That’s it.
I am breaking into the offices at Shondaland, hijacking the typewriters and writing the dialogue for this show myself.
Episode 10 of the season, Holidaze, has a great concept: since shows of this nature are often offscreen for the holiday period, thereby taking away their chances of having a Christmas, New Year’s or even Thanksgiving special – cram all three festivities into the last ep of the year. Howsomever, festivities are pretty thin on the ground.
The golden plot of the episode is Mark’s estranged daughter, Sloan; damn those spoiler-filled promos, I thought, because it could have been a pleasant twist. Aha … it doesn’t stop twisting there. Sloan Sr is not just a father, he is a grandfather. Lexie tries to get along with her common-law stepdaughter, which is awkward since they are practically the same age, and Sloan is an arrogant valley girl with the IQ of a cranberry, so they tend to bicker. I wish Derek wouldn’t refer to them to Mark as “your kids”, though. Ick.
And what would Christmas be on TV without the schmaltz? Teddy and Cristina treat a girl who has to have her heart removed and gets hooked up to a machine instead. She asks to be taken outside to see the snow one last time, to which they oblige, and her face lights up and it’s oh so magical and, in perfect don’t-miss-a-beat GA style, she suddenly falls in slow motion on to the ground on her face. Unbelievably, this Tiny Tim stand-in has no family, and the only person by her side is a short-term boyfriend, who proposes to her, stunning her in a good way, and I in a less good way as I started wondering whether the writers have pulled a Paul McCartney on us, lost Shonda and covered it up, or whether she’s now so busy rolling in cash she doesn’t care what clichéd mush they dole out to the viewers.
They follow this up with the woman needing a kidney transplant and Cristina finding a match in a braindead teenager. (No, not Mark’s daughter. Someone in a coma.) We run through the organ-donation dilemma format: save one life, lose another. However, this never really goes anywhere, so I question why it was there at all, except to make sure they didn’t run out of the schmaltz. And to highlight, yet again, that Cristina lacks sensitivity. What else is new?
Another dubious happening is the appearance of Bailey’s strict father. Miranda’s dad is ashamed of her for having “broke her family” and speaks to her like a misbehaving child over it. I was so happy when Bailey finally set him straight over the turkey, explaining that she couldn’t keep Tuck in a loveless marriage. Despite Bailey’s dad having a weird fixation with her married status, there is a great connection between the actors, even more so than with Meredith and Thatcher.
Speaking of Thatcher, he also pops by for Christmas dinner at the Shephards’, and intimates his concern about the Chief’s drinking to Meredith, who sends him away on a guilt trip by playing the worn-out daddy-abandonment card on him. Since she glimpsed the Chief indulging in a bit of liquid merriment in the previous ep, he cornered her, fed her some hokey about having been misdiagnosed with alcoholism, and told her he would like to encourage her exceptional surgical talents by giving her private lessons. Mer takes the bait, seeing it as her “present”, while to me it reeks of bribery. For one thing – what excpetional talents? And another, if she were the best, why would she be getting the extra teaching? And thirdly, you don’t catch your boss up to something he’d like to keep very quiet and he just happens to offer you a potential career boost – one where he can keep a close eye on you. I couldn’t believe she accepted it, but by the end of the episode, after finding him hammered out of his brains at Joe’s, I bet she couldn’t either.
Also, the doctors volunteer pool their bonuses (cue swelling string music) to save – wait for it – a dying boy. Yes, that’s the sound of a million sets of eyes rolling.
Mark and Derek work together to create an instrument that will help them operate on said little boy through his sinuses. It’s chock full of easy sentiment, and the result was more predictable and dull than heartwarming. What genuinely got me though, was either unintentional or really subtle – Meredith and Lexie watching their respective lovers save the boy, standing together, and hugging at the side of the shot at the end. It’s a happy New Year in the OR.
The ugly Cristia-Hunt drama rears it ugly head again as she catches on to the chemistry-free ‘smouldering’ looks between Teddy and Owen. Teddy transforms into Glenn Close for a while and hysterically tells Hunt that she loves him, she’s always loved him, she’ll love him for every minute of every day of every … you get the picture. He pushes her away and goes back to Cristina, who selflessly tells him that if it’s Teddy he loves, it’s Teddy he should be with, but Hunt’s response is to shove her against a wall and kiss her like he’s trying to eat her uvula. Um … squee?
So, yeah, ‘Holidaze’ was a bit of a let-down. They tried to fit way too much into an episode that, given its content and time scale, should have had an extended running time or cut some stuff out. It was underwhelming, to say the least. I hope Shonda’s New Year resolution is to tighten up the scripts that are starting to loosen a bit again.
On to what I liked: the impressive resemblance between Sloan & Sloan. Oh, and of course: Bailey and Sara Ramirez (my #1 girlcrush) singing in the same episode. That is a Merry Christmas sound.
Happy Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, Kwanzaa and Hannukah, GA fans.
