ABC
Too much. Too Much. TOO MUCH.
If the majority of this season – steeped in the brutal reality of the COVID-19 Pandemic – has been too much, you might need to give this week’s episode a pass for your own emotional well being. It is a brutal, shock-you-to-the-core mirroring of the civil unrest happening all across our country right now. Grey’s has had a blinding spark of real-world activism for the last several seasons and this week’s episode is a heightened jolt of exactly that. (In a sense, it almost exists outside of everything else that has happened in this season because its sole focus is the racial injustice, prevalent racism and inexcusable police brutality that is terrorizing the country from the inside out.)
Last week’s preview showed that the protests were coming. And the episode does not waste time – even having Richard narrate the opening. Hayes is the first protest victim of police violence – snagging Avery in the hospital parking lot to lance up his billy-club busted-open head. (He had taken his boys – who are indeterminately teenage-ish in years – to one of the peaceful protests and the cops came at the boys with billyclubs and Hayes stepped in – all of this happened off-camera before the episode started.) And it all just spirals out from there.
The woman Richard brings in – because he too was out marching peacefully, protesting peacefully – was shot with a tear-gas canister, and the canister was lodged projectile style into her shoulder/neck. Her episode arc is beautiful; she talks about the scars (after Avery & Richard do tests and a surgery to remove the canister) she has received from all the protests she has attended and supported – the very first being the 1963 March on Washington. (And all of this reflecting, which was done in a truly beautiful way, leads Jackson to blast out at Catherine.)
Since we’re on Jackson – it looks like he’s taking off to Bozeman to see his dad (I’m a nerd – I Google-mapped Seattle, Washington to Bozeman, MT and it says 10 hours 45 minutes … and Jackson’s GPS at the end of the episode said ’11 hours’) but that doesn’t happen until after the blowup with Catherine about why he doesn’t have scars – why didn’t she ever encourage him to protest and why was she instead insisting that being educated, doing his job, having the money to change the system from the inside out was the better way to go. And he rails and she says he sounds like his father, and poof – off we go to the estranged father that we met half-a-once several seasons ago (I was sort of hoping he was trekking off to see April since we all know Sarah Drew is coming back at some point this season. But even if she and Matthew, Ruby and Harriet did leave Seattle, I don’t think they went 11 hours away.)
Amid all of the gravity of the protests, we’ve got poor Bailey who tries to treat a COVID-Denier. (He dies, and it’s very, very difficult to feel sympathetic toward that loss, because how can anyone who is living through this pandemic or who has been impacted by this pandemic hear the words they put into that character’s mouth and not be apoplectically livid?) He’s a runner; runners don’t get blood-clots. He has asthma. COVID is a hoax, he says. The doctors make money, which the government pays them, from each COVID patient. It’s a wonder Bailey only had a minor meltdown in the stairwell and not a full on fit herself. The deeply enraging part about this character – just like so many of the greatly overcharged ills and evils that get reflected in Grey’s – is that there are people out there – here in this country – who believe exactly that. And it is just too much.
No Meredith this week (other than her sleeping form being wheeled in and out of the hyperbaric chamber). Oh, and her very realistic voice as she coaches Schmidt through a crisis. They double up patients in the chamber, and the intern who’s in charge of the other patient, has a bit of a misstep and panics, which results in the other patient’s gut bursting open, exposing his intestines. And Schmidt – through the Obi-Wan Kenobi style sentient vocal guidance of Meredith Grey – manages to calmly resolve the situation (which Jo teases him about later, and then admits to having heard that same Meredith-Wan Kenobi voice herself).
The heart-stopping issue this week is Winston Ndugu. It’s difficult to imagine we can care so deeply or be so scared for a character who has been a part of the Grey’s reality for five seconds. (And then we think about Denny, Ava, Henry, etc., and realize that’s exactly what we do …) But as Winston attempts to make the cross-country drive back from Boston – and he’s on the phone with Maggie –
He gets pulled over.
And your heart. Just. Stops.
(Though the episode itself must have been filmed weeks ago, the fact that another innocent black man was murdered during a routine traffic stop less than a week before this episode aired sends all of the spine-gripping fear of reality-come-too-close throughout the body the entire time this story arc is playing out.)
Maggie insists he stays on the phone, turn on his camera if he can. The officer forces him to turn off his phone. There’s even that dizzying, almost nauseating moment, where Winston hears (in that purposefully slow disorientating sound of warped reality) the officer say, ‘Mr. Ndugu, are you failing to comply?’ And then he hangs up the phone.
And Maggie, who is trying to deal with a patient who was shot directly in the chest with a rubber bullet and who keeps crashing because the gunshot was so brutal it bruised his heart into misfiring, cannot get him to answer when she consistently rings back. (The rubber bullet victim also pulls through, but not without the explanation from Hunt and Maggie to Helm that they ARE NOT rubber bullets – they are METAL bullets encased in rubber and that they were NEVER meant to be fired at close range or directly at people.)
The panic. The terror. The fear for Winston is so real (I wasn’t watching in live-time tonight, thank goodness for small miracles because I don’t think I could have handled it without the pause) that it should come with a ‘viewer discretion is advised’ warning. It is incredibly intense.
Winston is finally able to call her back. He is physically unharmed; the cops let him go. (Not without running the drug-sniffing dog through everything he had in the car and leaving it scattered on the side of the road … because his bike rack was supposedly blocking the license plate, and as he says ‘then they saw me and that was it.’) It is harrowing and one of the most intense moments yet this season (and that is saying something).
And even after all of that emotional upheaval, the episode feels like it’s a strange one-off (which it shouldn’t because it is so potent and relevant). Next week we’re back to COVID-Beach (and more of McDreamy – yum!). So this could possibly be how we wash off the series? If she sticks with McDreamy on the beach – in that ‘oh-so-close-to-the-elevator-touchy-non-touchy’ scenes of the primordial MerDer days – then she will not return to the land of the living. And it’s oh so hard to pass up the one great love of her life …
This has been a brutal season; it doesn’t look like it’s about to get any easier.
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