[Yet again life intervenes--this time the actual trip to Amsterdam to visit Josh [#], catch up schoolwork, and more Olympics–really, I had to fight my roommate last night to watch the Grey’s Anatomy tape instead of the Olympics. A very quick summary of what occured below.]

More sex with Izzy and Alex, George gets some balls gumption, Meredith sees her father for the first time in twenty years [in an oddly anticlimactic scene], a ghost from Addison and Derek’s past, and Burke says his piece to Christina . . . after the jump in “Yesterday” (season 2, episode 18)

Izzy declares that she’s not going to do it anymore with Alex (after doing it at least 4 times) but after treating a patient–a Junior at the UW with a Catholic father–suffering from “episodes” of spontaneous orgasms, at least 8 or 9 times a day and brought on by stress [I just hold my breath or get an upset stomach!], she feels the need to “feed the beast” [could this be worse? really] four times, then runs off with Alex that night at the end of the episode, but not before counseling George to tell Meredith how he feels. [More on this later.]

A stranger shows up in town in the form of Mark, Derek’s former best friend and who he caught Addison cheating with. Turns out he and Derek were bff back in NYC, and that it wasn’t just a fling with Addison–they were in love and stayed together after Derek left. Although first, we see Mark flirting with Meredith, prompting Derek to punch him in the face. And hey! Turns out he’s a plastic surgeon. The Chief is initially angry about the punch on his surgical floor but once he learns that Mark was who Addison cheated with, he completely approves and is happy to hear that Dempsey put his weight behind the punch. Anyway, Mark still loves Addison to come back to NYC with him, and points out that Derek punched him out for just talking to Meredith, but just walked out when he caught Mark and Addison doing in in the marital bed. Hmm.

The Chief’s approval of Derek punching Mark is somewhat strange, considering he was having an affair with Meredith’s mother that prompted her to ask her husband, Thatcher, who looks like George, to leave. Meredith begins to catch on–her mother actually admits the affair in Alzheimer state–and she questions the Chief about her father leaving. She then goes to visit her father after getting his address from the phone book. They have an extremely awkward conversation [to be expected after not seeing each other in twenty years; it's weird that they haven't seen each other in twenty years!], and he appears to live in Wallingford [but that's just my guess]. {Ed: he also seems to be Mr. Katimsky, the English teacher from My So-Called Life. [I knew he looked familiar!]}

Meredith and Preston [using the recently approved first names!] treat a man with horrible lung cancer. He’s got a 1 in 4 chance of surviving the surgery, so Meredith helps him make hate tapes to mail to everyone he’s ever known. Apparently he keeps it all inside. Even after living through the surgery, he wants Meredith to send the tapes. This prompts Burke–who in the very beginning of the episode was having an awesome/awful dance “episode” with Sandra Oh at “their” apartment” until he answered a call from the landlord at her other apartment–to say his piece, yelling about “being Preston Burke!” while Sandra Oh is a slob, guarded, and competitive, but he loves her anyway. After his piece, and while eating Chinese food in their bed, she informs him that she gave up the apartment.

While in town, Mark the plastic surgeon [I refuse to use Meredith's nickname for him, "McSteamy"] conveniently horns in (somewhat invited by the star struck Alex, who wants to “get into plastics” [hey, it was good advice for Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, right?]) on Derek’s surgery on a kid with tumors growing in the bones of his face [actually, craniodiaphyseal dysplasia--which causes bony tumors to grow on the facial bones, growing out to disfigure and growing in to compress the brain] which make him look like Cher’s kid in Mask [Mask was directed by Peter Bogdanovich--who knew? []] . Mark promises that he can fix his face after Derek performs a little brain surgery to keep the kid from dying. Except the kid does die on the operating table (can’t win ‘em all). But Sandra Oh and Alex (after talking to the parents!) have him perform the surgery after the death. [It's better to be buried/cremated looking normal?]

—
previous episode [mb] | next episode [--]