Grey's Anatomy – Episodes 6-1 & 6-2 Review

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It has returned, not so much in a blaze, but more of a haze of glory: the uber-addictive show you love to – nay, have to watch in your pyjamas, with a carton of chocolate ice cream. (Wine, Kleenex and ovaries optional.) It’s time to catch up with the world’s most attractive and narcissistic doctors for another year of sex, dramedy and lots and lots and lots of hormones and emotions. Yay!

After the shocking and much-talked-about cliffhanger which rounded off last season’s Grey’s Anatomy, it was easy to see that the writers were struggling to satisfyingly match this for the premier of Season 6. They didn’t quite succeed, and there was a definite sense of anticlimax, but that’s not to say that it wasn’t good.

Season 5 went out with a bang and a coding signal as two popular characters began to flatline, moments after one of them was discovered to be the patient critically injured beyond recognition whom the Seattle Grace doctors had been treating, and the other went limp in her husband’s arms after surgery to remove a brain tumour. George O’Malley and Izzie Stevens, Meredith Grey’s friends and fellow interns since the series began, were last seen in a heavenly limbo between life and death which looked remarkably like the hospital’s elevator (a bizarrely poignant feature of the building where more events take place than anywhere else – they even perform the occasional open-heart surgery in there, and now apparently it moonlights as a stand-in purgatory).

Now, fans of the show (aside from those who like to read spoilers and behind-the-scenes gossip) have been able to exhale the breath they have been holding all summer and find out who goes to the great big operating theatre in the sky. The majority, myself included, were probably unsurprised to learn that it was George, especially given T.R. Knight’s virtual disappearance from the show in the past year, amid rumours of heated disputes with the rest of the cast and crew. That said, there was the question of whether they were going to do the obvious (fire the actor, make up a hasty storyline about him wanting to join the army and kill him off), or whether this was a very clever red herring placed by the creators so that we would all be thinking “Of course it will be George” and then bang! give Izzie the chop. Unfortunately, it was the former.

Anyway, being an explorational (which should be a word, if it isn’t) type of drama, big events and plot twists aren’t exactly Grey’s thing. In fact, the show is pretty much immune to plot development, preferring the old going-round-in-circles-but-learning-something-new-each-time type of shifts. So you could tell that the writers were pretty pleased with themselves, and probably wanting to milk this huge, if a bit predictable, leap for as much as they could get by having the ghost of George O’Malley haunt every last member of the cast throughout the two episodes (metaphorically I mean – although given the show’s curious penchant for bringing back every dead character, including the one-timers, in some undead form, I imagine old T.R. will be popping in again sometime soon).

So here, the characters get a chance to do what these characters give us best – angst, angst and ohmigod more angst, to an almost self-parodying extent. The sight of all these doctors weeping and sobbing while trying to insert catheters and IVs was, regrettably and probably unintentionally, more comical than heartbreaking.

Yet, for all the gloom and mourning surrounding the death (I have never heard the word “grief” used more frequently in my life), George himself didn’t get much of a look in. It felt like they were merely using his demise as an excuse for the characters to feel, if possible, even more self-pity. His funeral scene in “Good Mourning” lasted no more than thirty seconds, interrupted as his friends wandered off and started laughing, because they’re dark and twisty and this is what dark and twisty people do at funerals. Overall, the effect never really clicked, since they had seemed to have forgotten that George existed throughout Season 5 due to Knight’s absence, and behaving now as though he was their best friend doesn’t wash as well as it could have had they, say, felt guilt for constantly treating him like the stupid kid who didn’t deserve to sit and navel-gaze with the cool, dark and twisty kids.

George’s death aside, the episodes were pretty good, particularly “Goodbye”, the second. The foundations for the coming season are set: high expenditure and screw-ups have led to the hospital board trying to oust the Chief and replace him with Derek, leaving Derek having to choose between his career ambitions and his friendship with the Chief. Callie finally puts her foot down, having lost her chance of becoming head of orthopaedics, and walks out on the Chief and into a new job at Mercy West, the rival hospital. As the Chief drives to his board meeting, he gets into a car crash and is taken to Mercy West, where he is impressed by their way of working. He begins to think …

But surprisingly, the best storylines in the two-parter belong to ‘Little’ Lexie Grey. Now a resident, Little Grey is no longer merely the quiet component of the cluster of interns or the chirping shadow of Mark Sloan, but comes into her own. She has to play the role of the best friend to a girl whose leg was amputated and arms reattached after a boat crash, and whose friends are continuing their tour of the US without her. The girl is e-mailing her mother pretending to still be travelling, and has lost her will to live. Meanwhile, sexy Callie is Mark’s new neighbour, and being ex-sex-buddies, she and Mark are too close for Lexie’s comfort. Some great awkward lines and deadpan delivery in these scenes.

Oh and there’s also some crap about Cristina and Owen and them needing to talk about feelings and stuff. This relationship has already left many cold; the characters are fine on their own, but they just can’t be bought as a romantic pairing doing ‘let’s be a normal couple’ stuff. This show was at its peak when all the characters were single or in on/off relationships, and would all get drunk and sleep with each other and cope with the drama that ensued. Meredith and Derek may gel well as a married couple (mazel tov, by the way) but that doesn’t mean everybody else will or should too. Shonda & Co seem to desperately want to see their characters paired off, settled down, and creating ridiculous amounts of drama out of seemingly nothing. (“You didn’t put milk in my coffee this morning. You obviously think I’ll be a bad mother to our future babies!”)

Overall, I’ll be fair: this wasn’t bad. The style – a countdown of the days following George’s death, a closing monologue from each character regarding the stages of grief, the episode’s obligatory motif – was well chosen, and the while the ‘mystery decision’ of the Chief was hardly the most engrossing storyline ever conceived, the ending revelation that he planned to merge with the wicked rivals at Mercy West – and cause some cutbacks on his own staff – was an intriguing one.

One last issue of mine is that of the soundtrack: one slowed-tempo indie song full of syrupy pain melting into another. It feels just a tad lazy, as thought the writing team are aware that their dialogue and characterization is not enough on its own to pluck at viewers’ heartstrings, so cue the Joshua Radin-ites!

It worked for Scrubs, right?

To round it off … I just think Rhimes and her crew spent too much time trying to make viewers weep to focus on the important stuff, such as O’Malley himself, that could have made the premiere a great one, rather than just an OK one.