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Back at Grey-Sloan, things are exploding (both logically and illogically) now that Richard has once again become the VIP patient of primary concern. After last week’s semi-non-sequitur where four of the doctors went off-campus for a lifetime’s worth of flashbacks (and this week Hayes was nowhere to be seen), everyone has returned from the conference in shambles of their normal life.
Teddy wants to bump the wedding up to yesterday because she knows Tom won’t cross the line with a married woman … and apparently she can’t trust herself not to be with Tom again … even though her sleeping with Tom (twice) because she thought that Amelia’s baby might be Owen’s was actually driven by her deeply buried past of losing her lesbian lover, Allison, in the Twin Towers. (In this three-way love drama that we were exposed to for the very first time last week.) Owen finally starts to atone for all of his crap behavior for the last decade’s worth of seasons and we give him CheatyTeddy.
Owen and Link get what was probably going to be the B-storyline funny sideplot if filming were on track for Season 16, but if you cut the two of them (and their singing patient) out of this week’s penultimate episode Season 16 narrative, then you don’t get the reassuring moment when Hunt tells fatherhood like it is and you don’t get the ‘case-related distraction’ that Tom Koracick desperately needs to take his mind off of a highly fatal surgery that only he (or Amelia Shepherd, until she goes into Braxton Hicks) can complete.
Remember when April went of the rails, had a semi-divorce from God and was messing around with Koracick? And we learned he actually was a human being, whose monstrous exterior was a coping mechanism because his son was killed? His ex-wife shows up with a ten-year old boy (her second child who apparently looks just like David, Tom’s dead son) from her new/second/other marriage and he has an inoperable brain tumor-turned spinal tumor – that only Tom can treat. Except he can’t because all he can see is his dead son, so Teddy runs emotional interference for Tom and Amelia perform the surgery. Right up until she goes into labor, which turns out to be Braxton Hicks. But the hilarity of watching Link and Shepherd freak out over the potential then & there birth is pretty hilarious – a bit of the much-needed levity in this episode.
ABC
Maggie can’t seem to stop wallowing in the twitter-meme-shame-spiral of what happened to Richard at the conference; they are all 100% Grade-A Mean-Girl posts (and I hate to give praise to that sort of bullying but it was so spot on – someone really did their research!) And Catherine is busy beating herself up for not being there because she couldn’t kick her pride to the curb when it came to her marriage. (Liked to come through the screen myself when she furthered the delusion and confusion of poor Richard by telling him – yes she was there at the conference with him.) And did Jackson jump shows? Plastics not his thing anymore? Does he bat for Station 19 now? Good riddance.
Bailey is Bailey; taking charge where she needs to and trying to get a handle on this Richard thing before it falls to hell in a hand basket (if it isn’t there already) and way to bring up that minor brain tumor that Derek tackled in Season … 1? Early in 2? It was super early but I also feel like Addison was there when it happened (Richard was the very first of the cast to become a patient in the viewer history of Grey’s Anatomy). Still not convinced that Meredith might not be having whatever Richard was having when she was sitting alone with DeLuca in that research corner towards the end … especially since he rode off to doom/parking lot of no return the week before (but I think that all got shuffled around when the Pandemic hit and they were still on-set enough to realize that they’d have to hurry up and do a big cliff-hanger since they couldn’t stretch things out with the four episodes they were inevitably going to lose.)
Between Richard saying ‘Oh, we’re at Seattle-Grace?’, ‘Adele will kill me if I’m late’ and the moment in the semi-hallucinated OR; I was done. I didn’t believe for a minute that he had actually made it into a fully staffed OR – but the way Meredith handled that – dear God it gave you the shivers. She’s living it again. It’s her mother again; maybe she can’t see it as Alzheimer’s because her mother’s was so early-onset and because her mother was violent and combative most of the time. Hard to say.
If the world survives long enough to get a Season 17 (we should be so lucky!), not sure that the series will survive without Richard. We’ve built up a lot of side-structured elements – like Jo being bestie-roomies with Schmidt, who aside from Helm seems to be the only intern left (they’re flaming out at an alarming rate this year!). And I guess Nico got the ‘parking lot/tour-bus of no return’ write-off, which is fine. He was basically just eye-candy for all (big jerk personality as it turns out.) Still waiting for Addison’s return … which may have been suspended because of the Covid-19 shut-down; hard to say.
DeLuca’s going rogue next week to save Richard, Amelia’s going into labor – water breaking and all – and I guess we’ll find out what happens … on our premature season finale of Grey’s Anatomy.
Grey’s Anatomy airs Thursdays at 9:00 PM on ABC.
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