By Michelle Lerner
The theme of this week’s episode of GREY’S ANATOMY was high school. As if we needed reminding that Seattle Grace is run by essentially the same set of social guidelines as your local public school. (I would reference GOSSIP GIRL but those kids are way more sophisticated then the GREY’S crowd; Blair Waldorf could eat Meredith Grey for lunch. If she ever ate lunch.) There’s the in crowd, with Derek Shepard as most popular and Meredith Grey as the mysterious beauty. There are the nerds who are too smart to care, like Christina Yang. There are the overachievers like Dr. Miranda Bailey. Yeah we get the point.
But the episode spends the whole hour driving it home. The inciting incident was a high school bus crash. Among the patients were; an outsider with a pencil through the eye and a loyal best friend, a bitchy pom squad captain who broke her ass, and Dr. Bailey’s high school crush, who is now a teacher.
The teacher-crush, Marcus King, is still trying to get Miranda to do his homework, (in this case patient paperwork,) and succeeding. At the end of the episode, after Bailey has saved his life, and he takes her for granted again, O’Malley exhorts her to “give him a long speech.” You know what? For once that pipsqueak O’Malley is right. It would be in satisfyingly in character for her to march back in there and give Marcus King a piece of her mind. Instead Bailey gives her speech to Shepard. This is so we can learn that he was an ugly dork in high school. Of course he was; he’s still perfect, and overcoming massive dorkiness just makes him more perfect. But it’s so contrived. Yawn.
The pencil eye’d kid and his best friend are meant to be the “outsiders” who no one really knew. But they are both way too pretty. Just before pencil kid goes into surgery he talks to his mom on his friend’s phone, which dies as he tells his mom he loves her. Then he blames her crappy phone. Some friend. Either way, he’s gonna be in a comma for the rest of his life, leaving her alone with the wolves she goes to high school with. The writers present such a cliché view of high school, that I can see why this would be upsetting. The pretty girls are fake. The pom girls are conniving. The outsiders are us. But the truth is, like all of life, high school is a complicated place. I get wistful thinking that the GREY’S of three seasons ago might have taken a deeper, more level look at teenage life, instead of giving us cartoon outlines of reality.
Their one concession to contrasts is the portrait of Lexie Grey; the high school prom queen and valedictorian, who now has an alcoholic father to watch over. The best moment of the show was when Meredith tried to school Lexie about their dad. Condescendingly informing Lexie that their father was in the E.R., charming yet drunk, and that Lexie might want to keep a better eye on him, Meredith hyperventilates when Lexie says in many words what in real life she would have said in two: Fuck off. As it was, Lexie held her own. So I don’t totally get Karev’s beef, but whatever, he and Lexie are finally starting to have a little chemistry. Meredith ends up confiding in the chief, who refers to himself the nice principal. Um, subtle.
Shepard seems to have some chemistry too, with an O.R nurse he only noticed for the first time that day, when she mentioned during surgery that Seattle Grace is a cliquey place. Which brings us right back to the beginning. The new nurse could be like that freshman that ends up going to the prom with the captain of the soccer team; the new new thing.