loud and porny, until the unthinkable happens. Mark screams in real, agonized pain. Uh oh, Little Grey broke Little Sloan! Lexie 911-pages Callie (Sara Ramirez) and stutters out an explanation that Mark is badly injured in a very bad way. Makes me think of Will Farrell’s character in Austin Powers. (“I’m very badly injured!”) Callie doesn’t believe her at first, but when she sees the panic in Lexie’s eyes, they both rush over to Mark’s room.
Callie and Major McHottie examine Mark’s broken penis. It is indeed broken, and they need to operate on it. Alright, clearly I’m no medical expert, and being female, I’m also not exactly a penile physiology expert. But I didn’t think there is an actual bone in the penis, is there? What exactly is broken here? Major McHottie will operate, but Mark doesn’t want a “meatballer” like him to do it. Lexie pops her head in to see how he’s doing, and he begs her not to stay and see him all broken like this. My, but he’s nice to look at when he’s not wearing a shirt, even if he’s not up to the job, if you know what I mean!
In front of Lexie, the other interns speculate about who would be enough of a sex-crazed vixen to break a man like Sloan. Sick of hearing it, Lexie tells them to shut up. They are just about to figure out that it was Lexie, but then Sadie (Melissa George), knowing the truth, jumps in and takes the heat away from her. Later on, after the surgery, Lexie apologizes for breaking him and humiliating him. But she says that she is not going anywhere and, in fact, is going to climb into bed with him and stroke his hair. And then she does just that. Sadie is playing lookout out in the hallway.
Meanwhile, Cristina and Major McHottie are both at work now. He finds her and apologizes for showing up drunk and late. She’s very cool about it and says everything’s OK. She says that he doesn’t have to talk about it, which is exactly the opposite thing normal people would tell him, but exactly the thing that she would say.
PDR Guy is fading fast, and Meredith gives him an out. She says that he can stop this at anytime, but he doesn’t want to stop. Instead, he probes Meredith about her personal life, deducing that she and Derek are a couple.
Richard (James Pickens Jr.) instructs George (T.R. Knight) to see if there are any patients on life support who are O-positive or brain dead, and then cross-check them with Jackson to see if any of them match.
Derek, giddy as a schoolboy, asks Cristina for her opinion on the engagement ring. He also asks her to make up with Meredith already because when he proposes, she’s going to need someone to freak out to. So true! And so understanding on Derek’s part. I’m actually impressed. However, Cristina gives him the brush off.
Izzie is still being tormented by Dead!Denny! (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) who asks her if she believes in heaven. He passive-aggressively tells her that being with her was like heaven, but not anymore, after she broke up with him. Now it’s like hell. She has a really tense imaginary conversation with him, and he keeps insisting that he’s here for her but he can’t leave. She doesn’t know what it means that he’s here for her, but he tells her to use her doctor skills to figure it out.
Meredith looks at Cristina as if she wants to talk, and from the look in her eyes, Cristina figures out that she did something to the PDR patient. Cristina rushes over to PDR and examines him, while Meredith insists that he’s going to die anyway, and if he dies that day, they can save the life of the boy. But at that moment, PDR changes his mind. He doesn’t want to die and begs for help. Cristina pages Derek right away.
In the middle of examining Jackson under Robbins’ tutelage, Dead!Denny! babbles on and on about what he wishes he could do, causing Izzie to wig out in a major way. He keeps talking over Robbins, and Izzie is having a hard time concentrating. She breaks and yells at Dead!Denny! which, of course, confuses the hell out of Robbins and Alex.
Derek reprimands Meredith for not being honest about PDR’s status, insisting that because he is a serial killer, he doesn’t have the luxury of having his wishes met. He also says that PDR preys on women and that he was playing her. Meredith stands her ground, and as punishment, he makes her scrub in on the surgery to save his life. Bailey watches them as they wheel him to the OR.
Meanwhile, George has found a match for Jackson. He’s not a donor, and they’re about to unplug him, so we know that he’s not talking about PDR. Bailey starts having second thoughts about using PDR’s organs, and interrupts the surgery. She asks Derek to stop the operation and give her his organs. Derek tells her to leave, but she continues her plea. He reminds her about the Hippocratic Oath. Right, like they’ve ever considered the Hippocratic Oath before on Grey’s Anatomy. Derek decides that it’s all up to Bailey. It’s her call on whether he is a surgeon or an executioner. After a long and excruciating pause, she tells him to proceed with the surgery to save his life.
Richard asks the wife of the match George found if they could pretty please have his liver and bowels, but the woman says no and please go away. But, instead of respecting her wishes, Richard tries again with the wife of the brain dead guy. He pressures her into reconsidering the organ donation.
Alex chides Izzie for indulging in talking to dead guys while they are supposed to be treating a dying boy. Izzie, continuing her descent into insanity, pulls Dead!Denny! into an empty room and demands to know whether he’s really alive, or a ghost, or what. He tells her to think like a scientist, but that isn’t helping her figure it out since she really can see and feel and smell him.
Derek and Cristina save PDR’s life and his brain. Meredith laments how much of a waste it is. Meanwhile, Jackson’s mother breaks down, and Izzie comforts her and tells her that medical miracles happen all the time. Alex comes to get her because Jackson is about to die. So sad! But there are still 12 minutes left in the episode, so we know that there’s still hope for him. Right at that moment, Richard rushes in and yells, “We have organs!” Everyone jumps into action to get ready for the transplant. Let’s hope that nobody drops any organs on the floor.
Izzie runs outside, visibly distraught. She finally realizes that she’s sick and the reason why he’s there is because of what’s wrong with her. She gets angry, yelling at him that he could have told her the truth all along. But now that she knows she’s sick, Dead!Denny! says that he can go now. Coming back to be with her was like heaven to him, but at the same time, it was hell to her. She tells him to go because she chooses heaven, she chooses life. He looks at her sadly, gives her one last lingering kiss, and then disappears. Isn’t anyone outside, watching her?
PDR regains consciousness and admits to Meredith that he indeed was playing her. He wanted to destroy her career, he says. He asks her to be present at his execution.
Major McHottie sits down next to Cristina and tells her that he had their whole date completely planned out before he got piss-drunk and ruined it. He wanted to take her to the West Point Lighthouse to watch the northern lights. (I appreciate the nod toward realism here – the West Point Lighthouse is an actual place in Seattle – but a quick Google search shows that it’s nearly impossible to see the northern lights from Seattle. Tsk tsk, Grey’s Anatomy writers!) He asks for another chance. She agrees to it, despite the fact that they both know that he has big problems.
Bailey confesses to Richard that she crossed a line today, but so did he. Jackson’s surgery went well, but because they had to wait so long for the organs, they don’t know if he’s even going to wake up and whether he’ll have permanent brain damage. She breaks down and weeps.
The episode ends with PDR’s execution. He walks in, and the families of his victims are in the viewing gallery. Meredith is also there, sitting in the back row. He stares at her as he is lethally injected. Afterwards, she walks out into the parking lot of the prison where Derek is waiting for her. She breaks down in tears and says that she wanted to show him compassion and that’s why she went, but it was horrible. He drives her to Cristina’s and begs her to talk to Meredith because she won’t stop crying. Yay, they are finally making up. They don’t hug or anything because they don’t do hugs, but I think their fight is over.
In the hospital, Jackson wakes up and asks for water. Looks like the kid is going to be alright.
-Debbie Chang, BuddyTV Staff Writer
(Image courtesy of ABC)
Staff Writer, BuddyTV
