Well, well well! Viewers got a big surprise this week as we were treated to – dare I say it – a pretty decent episode of Grey’s Anatomy.
Like, seriously! Hardly any drama! Few repetitive speeches! There were even a couple of jokes!
But, most important of all – the triumphant return of Old Bailey.
Yep, Dr Miranda Balls-of-Steel Bailey is marching back and replacing the cringeworthy doppelganger who has taken her place since Season 4. The thing that pained me most during the show’s progress was how they devolved my beloved Bailey’s character: she started out as a whip-smart, funny, hard-as-nails doctor who doled out the tough love and was just so human you could hug her. Then she went away and re-emerged as this stammering, scatterbrained emotional trainwreck who was unnecessarily mean to everyone. However, last night she went back to the Bailey I remembered: all heart, all guts, no bullshit.
The patients’ storylines were interesting for a change, and while they technically still fitted the formula the show has been using of late (someone has disease, refuses to be treated for reasons that seem crazy at first but then when they explain them in an emotional way the doctor realizes that oh my gosh, it’s just like my life so I like totally empathize!), they were still somehow different. Aside from the main case of a mother with an anyuerism and her schizophrenic son – which was handled brilliantly, by the way – we saw many patients briefly, as Cristina dabbled in paediatrics, instead of focusing on one case for the whole episode. This is what they used to do, remember? Think Episode 2, with Cristina and Alex dodging multiple patients’ relatives as they tried to hug them. You don’t need to shove one individual in our face for a whole show for us to care about them, writers – if anything, it makes us care less, and wish they’d just die already, so at least the episode would end on an interesting note.
The story arc right now is the staff on tenterhooks to find out who gets kicked out in the merge with Mercy West. The hammer fell on Nurse Olivia (which, like George’s death, might have been sadder had we been sure she was still there to begin with), Intern Megan (the pregnant one with the glasses) and pretty much every intern except the two whose names we knew, Lexie and Steven. Kudos that they managed to actually wring a lot of humour out of this, especially Cristina, who uses Arizona as a cover to save her butt and has to work with children (horror!) as a result. Even cancer-stricken Izzie scrubs in to save her job, in a really bad wig which she mercifully takes off during surgery, to reveal her own ‘chemo fuzz’ (which actually ain’t so bad – kinda resembles the hairdo I had in my Johnny Rotten phase).
And a special mention for funny goes out to whoever’s in charge of Not Making Ellen Pompeo Look Pregnant. Whether it’s a wink to the viewers – ‘Look, you all know the actor is up the duff, but we have to pretend she isn’t for realism, ‘kay?’ – or genuinely sloppy editing, the acheived effect is almost like a spoof of a show trying to hide an actor’s pregnancy: the constant full-body shots of everyone else followed by an individual close-up of Meredith standing apart from them. I’m guessing they do realize there’s not much they can do to hide it, given that Mer’s face has swollen up to twice its usual size, and the occasional sweeping camera shot shows an eight-month belly straining out from those scrubs. They did a much more careful job last year with Lexie’s pregnancy – sorry, I mean stress-induced overeating (wink). Man, those Twinkies went straight to her uterus.
