[ad_1]
Grey’s Anatomy
We have just begun
Season 20
Episode 1
Editor’s Rating
Photo: Anne Marie Fox/ABC
The last season of Grey’s Anatomy left us in total chaos: Teddy was on the OR floor with no pulse, Lucas and Simone had opened Sam Sutton’s cute bag of bones while he was standing straight, Kwan had ignored Maxine’s DNI order, and Jules was professing her hate love. To him, Meredith was ruining her career while reigniting her stagnant love life, and chaos is exactly where we find everyone when season 20 begins. You know what? Chaos seems like the right move for such a momentous occasion. twenty seasons of Grey’s Anatomy! Two decades! The amount of time I and many of you have devoted to this television show is, frankly, disgusting, but I don’t regret a single thing! I actually start to cry a little just thinking about how long we’ve all been on this journey together and with these characters. We are all aware that Grey’s Anatomy has prosperous about chaos for 20 seasons: this, the show of ferry accidents, electrocutions and severed legs through elevators and MUSICAL EPISODES (#neverforget), chaos is tradition. So, yes, throwing ourselves right into the middle of the chaos after a long hiatus feels right and good and true. It feels like home.
It’s the morning after all of the aforementioned chaos broke loose, and everyone who was in Boston for the Catherine Fox Awards, including Meredith “I left Seattle” Gray, is at Gray Sloan surveying the damage inflicted in their absence. Everyone panics and yells at each other, but none more so than our five baby surgeons who, the moment Nick Marsh asks for an explanation, don’t hesitate to turn on each other. I know Kwan likes to be a jerk, but is he really that mad that Simone ditched her wedding for Lucas? Do you call Lucas a homewrecker? I honestly can’t believe Kwan doesn’t get punched in the face more often. Of course, the anger these five hurl at each other comes from fear: the fear of Teddy dying right after watching Sam Sutton die, the fear of losing his job. Nick threatens them with the latter, but then has to run out and orders everyone to stay put: no one practices medicine until further screening is done.
Almost immediately everyone disobeys that order. It’s like old times!
Lucas needs some air because, in just a few hours, he has been inside the bodies of Simone and Sam Sutton. Simone follows him outside because she needs to talk to him about both things. Before they can really get into the sexy details (the former) or the gory details (the latter), they are dragged into an emergency. A paramedic calls them for help: they have a car accident victim passing out in the back of their ambulance and the engine is off; They need help keeping him alive and figuring out how to transport him to the emergency room. The two paramedics exit the platform to allow the medics to start working on the guy before moving him, and just as they do, well wouldn’t you know it, a car crashes into the back of the ambulance, trapping Lucas and Simone inside. with the victim. Oh, and also, did I mention, the car is a malfunctioning self-driving car; the employee tasked with conducting the beta test (excuse me, the car has a name, and that name is Wayne) gets trapped in the back as the car crashes into the ambulance over and over again. Nobody can close it.
Meanwhile, Meredith wanders the halls of Gray Sloan after being dragged across the country in a true Catherine Fox move. Catherine just wants to yell at her for telling all the Fox Foundation donors that they’re all wrong about the Alzheimer’s for decades and for making Catherine and the Foundation look crazy. Meredith can stop talking about her theories or Catherine can defund Meredith’s lab. That’s literally all she has to say to him! I know she’s angry, but Catherine, darling, that could have been done over Zoom. Anyway, this frees Mer to (1) listen to Nick complain about the mess the interns have gotten the hospital into and stress over the possibility of having to fire one or all of them, and (2) be available to help when Bailey takes her aside and tells her that the inmates are in trouble again.
What follows are several excellent scenes in which Meredith and Bailey team up to instruct the inmates trapped inside the ambulance on how to treat their dying patient. Watching these two work together will never fail to warm my heart, and even they seem to enjoy it too. The atmosphere inside the ambulance is much less welcoming. When Mer and Bailey can see from the symptoms Lucas and Simone relay to them that the victim is bleeding internally, they tell their interns that they will have to perform an ex-turn themselves. Basically, they’re going to have to cut open that guy’s abdomen right there at the back of the rig that’s still being hit repeatedly by a car to stop where the bleeding is coming from. Chaos reigns!
Simone is understandably hesitant after the Sam Sutton incident and is pleading for this to be handled differently. Couldn’t they just feed him liquids to keep him alive until they can get out of there? It’s possible, but if he’s as bad as he seems, he’ll most likely die if they don’t open him. Lucas and Simone are the only ones who have their eyes on the patient; They need to make that decision. Lucas says they have to try. Simone says, “I can’t have another death on my hands because of you!” It is harsh but true and yet it is not the better way to start a new relationship.
Lucas has the scalpel and decides to cut. It’s dangerous for a while, but they eventually get the bleeding under control. Lucas made the right decision. Fortunately, at that moment Kwan realizes that they could puncture the self-driving car’s tire with something to stop it. Oh, friends, I laughed and laughed. There are so many doctors and paramedics and a guy who works for the car company hanging around, and not a single one of them thought, Hmm, maybe we could take the tires off? I know people were busy, but come on.
Meredith and Bailey take the victim to the operating room and he ends up being fine. More importantly, we get a lovely little exchange between the two about Meredith’s intern class. Bailey reminds her former student that her intern class caused so many problems like this: cutting LVADs and sabotaging clinical trials. “And look at me now,” Meredith responds. This sweet little trip down memory lane is a reminder that Meredith is a cool surgeon only because she had a cool teacher as an intern.
It’s that fact that’s at the forefront of Mer’s mind when she meets Nick again. She admits that part of the reason he’s so frustrated with the interns for repeatedly breaking the rules is that if this continues, he won’t feel right leaving Seattle to start his life with Meredith in Boston. He can’t just leave those dolls. Suddenly, Meredith has an idea that she could solve more than one of her problems. Hi, no one does this job alone, not really.
First, Meredith tells Catherine that she’s totally fine with shutting down her research to keep her funding. I don’t understand how Catherine isn’t more suspicious of this. Meredith immediately goes to Amelia, who has accepted Mer’s theory that plaque development in the brain may not be the singular cause of Alzheimer’s, and hands all of her research over to her sister-in-law. Meredith wants Amelia to continue researching things for her here in Seattle, since she can’t do it in Boston. Amelia seems to agree. She really needed a good project to keep her busy this season.
Then Nick comes in to finish the talk he paused with the interns earlier. He informs them that despite all the havoc these five continue to wreak, no one will be fired. He, however, leaves (not because he hates them, although no one would blame him if he did). He’s headed to Boston, but only because, thanks to Meredith, no doubt, he found someone to take over the Residency Program. Someone as capable, even more so, than him. Friends, I’m Miranda Bailey. She walks through the door and says, “I have five rules,” and the credits roll. I have never felt so alive! Miranda Bailey sending the interns with her five rules: what a time we’re having here in season 20.
• Thanks to the new head of cardio, Winston Ndugu, Teddy ends up doing well. Things get tough for a minute when he gets a clot in his femoral artery, but he’s no match for Winston. Owen can rest easy knowing that his final interaction with his wife won’t be him handing her “a stupid milkshake.”
• Okay, obviously Link and Jo should have been responding to their pages when everything was bad with Sam instead of kissing in the rain, although that was cool, but seeing Sam’s mom blame them for her carelessness really bothered me. I know he is grieving, but she could be blamed just as much for not coming to see his son in the hospital. Maybe if she were there, she would have noticed something was wrong., which is something I would say under my breath if I worked at Gray Sloan. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of her!
• I’m happy that Link and Jo are happy and don’t let their guilt get in the way, but wow, they could use 15 percent more guilt about that guy. Jo was flirting with him a lot for weeks! Sam Sutton, missing and forgotten.
• Jules is backtracking on her big, tearful declaration of love to Kwan over Maxine’s hospital bed. She’s here to become a surgeon, not to fall in love with someone. When she informs Kwan of this change of heart, he says that he was going to say the exact same thing. They both lie to each other and they both know it.
• Is Schmitt really bad at his job? Discuss!
• Am I just rusty or did I feel like there was a lot more medical jargon than usual in this episode? We have a new showrunner this season in a long time. grey writer and producer Meg Marinis. Could this perhaps be a new normal? I like it.