After the jump, a recap of last night’s Grey’s Anatomy. One case — hillbillies vs. hospital intern, and the aftermath — dominates the medical intrigue. There’s a little bit of character development and relationship advancement and the showdown we’ve all been waiting for, possibly as a way of setting the stage for next week’s two-night season finale.

The episode opens with morning routines and a sweep over Queen Anne. “We all go through life like bulls in a china shop: a chip here a crack there doing damage to ourselves, to other people.”

Chris O’donnell cooks breakfast for Meredith (who doesn’t cook), along the way he attempts to get her to pretend not to be all scary and damaged. She can’t manage the charade, avoiding any talk about her family or previous boyfriends. So she goes home for some quality grooming time at home with Isabel.

“The problem is trying to figure out how to control the damage we’ve done, or that’s been done to us.”

In the bathroom, Grey plucks her eyebrows while Izzie does some flossing and possible tooth-whitening (or something to induce a speech impediment). Meredith tells her that she didn’t tell Chris O’Donnell about George or Dempsey (and that they’ve had four dates without so much as a goodnight kiss {thanks, ellen}), which makes Isabel a “proud mama.” Enter Crazy Torres, who walks in topless, sits on the toilet, urinates, and exits. All without washing her hands. The horror! Living like a stowaway has really cut into her manners and hygiene.

In the ambulance bay, everyone’s grumpy, except for Sandra Oh. She’s extra happy and tries to induce reconciliation. Staying up all night to watch a peri-esophageal surgery and getting laid makes Sandra Oh a happy camper.
That, and the three ambulances full of bodies that will need to be fixed up.

“And sometimes the damage is something we can’t even see.”

Dempsey, on the other hand, is in supreme jerk mode. Still steamy from last night’s shower sex with his wife? More like still grumpy after seeing Meredith in Chris O’Donnell’s shirt. He asks Meredith if “his dog” (instead of “our dog”) is o.k.; when she corrects him and asks if he’s mad at her for something, he just grumps off with a “now’s not the time.”

The ambulances are filled with assorted members of a family from the south (Bailey says, “A hillbilly picnic”). It’s like the Waltons goodnight routine on speed as they all yell to each other to see if anyone’s o.k. and cause headaches for the doctors. The mother won’t let Alex examine her because she’s pantiless and doesn’t know him well enough to let him see her “good girl.” The last ambulance carries the guy who caused the car crash. He’s a young, Asian intern from “Mercy West”. Hillbilly dad (Big Jim) makes a move to assault the kid, but his wife convinces him to hold his horses since he’s already hurt. When Dempsey examines the intern, it looks like she was right : closed head injury and unable to remember a few words.

[ opening title ]

When we get back, the mother and father are cleared for discharge. Alex makes fun of their southern accents, but Isabel and George defend their non-hickness, saying that Big Jim owns half of Alabama. Addison is still exacting revenge on Alex. He left her service for the emergency page, noting that one of the accident victims is a pregnant young woman. With this, she assigns him to sit with her all day rather than follow along on interesting cases. Speaking of Alex’s new ward — she’s something of an Amy Adams wannabe. One Junebug was more than enough as far as I’m concerned, but at least we have a nickname.

Oh gets all flirty with Chief Wannabe #2, but he’s not having it. It turns out she fell asleep on “duty”. She’s really sorry, but she already “finished”, twice and was really tired. The main problem is that he hadn’t finished even once. Ouch.

Look: the Tin Man still isn’t dead. But his batteries are. The doctors find Denny collapsed in the hall. When they get him back to his room he says that he wants to go home. It’s his heart; the machine hasn’t fixed him, and he’s sick of it all.

Later, Bailey looks at Junebug’s CT scans. It looks amazingly bad — lungs, liver, etc — and they wonder how she’s alive at all; so she pages every single doctor in the place. As she’s noticing all the internal damage, the machines start making their crazy dying noises. On the upside, there’s really only one case to recap this episode, being a SuperFriends sort of patient.

–

After the commercials, Torres asks George about Isabel, and why she blew off her morning O.R. prep assignment. Instead, he brings the bad news to Junebug’s family. Their daughter / fiancee (as appropriate) seemed fine when she arrived because she was pumped full of adrenaline, but once she relaxed she succumbed to the catastrophic consequences of her injuries. The scene shifts to all of our favorite surgeons, cutting away. Alex is tasked to baby heartbeat watch. For now the baby is safe, but the mother isn’t doing well at all. The Chief sends them into damage control mode — and demands that they stop once they reach the “triangle of death”

Meredith hangs out with the injured intern. It turns out that he scrubbed in to a 12 hour surgery against the rules. On the way home, he fell asleep at the red light for just a second. He asks whether staying up late to save a life mean that he killed a pregnant woman. It kind of looks that way, doesn’t it. Grey turns her back for a minute and Sleepy has disappeared.

Elsewhere, Izzie brings chocolate and tabloids to Denny to help him make the most of his misery. But he’s still surly, saying that she has no idea what it means to have lost what he lost: he’s a strong virile man stuck in a weakling body. If she knew what it feels like, she would have let him die weeks/months ago to save us all from the agony of this storyline.

In the O.R., the Chief calls a time out. He demands that everyone stops their cutting and sewing. They don’t even stitch Junebug back together again, instead covering her in plastic and sending her up to the ICU. Let’s all have a collective WTF?!?, shall we? Her heart is still beating and SleepyIntern is watching from the gallery.

–

Dempsey chews Grey out for letting her patient escape, saying that it’s all her fault: “You had him and you lost him. You need to take responsibility for once in your life.” {I think we all know who he’s really talking about. Not that it makes any sense.}

In the ICU, the doctors explain the SaranWrap situation. They’re giving Junebug medication because they want her to gain strength before continuing the surgery. On the other hand, they also want to fix her up, but not too soon. It’s what they like to call a balancing act. While everyone else gets to run off to do fun things, Alex has to stay and watch the fetal monitor. Addison reminds her indignant intern that he’s the only one on the whole floor responsible for the baby. Did he know that an infant can survive for four to five minutes after the mother’s heart stops beating. {Let’s all file this away for later, shall we?}

In a crummy looking lounge, the interns chat about all of the places they’ve fallen asleep. George walks by to find out why Isabel wasn’t with Torres (her surgeon for the day). They tease him a bit about his unhygienic crazy girlfriend, and he pouts off. Sandra Oh says that if Burke can forgive her for falling asleep during sex, George should forgive Grey for some coital tears. Meredith reminds her that Burke hasn’t actually done any forgiving.

George catches up with Crazy to say that Izzie had another patient. This makes Torres mad, because George took his friend’s side. She storms off, leaving George to talk to Junebug’s husband. He wants to know what Geroge did to get in so much trouble. He expositions about their story. He’s a Seattleite who came back from college married to a
southern girl, and everyone thinks he’s crazy. What’s happening is that his big haired southern girl could be dying and he can’t think about that right now; so he really wants to know more about George’s domestic troubles. So George reveals the handwashing rumors, the patient hopes that she did wash her hands since she just did some surgery on his knee.

Sleepy’s CT is back, and he pleads for an opportunity to apologize to Junebug’s family. Dempsey rushes out and Meredith follows him. They have the stairwell confrontation we’ve all been waiting for {well, except for those of you who’ve been hoping for a stairwell reunion.}

Meredith apologizes for ever telling him about George and the Night of Weepy Desperation Sex. He says that it’s O.K., he’s glad to know what a whore she is — first George, then the vet, she really gets around — saying that it’s unforgiveable. He’s incredibly out of line with this guilt trip and she finally calls him on it. She doesn’t remember asking you to forgive him. He asks who’s next in the phase, he hears that Alex likes to sleep around, something they have in common. She grabs him, turns him around, and says that he doesn’t get to call her a whore. When they met she thought that she had found the guy she was going to end up with {For now, let’s ignore the fact that this isn’t true. When they met, it was a one night stand and she tried to get rid of him the next morning so that she could get to work.} She says that all of the boys, and the bars, and the obvious daddy issues didn’t matter anymore because she was done. And then he left her. He chose Addison. And she’s “all glued back together now, I make no apologizes for how I chose to repair what you broke. You don’t get to call me a whore.”

He nods, “This thing with us is finished. It’s over.”

She, and most of the home audience, say “Finally.” They agree that it’s done. Grey cries a little bit, but we don’t.

–

We return to find the doctors gathered around Junebug whispering about when they should resume the surgery. The mother, sitting in the back of the room tells them that they might as well speak up. This is the kind of decision a momma outght to be involved in. Her daughter has always asked her mother for advice. Together, they decide that it’s time to go back into the O.R. Alex is still watching the fetal heart rate. Soon, Junebug’s falling apart and he announces that they’re losing the baby. Next door Addison is busy (up to her elbows in another uterus), so she tells Alex to do what he can. While all of this is going on, George and the rest of the family hold a makeshift vigil. Meredith interrupts to tell them that Sleepy (one of them) wants to apologize.

Back to the O.R., and Junebug has been down five minutes. Alex grabs a scalpel and insists on doing a c-section to get the baby out. Bailey gives him some quick coaching, and out comes a blue-looking baby. Neither mother or child look very good. The doctors pronounce her dead. Just as Addison enters, Alex gets the baby craying.

–

It’s sad music time as the doctors clean up the aftermath of their failed surgery. Followed by George, a deranged-looking Big Jim drops in on Sleepy’s room (where Meredith observes her patient). Sleepy is very very sorry. So so sorry. He pleads for forgiveness. For a minute, it looks like Big Jim is going to choke him to death for killing his daughter. Instead, he sort of caresses Sleepy’s sobbing face and leaves without saying anything.

In the Tin Man suite, Isabel climbs into bed with Denny, who warns her that it could get her into trouble. She doesn’t care about that. She’s there for him, not for herself. Later in the montage, Denny asks if it would be wrong for him to feel her up right now. She just calls him such a dirty boy.

Grey’s voiceover walks us out of the episode: “We’re all damaged, it seems. Some of us more than others.”

Back at the Burkeatorium, Oh and Burke sit down for dinner. He says, not particularly jokingly, that she must be tired. He, reading over his soup, is tired too.

“We carry the damage with us from childhood. Then, as grown ups, we give as good as we get.”

In the NICU, the new father looks at his baby. Alex looks at them through the glass. Addison congratulates Alex on his good work that day. He replies that the kid’s alive, without a mother.

“Ultimately, we all do damage.”

In the locker room, we find Meredith and George packing up for the day. George, breaks the long-term silent treatment, asking if he’ll see her at home. She says yeah, sure. We all say, Aw, he was inspired by Big Jim’s forgiveness.

“And then, we set about the business of fixing whatever we can.”

Before going home, George stops by Crazy Torres’s hospital hovel. She explains that she didn’t wash her hands because the girls were looking at her like she was a rodent having the naked high school dream. {Or maybe because she marched into an occupied bathroom without saying anything, not wearing any clothes, and peed in front of near strangers?} She explained that she washed her hands in the kitchen and insists that he has to stand up for her. She demands that he say that she washed her hands. George apologizes and they curl up on her mattress.

Back at the Veterinary Apartment, Chris O’Donnell is cooking again. Meredith is hovering. She backs off to tell him that this could all be a mistake. She admits to being scary and damaged, possibly more than he can handle. Not to worry: his mother died from cancer when he was ten and his father’s now spends his days as living dead drunk. The last woman he slept with was his wife, who died quickly after a car crash. But he thinks that his luck is beginning to change: she lies dogs and pony births {who doesn’t, really?} and has the ability to save lives. He never said he wasn’t scary and damaged, too. This is a pretty cute line. They kiss and smile.

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