ABC
Well if there’s one way to guarantee you’ll get a 19th season, it’s to leave the 18th season with every doctor BUT Meredith Grey having basically flown the coupe from Grey-Sloan Memorial. Hunt & Altman — gone. Bailey — gone. Webber — gone. Residents — gone.
But let’s back it up for just a moment here.
Where does one even begin with this insanely crazy and yet oddly surreal two-hour season finale?
How about right at the end with Meredith sitting in the chief’s office — looking beaten as all hell with her intern self staring back at her. THAT was a really striking profound moment and brought about all the tears — and none of the fixed cast even died! (Two patients didn’t make it but that’s to be expected from time to time.)
The big focus, aside from the result of the accreditation for the residency program, is the blood shortage. (A real life mirror from the medical community.) Bailey’s set up a blood drive, encouraging doctors to donate while they wait for blood. And we get that shameful reminder of one of the many broken facets of our health care system. Sexually active gay men are not legally allowed to donate blood. So Schmidt can’t donate.
And then at the end of ‘Out For Blood’ aka the first half of the two-hour finale, Bailey — who is tangled up in a huge mess — gets a phone call from Ben. Saying there’s been an accident. And she asks was he in it and he says to her, ‘No, but you were.’ Did anybody else for one hot second think they were going all Meredith on COVID Beach/Denny-tumor reality there? That Bailey has just been in some horrific coma-nightmare this whole time and that the accreditation wasn’t actually happening? Turns out he just meant her blood — the hospital’s blood — now washing down the street drains on some street in the rain.
But Bailey can’t really focus on that because Hunt and Altman are going on the lam. Remember all that death with dignity stuff Hunt was trying to give to a bunch of his fellow veterans? Well one of them from Utah shows up demanding life-ending drugs for his wife, and when Teddy and Owen basically tell him he’s either got to move to Washington where they can vouch for him having been a longtime resident, that they’ll pay for the move and all that so that they can legally prescribe his wife physician assisted suicide for death with dignity — and he does’t accept that option and then basically turns them into Bailey — they decide they have no choice but to flee.
Of course Bailey catches them mid-flee-attempt, and despite their best efforts to explain to her why they were doing what they were doing — and her explaining that you change the rules, not break them — she does call the police … stating that she will do so AFTER she handles her blood shortage — giving them time to get the kids from Amelia and hop a plane to goodness knows where.
This leaves Amelia in deep, deep confusion. She confesses to Link, at the end of the night how very sorry she is for breaking his heart — if she had remembered how much that hurt she would have handled things differently. But then Kai shows up in the parking lot with the ‘I can’t sleep’ and they make out (resolving nothing … but hey, Arizona didn’t want kids, Amelia didn’t want kids … why is Cristina the only one who gets to stand by her line of ‘I DO NOT WANT KIDS’).
The second hour — ‘You Are The Blood’ opens with an insane tear-jerking moment. And it’s not just the return of Jackson Avery!!! It’s the return of Jackson Avery looking teary-eyed, standing in front of some yellow floral arrangements delivering Catherine’s eulogy.
SERIOUSLY!?
ABC
Of course about two minutes of this (remember the top of Season 5 where Meredith watched Derek flatline and die after building him the house of candles?) we pan out to see Catherine sitting in her chemo-therapy chair, holding Harriet, with April, because she wants her people to sing her praises while she’s still alive and can hear them!! Later in the episode we get the great news that her tumor is responding to the chemo and she is currently living with and not dying from cancer. She and Webber make a decision to go off on some sort of sabbatical leave (to see the pyramids?) and celebrate. This gets tossed out there as a throw-away as to why they’re leaving at the end.
Jo breaks up with Todd. Because after just one sex encounter (including his singing orgasm, which Link mocks relentlessly) he’s crying he loves her — and brings her a giant stuffed teddy bear as a ‘Thank you for the great sex/I love you’ present. She ends with Luna, and Link and Scout going home to watch Encanto for the millionth time — because she needs her best friend in Link.
Oh yeah — and at the top of the episode — and not just in flashback (but we get a lot of that too) Ellis is in the OR giving Meredith some real inner head trauma. SURPRISE!
Maggie says she and Winston got married too soon. But like adults they sit in the car late in the episode — in the rain — and talk about how they both have trouble opening up to others and why and that they’re going to protect their love and get to know one another.
Bailey — after that craptacular Blake woman (why do they make all the killer-characters … as in literally characters who kill things … be named Blake? Penny Blake? Killed Derek. This Blake? Killed the residency program) kills the residency program — walks up to Jackson and Meredith, hands her the keys to the chief’s office and says, ‘You broke it — you bought it. I quit. No notice. Pru and I are going home to bake cookies.’ And she walks out.
So no Webber. No residents. No Bailey. Jackson and April (why was she even there, all she did was close the pit to trauma b/c of the blood shortage — and also they got an HEA elevator kiss at the end of the day) are going back to Boston, and Meredith sent Nick off because he sort-of-but-not-really implied that she was either intentionally or subconsciously sabotaging the residency program so she could leave Grey-Sloan in flames as she departs.
So Meredith is all alone at the end of the episode — flashing through some of the more devastating images all through 400 episodes worth of material. And she charges out into the hallways, after seeing her intern self walk away in disgust — screaming for Nick to wait.
But is it too late? Well, we get a summer and then some to wait!
What did you think of the season finale? Start a conversation in the comments section below.
Grey’s Anatomy will return in the Fall on ABC.
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