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Get the tissues. And get your blanket or whatever makes you feel comfortable and safe. This week’s episode needs a hard trigger warning beyond ‘VDA’ because it fully confronts and addresses rape, rape culture, rape survivors, and #metoo with the patient who comes through the ER while Jo is trying to work through her crap with her birth mom. It’s the heaviest episode I can ever recall seeing and it is an emotional breakthrough, though for some it just might be a break.
The cute and adorable bit – that we get as bookends to this brutal emotional roller coaster – is Tuck on the dating scene. He’s ‘talking’ to Kelly. Gotta love Bailey and her ‘why do they need new words? Why can’t they just use the old words?’ And how Ben really steps up to take that in hand so that poor Bailey doesn’t have to talk condoms with her boy. Ben’s sports analogy seems like a really good tool for the beginning discussion of consent and how important that is. Loved that moment with him and Tuck at the end. But that’s really the only bit of lightness we get in this episode so cling to it.
Still sort of frustrated with Jo for her dodging Alex. It’s like she hasn’t grown at all – and I’m not saying this revelation of trauma doesn’t warrant her wanting to be alone and sort through it – but my God, if she hasn’t learned by now to say that to him first thing rather than do the annoying ‘avoid with work’ excuse … it really makes me feel like she hasn’t grown at all.
The streamlining of Jo’s encounter with birth mom and the patient that comes into the ER was a really beautiful and balanced way to handle the episode – sort of feared it was going to be another flash-around like when Jackson went to meet his dad or Alex went to meet his mom, but it actually didn’t dominate the whole episode. Seeing the perfect woman in her house with crown molding who works for the mayor’s office, with her two rowdy teenage kids, fabulous dog and loving lawyer husband gives Jo lots to be judgy about and it seems to take a really long time for her to stop being so judgy, even after that woman starts explaining what happened.
The way Jo’s birth mom explained her ‘best I could’ decisions of giving up Jo … because Jo was the result of a date rape attack – is brutal and heartbreaking. But we just don’t seem to get any relenting from Jo – which doubles down on the stigma of rape culture. Even that back and forth with ‘when I happened’, Jo trying to assert herself as a person and not an event and her birth mother saying ‘When the rape happened.’ It’s really difficult to watch. It isn’t until Jo confesses that when she was married to Paul and he busted her ribs that she had an abortion to save that child from abuser Paul Stadler that we finally see her seeming to understand the situation.
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All of that is brutal enough on its own (and thank Shonda it wasn’t the dark-n-twisty ‘your birth father was Jimmy’, aka Alex’s deadbeat dad, though this isn’t much better) but the really difficult part of the show that the VDA/Trigger warnings apply to comes with a lost and confused looking patient who wanders into the hospital, encounters Jo whilst trying to find the ER.
It becomes really apparent very quickly that the woman has been abused or beaten. It isn’t apparent until Teddy gets brought in that she’s been raped. The scene where that patient, Abby, fully bursts out with her story when Teddy & Jo try to explain to her the option of a rape kit (I want commendations from them never pushing it on her, never trying to force her, and clearly outlining all the steps of consent every step of the way – even if she only does it and never does anything with the kit once she’s done it) brings the full-on tears. The process of going through the rape kit is really intense as well, but handled very tastefully and always every step of the way with consent.
TeamShonda & the writers so brilliantly and brutally capture the reality of rape culture in this time of #metoo that the episode will have you crying long after it’s over. Every stigma about how her skirt was just a few inches too short, how the tequila she drank will make it her fault but the alcohol her rapist drank will be his excuse, how a jury of her peers won’t believe her and how her husband will think it’s a sorry excuse to cover her own ass because they had had a fight about the laundry before she went to the bar and started flirting. That it was her fault for flirting. All of the ‘blame the victim’ culture that we have let go on for far FAR too long comes out in that speech and it Brings. The. Tears.
Drink lots of water for this episode because the tears aren’t over. Just when you think it can’t get any more emotional – Shonda & Team orchestrate this stand of solidarity – a physical representation of what we all wish we could visualize for #metoo. She literally lines every female doctor, nurse, and employee of that hospital (including series favorite Bohkee who gets more and more time outside of the ER these days!) on both sides of the hallway as they wheel the patient Abby down to her surgery to fix the diaphragm rupture that her rapist caused during the attack. THAT is a moment of ugly-cry solidarity, women standing (literally) in support of women.
This is an episode of female truth, female voice, female empowerment. It is NOT the victim’s fault. And it puts firm ground under a stigma – that regrettably is taking far too long to change – that no matter what you’re wearing, what you drank, whether you were flirting, what you did – rape and being attacked is NEVER YOUR FAULT. Teddy points it out at the end, commends Jo’s work with the patient, and just brings it all home for everyone to really think about. The episode’s one mistake might have been not titling it ‘#METOO’ the way they re-titled the episode where Jo encountered Paul at Grey-Sloan as ‘1-800-799-7233’ Well done, TeamGrey’s.
Grey’s Anatomy airs Thursday at 8:00 PM on ABC.
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