Brilliant, thrilling, chilling whodunnit episode concerning the mysterious death of a trauma patient and who is to blame for it.
Told by jumping back and forth between the accounts of each doctor told to the Chief’s panel (similar to when Denny died) and what actually happened from their point of view, we watch as the hostilely mismatched team of surgeons work to get the ‘best’ cases after an apartment block catches fire. The main focus is on a woman with a young son who appears to have relatively minor injuries, and therefore gets some vague attention from each passing doctor before they scurry on to grab up something better. Obviously, she’s the one that kicks it.
The chaos is compounded by the seething resentment between the team: Alex is frantically trying to get in touch with Izzie, and pissed off at Charles and the other one whose name I forget but who shall be hereafter referred to as Alex II, because they referred to the Seattle Grace docs as “kind of douchey” (oh no he di-dn’t!). Charles passed out after giving blood and consequently yanked an axe out of a patient’s neck, causing him to bleed out and Bailey to go off on a humorous tirade of fury (“He better have a brain tumour or something, ’cause that’s just unacceptable!”). I love Bailey. Lexie inexplicably freaks out watching Mark and Arizona’s burn-trauma teenager, which earns her an uncharacteristically kick-ass speech from Arizona, who tells her if she can’t do her job, send her someone who can.
In the end, the seemingly fine patient has suffered a collapsed lung, been intubated(?), bled out, and died. Each doctor is responsible in some way for each of these, and is gathered around her when she flatlines and Derek comes and asks someone to call it, only to realize that she was nobody’s patient. Oh the fools.
So, turns out the guilty party is actually April Kepson, the notebook-and-nose-job girl, and she gets the heave-ho. (Yes, she gets fired for making a simple innocent mistake while Izzie doesn’t for deliberately cutting a guy’s life support and killing him. Biased much, Chief?) But at least the pressure and trauma has brought them all together and they do the closest anyone on Grey’s Anatomy does to a group hug, by standing in the same room and looking at each other with slightly less loathing. Awww.
Oh, and Fairy Godmother Derek triumphantly guilts out the Chief – who every week earns himself another reason he should be kicked in the face – by pointing out that the real blame lies in him forcing together a troupe of surgeons who don’t trust one another and generally being a lousy boss. Zing.
The tension in this episode is brilliantly played, I can honestly truly say I was 100% hooked, and the new characters mesh perfectly with the others. The music’s steadily getting better too, nice one guys.
Finally, I like how Meredith was only seen at the start at the end and providing the voiceovers while this was all going down, reminiscent of Mary Alice Young in Desperate Housewives.
Watch this space!!
