By Michelle Lerner

In the middle of tonight’s episode of GREY’S ANATOMY Christina Yang states what I believe is the central conundrum of the show. She says: “acknowledging your crap, and fixing your crap are two different things.” Oh how right she is.  The show is meta enough that I took this statement as a sign from the producers that they are aware of the shows flaws and are striving to fix them. One can only hope, right?

And tonight’s episode was a decent start. After I watched last week’s episode I felt as though I had been hit by a battering ram. There were so many stories, each yearning to make us laugh, make us cry, and anger us all at the same time. I sat down to write my review emotionally exhausted. In contrast, tonight’s episode was fairly straightforward and simple. I dare say I actually enjoyed it.

I can’t totally make out what new Dr Hahn’s angle is yet. She hates Yang, believing that she likes to sleep with her attending (and why not, the proof is in the pudding.) She talks back to the Chief. She invites herself to the “gentleman’s evening” he is having with Shepard and Sloane. At this early juncture I like her balls and straight forwardness. Hahn injects some womanhood, (missing since Addison Shepard got her own series,) into a show filled with girls.


In a non-story, a skydiver falls twelve thousand feet as his parachutes fail and basically walks away. He is a catalyst for Meredith to wonder at her reaction to her near death experience by drowning (from last season,) and how she hasn’t seized the day with Shepard. It was this plotline that inspired Yang’s aforementioned piece of wisdom. Yang’s advice works on both levels: Grey, either shit or get off the Patrick Dempsey pot. Seriously, you are better then this. They love each other, and it can’t ever work.

The B-story, I guess I should call it, though I think it played out as more of an A, centered on two brides engaged in some stupid contest where, like TWO HANDS ON A HARD BODY, they have to hold onto a dress until one of them is the last one standing. They fall off some sort of platform. One of the girls, the blonde of course, cares for nothing but winning for winnings sake. Sloane appoints George as her proxy when she needs surgery to fix her dislocated shoulder. This is meant to humiliate George, but doesn’t Sloane know? George is unhumiliatable! Nothing can make that guy not find a moral or a heart or a good reason behind doing something. Someone really should kick George’s ass.

Either way, we find out that the other girl holding the dress, a brunette by the way, is doing it for her mom. Apparently her mom loves her so much and is going into debt trying to give her daughter the wedding of both their dreams. Gag. But it was played well. Towards the end, after we’ve heard her tale of woe, the bride collapses, and of course almost dies. And lives and wins. Because of course, the pushy blond can’t win, especially when the first words out of her mouth when she wakes up from surgery are “Did I win??” Callie tells her to let go. But of course, it’s Callie who needs to let go. Of George.

I’ll be honest. Callie didn’t really seem to be holding on to a ton of anger. Sure, she let Sloane ostensibly humiliate George, but it wasn’t really that embarrassing. I would have liked to see Callie go a little crazy, and really prove that she is a hard-core bitch. It would have been fun to see her tormenting Izzy and George. Maybe she would have if she had known they were planning their “perfect night.”


Actually Izzy had an interesting story. As Hahn’s resident of choice, Izzy gets to scrub in on an awake open-heart surgery. Even I got what a big deal that was. Six hours awake, while your chest is open? No thanks! The patient wants to live so that he can go and see an Ivory Billed Woodpecker, a bird once thought extinct but that has recently been rediscovered in Arkansas. I’m glad about the non-extinct bird, but really? That’s the guy’s reason for living? Yikes. He could learn a thing or two about life from Meredith Grey, and that’s kind of saying something.

Anyway, it was touching when Izzy set up the O.R so that the patient would feel comfortable. She rearranged the monitors so he couldn’t see himself, and brought him headphones so he could block out the sounds of the saw that cuts open the breastbone. She pinned up a picture of the woodpecker so he has something to look at during the operation. When he freaks out, paranoid by the fact that a gallery full of people are watching him and his chest, she makes him tell her what birds they all look like. It was good, and it reminded me of what a touching show GREY’S can be.