ABC
Grab the tissues (again) because Grey’s isn’t done with the emotional torment, and just as dramatic as the winter season finale, the spring season crossover opener packs just as much of a gut-punch.
We left off with Meredith being put on the ventilator as she spirals downward into her Covid-19 illness. And one of the most gut-wrenching moments this episode is when Maggie (who is finally pulled out of hotel-sexlandia) and Amelia tell Zola that her mother is on the ventilator. It’s not even that poor Zola, who vocally acknowledges that her father never came off of that machine that breathes for you, realizes that her mom might die, but the heart-crushing, tear-filled decision she makes to ‘not tell Bailey and Ellis unless we have to, they’re just too young to understand.’ It’s so heart-breakingly real. How many children are in this exact situation with their parents or grandparents and have younger siblings who just will not understand, as the United States Covid-19 death toll passes 527,000?
And that was just one of the ugly-cry moments of tonight’s episode.
Jo Wilson loses her patient, after fighting with Hayes to bring the very sick premie baby, who also needs surgery, to see her mother – who has never held her or even seen her since birth. There’s even a ‘what if it were Meredith’ moment that Jo uses to get Hayes to concede the point, and a tender expression of how he was kinder, better, nicer before his wife died. And while that’s difficult, it just adds to the rest of the traumas unfolding all around.
Before the big traumatic moment(s) blow us all to smithereens, there is some sexy ridiculous fun – and a little bit of awkward hilarity. Maggie and Winston are having all the nonsense in that hotel room of theirs … right until Jackson (because Atticus doesn’t know how else to get Amelia to not implode without Maggie, and Maggie has gone off the reachable grid – so naturally the best person to go and get a hold of Maggie is Jackson …) interrupts their hotel hotness. So that’s awkward. And hilarious. And even more awkwardly hilarious when Winston makes the discovery in the backyard of the Grey household that Jackson is Maggie’s ex. (But seriously that’s all the levity we get this entire episode.)
Levi has a pretty heart-breaking moment as well. He’s shaken beyond belief when he realizes that Opal (the sex-trafficking baddie who Carina and Andrew went off chasing at the end of the Winter finale and spent all of the Station 19 season opener catching up to – and yes – that bitch is in custody) was someone he treated and that he didn’t put two and two together and now horrendous things have happened because of it. But what’s worse is that when he has that realization (after taking himself off one case only to be on Jo’s patient’s case, who then dies) he sits in an on-call room with Niko and says, ‘We’re never going to get a memo saying Covid is over, go back to your normal life,’ and laments how he believes he may have wasted his whole life pretending to be someone he wasn’t, and that all that time he could have been happy is gone and may never come back. That is as harrowing as Zola’s mature beyond her years decision to not tell Ellis and Bailey about Meredith on the vent. He’s right. This pandemic isn’t just going to end – and for so many, the chances that were had to do this or that or be happy or even just live life – may never come again.
The case he took himself off of – Andrew DeLuca. Who in his attempt to stop Opal, the sex trafficking fiend, gets stabbed at the train station. It forces Teddy & Owen to work together (though Owen scathingly tells Altman that she shouldn’t read into it – that he only needed her because of their training together in Iraq) and it causes Teddy to try and reconcile with Tom, which just dissolves into a disaster as she tells him she never loved him.
At first, the very gimmicky nonsense of ‘we need to get Meredith and DeLuca together on the beach so let’s have him need major traumatic emergency surgery’ is so lame, it’s infuriating. Right up until he sees his mom. And Meredith tells him that if she goes back (to real life?) and he doesn’t, that she’ll miss him. And he tells her that it will be okay. It’s really, really hard to be pissed at the show writers for using that gimmick, when they ultimately kill the character off.
And then you can’t help but wonder if – since the series’ future is currently up for debate (and in the air quite possibly higher than it has ever been …) if this is just the new norm. Everyone gets to come to the beach to say goodbye to Meredith and that there is no life after Covid for Grey’s Anatomy.
It was touching to reunite Andrew DeLuca with his dead mother on the beach. It’s going to be very hard, after watching him come to terms with his mental illness and get a hand on it and do the right thing and make peace with Meredith, to see him leave the show. (He’s only been there a handful of seasons compared to others, but he’s made an impact all the same.)
But real life death – non-Covid death is still happening here in the real world. Why wouldn’t it be happening at Grey-Sloan too? The preview for next week shows the much-anticipated return-return of McDreamy … and I guess we should all hope that it’s Derek pushing Meredith back to the kids and not out fishing with him.
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