Season 6 just keeps getting better.
The show seems to have rediscovered how to keep the balance between comedy and drama, between light and dark. The laughs (mostly from Mark, Cristina and Alex – whose girly scream, by the way, was priceless) were aplenty, the situations managed to tug at our heartstrings without going overboard on the Hallmark emotion, and all the characters got the coverage they deserved.
Lowdown: Thatcher Grey is back in town, and needs a liver transplant. You know what that means – Lexie getting tearful and Meredith doing the ‘screw him, he ain’t no daddy of mine’ bit. Which seems a bit excessive at this point. Yes, he walked out on her mum, but to be fair about it, Ellis did cheat on him. And yes, he started hitting the bottle pretty hard, but his wife did just die at Meredith’s hands. You’d think Meredith would be adult enough to get over herself just a little and stop wearing her daddy issues on her sleeve. Not to mention that, however crap a parent he was to her, he’s still Lexie’s dad and saying that you don’t care if he lives or dies while she’s clearly very distraught does not make anyone feel sorry for her, it makes them want to hit her. But, she did redeem herself by the end by agreeing to be his donor – what threatened to be a very cheesy speech (“You’re the guy who used to pour my cereal, that’s all. You’re the guy who used to pour my cereal”), was rescued by the grace and dignity with which she delivered it, and by announcing that she was doing it for Lexie, because she finally knows what it it feels like to have a sister – “and it feels really good”.
Goodbye yet another of Meredith’s tiresome issues. A clap on the back for Mer.
And, the patients are interesting again. An 82-year-old guy looking for a penile implant proved to be both funny and emphatic, while Izzie’s cancer victim was touching with minimum forcedness.
And hurray for Callie! She got her attending job at long last. When Cristina complained to the Chief like Callie’d planned to before her sympathy-for-the-devil moment, I thought for a crazy second he was actually going to make Yang an attending. I know she’s only a second-year resident, but hey, it’s Grey’s. Realism shmealism.
