This week’s episode was full of drama. We get to meet the son of Two-Face. Cristina gets her first solo surgery. Everyone finally finds out that Izzie has cancer. After almost bringing all of Seattle Grace down into his depression, Derek may finally be snapping out of it. Also, an intern is pregnant!This week’s episode was full of drama. We get to meet the son of Two-Face. Cristina gets her first solo surgery. Everyone finally finds out that Izzie has cancer. After almost bringing all of Seattle Grace down into his depression, Derek may finally be snapping out of it. Also, an intern is pregnant!
Amid all of the drama of this week’s episode, Sloane performs a face transplant for a man who lost half of his face when he was hit by a car. Shonda Rhimes must have been owed a favor by the makeup guys from The Dark Knight, because the dude looked just like Two-Face.
As with most “big surgeries” on this show, this one acts more as a centerpoint for all of the drama to orbit rather than providing much drama itself. To summarize New-Face’s story, though, he freaks out when his online friends – who were supposed to meet him for the first time after the surgery – show up before the surgery to offer moral support. He panics and tells them to get the hell out because he doesn’t want them to see his face. Sloane explains to him that he’ll need his friends to get him through the psychological trauma after the surgery. In fact, Sloane can’t ethically perform the surgery if New-Face doesn’t have that support. New-Face finally calls them and asks them to come back where we’re treated to an analogy of his face and an orchid that looks ugly at first glance, but is beautiful because of what it has been through. All hearts suitably warm, the surgery proceeds successfully.
Sloane picks Lexie and Izzie to assist him with the surgery, but Izzie keeps ripping into the interns whenever they make fun of New-Face, and Sloane finally decides she’s too edgy to scrub in, making it just him and Lexie. The other interns continually mutter under their breaths about Lexie getting ahead by sleeping with Sloane, and it starts to get to them until Lexie decides she doesn’t really care what they think. Cue big kiss in front of everyone and speech to Sloane.
In a seemingly minor sub-plot, three interns have their own private drama going on. While Meredith and George are examining patients and trying to get through their paperwork in time to watch the face transplant, one intern is running around with a black eye, another is running around with a bloody hand, and a third (a woman) is running around sobbing all over the place. When I lay it out like that, it’s probably fairly obvious to you that the two guys got into a fight over the woman, and I figured it out a little before Meredith and George stopped trying to ignore the drama and decided to find out what was going on.
Apparently, bloody fist and sob girl were dating, but broke up for a while. During the time they were broken up, she slept with black eye boy. Bloody fist and sob girl eventually got back together, but black eye kept texting her to say he was in love with her. Bloody fist saw one of the texts and… drama ensued.
Meredith and George basically tell them all to grow up and oh yeah, sob girl is pregnant. I assume there is a question of who’s baby it is, but there wasn’t really much explanation for what possessed Meredith to run a pregnancy test on the girl.
Chief can’t pay attention to Sloane’s surgery or anything else because he’s so caught up in worrying about if and when Derek is coming back, so Bailey takes it upon herself to send Torres to talk him into coming back. Unfortunately, that plan backfires when Sloane just brings her down into his depression. When Torres doesn’t come back and her phone just goes to voicemail (presumably because she gets no signal in the woods), Bailey freaks out and gets McBadass to go out and retrieve both Torres and Derek, which backfires in the exact same way.
Bailey finally goes to the Chief and tells him what’s happened, so he goes out to smack some sense into all of them. Derek blasts him for telling Meredith about the ring and tells Chief that he ruined him. The Chief refuses to be blown off, though, and tells Derek that he’ll be there when Derek decides to come out of his hole. The Chief also advises Derek to call Meredith.
Back at the hospital, Yang is so caught up in trying to find Izzie treatment that she can’t focus on her work. It doesn’t help that Izzie doesn’t seem interested in getting any treatment and appears to have just given up. Yang doesn’t understand why Izzie told her about the cancer if she doesn’t want help and doesn’t want anyone else to know. Finally, when Yang can’t even focus on her first solo surgery – a hernia removal – she decides to tell Alex and Bailey, knowing that they’ll tell everyone else.
Rather than being upset with Yang for telling everyone and verbally smacking some sense into her, Izzie is grateful and thanks Cristina.
As everyone gathers around to help Izzie and get her admitted as a patient, Meredith goes to Derek (it’s not clear to me whether he called her or not). They have a tender moment (emphasis on moment) where they say that they love each other, but Meredith is on a mission. She wants Derek to operate on Izzie’s tumor because he’s one of the very few who have a shot at saving her. She leaves the films with him and goes back to help Izzie.
As the show closes, the central group checks Izzie into the hospital and begin running tests while Derek sits back at his trailer and examines Izzie’s brain scan results. Justin Chambers pulls off some very nice subtle acting as Alex helps Izzie and seems very in-control until you get a look at his eyes and see that he’s absolutely terrified. My fiancé cried at this point, but I totally stayed in control. Totally.
Stop looking at me like that; it was just some dust.
