By Michelle Lerner

I am a sucker for a Halloween episode. I just love seeing what costume departments come up with. And it’s funny to see a bit of supernatural in non-supernatural shows. So when GREY’S ANATOMY started out implying that it would be Halloween themed, I was excited to see what they did with it.

And it got off to a good start! Meredith has a silly dream at the very beginning. But it turns out Meredith’s mother, ensconced in an urn in Meredith’s closet is haunting her. So Meredith decides to tote her mom’s ashes around in a plastic baggy until she can figure out what to do with them. Ok. I’ll go with that. It’s creepy and funny. I was more excited when a guy with a perfectly healthy foot showed up, asking for a surgeon to amputate it. He swore it wasn’t his foot, but belonged to someone else. A classic Halloween mystery! I was even charmed by the precocious earless boy, trick or treating for ears. And when Eva, the reconstructed mom who Karev fell in love with last season, showed up, I thought that I might just be in for a very satisfying episode.

I was pretty wrong. At first I was happy enough. I got tangled up in all the possible outcomes in the first half hour. I almost cheered when Callie announced at rounds to a room full of residents that izzy had slept with George. When Yang left lunch in a judgmental huff, I experienced a sense of anticipation that harkened back to the early days of GREY’S, and for even that I’m grateful. And Karev and Eva still have really good chemistry.

But what I ended up with was: no resolution about why the foot guy so urgently needed to get that foot off, a dad who has to chose to take his daughter’s heart, and a rant from Bailey about black and white and shades of grey. Sigh.

All the writers in the room at GREY’S must suffer from A.D.D. They never let a scene play out long enough so that you connect to the characters in it. I could intellectually feel for the father who has just lost his daughter in a sudden and senseless way (a kid threw a brick off the highway and it hit her car,) and now must choose to have her heart in his own chest or not. It’s a terrible choice. But there’s no logic in having him refuse it, only to accept it two minutes later, after a nimble little speech by George O’Malley. Ugh.


I was enjoying the catalog of horrors Callie and Yang were laughing over in the O.R. They are the two best things on the show. I would have liked to see the emotional end to that desperate hysterical conversation, instead of having the ancient intern Norman fall to the ground with a stroke. It’s manipulative, and it’s also cowardly of the writers. Instead of exploring how people feel, they throw an emergency into a show cluttered with emergencies. Norman has been contrived from day one, and for his story line to play out in this shallow way is disappointing. They didn’t even have the kindness to give him some sort of fireworks for his exit. Instead he is transferring to Psych.

By the end, even the sweet earless boy was bugging. As he wakes from his surgery, his sweet head adorably wrapped with gauze, he beckons Meredith close with a little monitor-clad finger. He tells her a story about a goldfish he flushed down the toilet so it could go back to the sea after it died. Jesus. Really? Morality tales from a ten-year-old? I almost gagged. Flush me down the toilet. Please. And I still don’t know why that guy needed to get rid of his foot so badly that he ended up taking a chainsaw to it! All I know now, is that Callie and Yang are going to live together (good.) I know the George and Izzy made it through a terrible day (huh?), Bailey is in trouble with her husband (ok,) and that Derek needs to start dating (why exactly?)  I want Eva back!