Oh my God, you guys. Wasn’t Grey’s Anatomy sooo good tonight? Sorry, I just had to channel a little Kelly Kapoor there for a moment, because while this episode started off kind of slow for me (and gets its title from one of the worst Rod Stewart songs ever), it quickly became one of my favorites of the season; the reason for which I can sum up in one word: Bailey. Well, the fact that there weren’t any Izzie/George sex scenes that I had to scrub my eyes after helped as well. But you know, mostly the awesomeness of the Bailey.
Mer VO: “There comes a point in your life when you’re officially an adult.”
For Derek, being an adult means going out on a grown-up date with Sydney, that crazy-annoying resident with all the hair and the grating sing-song voice. Of course, as he’s currently employed at Our Lady’s Home of Emotionally-Stunted Perpetual Adolescents, his grown-up date takes place in Joe’s bar, ten feet away from Meredith. Seriously. I’m admittedly unfamiliar with the Pacific Northwest, but there’s got to be at least one other eating/drinking establishment in the area, right? Like a taco stand or something? Or perhaps one of those Applebees that the kids on Friday Night Lights seem to be so taken with?
The next morning at the hospital, George and Meredith are waiting for the elevator. When it opens, Izzie and Derek are on it, so they both run away. Apparently things have devolved so badly between George the chicken-pecker and porn-star Izzie that they’re not even talking anymore. As a viewer, I can’t say that I find this development disappointing.
Today is Bailey’s first official day as chief resident, and she does an adorable happy dance after posting the announcement. Soon after though, she’s back to being hard-ass Bailey. She gathers everyone in the locker room and lays down the law. Things are going to be different. They are going to start treating the hospital as though it is a professional environment where people, you know, die and stuff. “The locker room is for changing, not for crying. The on-call room is for napping, not for anything that requires a locked door. Grow up!” Aw, Bailey. You just keep rolling that boulder up the hill. I’m sure this time you’ll totally make it to the top.
Patient Roundup:
There’s a school bus crash, so Seattle Grace appropriately becomes flooded with high-schoolers. One is basically Rachel McAdams in Mean Girls. She’s a “pom,” which is more of a dancer than a cheerleader, but it sounds silly, so I’m going to call her “the cheerleader.” She has facial lacerations and also broke her ass. This leads to her being replaced as captain, which of course, effectively ends her life. Also having a bad day is one of those cute geeky kids that Hollywood is always trying to tell you is so friendless and lonely, but never really would be. He was drawing and got a pencil jammed into his eye. It’s horrifying. The bus driver got injured as well and it turns out he and Bailey went to school together. He’s also hot and turns Bailey or “Mandy” as he calls her into a puddle of goo.
Guess who else is a patient? It’s Papa Grey! And boy, is he drunk. Alex tries to find Lexie to take care of him, but she blows him off, which leaves him with Meredith. Unlike every other time he sees her, Papa seems really happy to have Meredith stitching him up. He spends the entire time apologizing for how he treated her when his wife died. He also apologizes for being all crazy drunk, but explains that it’s Susan’s birthday. He doesn’t want to see Lexie, and he tells Meredith that he’s proud of her. Meredith just basks in the fatherly attention.
At the cafeteria, everyone is in their own little clique. The Chief, Hahn and Sloan are sitting together. Sloan is bragging about how high school girls still love him, and sure enough, there are two giggling and looking over at him. He invites them over and one of them tells Sloan that he looks exactly like her dad. Heh. Cristina and Callie are sitting together at their own little table. I really like the idea of them being friends. So does Cristina, apparently, because she spills the news that George and Izzie are on the rocks. Speaking of which, George and Izzie are still almost literally running away from each other. That must have been some bad sex.
Bailey has been spending time with Marcus. She’s been fawning over him and is completely un-Bailey like. As Hahn put it, she’s a “blithering idiot.” The whole thing is simultaneously cute and awkward, because it’s obvious that Bailey was in love with him in high school and he just used her to do his homework. Even now he’s getting her to fill out all of his patient forms.
Surgery:
The cheerleader with the broken ass gets through her surgery fine. Mainly, it’s just used to drive home the point that the hospital is just as gossipy as high school and everybody knows about Izzie and George. Pencil-eye isn’t so lucky. His brain starts herniating during surgery. He’s going to be in a coma for the rest of his life. Derek eventually tells his best friend, who is understandably distraught. She also feels like her life is over, and while her point may be more valid than the cheerleader’s, Izzie still tries to tell her that she’ll get through it. The girl scoffs at this advice and says that Izzie was probably the prom queen. Izzie says that no, she was “the girl with the cheap clothes from the trailer park who got pregnant and thrown in the pregnant girl class.” Izzie does concede, however, that losing her best friend is the worst thing in the world, which is why you shouldn’t break up their marriages!
Marcus has to go through surgery too. When he comes out, he calls Bailey his angel—and then asks if she finished that paperwork for him. And then pretends to go to sleep. It’s kind of heartbreaking. George overhears all of this and tells Bailey that she needs to go in there and give one of her patented long speeches, but she can’t; he’s basically turned her into an awkward, insecure teenager.
Meredith finds Lexie and tells her that her dad was there and that maybe she should “keep a better eye on him.” Lexie rips into her saying that everything he told Meredith about him being proud of her and sorry for what he did is just what he says when he’s drunk. It’s not even Susan’s birthday. Ha. Is it wrong that this whole scene kind of makes me like Lexie a lot more?
Of course, Lexie’s speech is nothing compared to Bailey’s. Since she couldn’t give Marcus a long speech, she orders Derek to sit down and listen to one. She says that guys like him don’t see people like her. She did his homework and he never even thought to ask her to the homecoming dance. Derek lets her get everything off of her chest before telling her that he was a skinny geek with acne in high school and he would have been honored to take a girl like her to a dance. It’s a very sweet scene for the both of them.
George is waiting for Izzie when she gets home. They talk about how they can’t talk to each other anymore. They both feel like they’ve lost their best friend. Does this mean that they’re going to go back to being friends? Is our long national nightmare actually almost over?
Back at the bar, Derek makes eyes with Rose, a nurse who has been in on 36 of his surgeries, but whom he had never noticed until today. He still goes home with Meredith, but something tells me this nurse may be a little more competition than ol’ “I’m a lot of woman” Sydney ever was.
Next week: A Grey’s Anatomy event. Dun Dun DUN!
