Grey's Anatomy: It's okay. I won a contest.

Quick spoilers for last night's "Grey's Anatomy" coming up just as soon as I pet a cub...

Why am I still watching? Somebody want to tell me that? With Thursday night as packed as its going to be from now through the end of the season, and with "Grey's" giving us episodes like this on a regular basis, what masochistic urge still has me giving up an hour of my life a week for it?

Shonda Rhimes said in several interviews that the strike gave her time to step back and re-assess some things, and has implied at the very least that she realizes she has to put Meredith and McDreamy back together once and for all. But even if "Where the Wild Things Are" started to hint at the latest reconciliation for primetime's mopiest couple, it still bore the hallmarks of a show that Just. Doesn't. Get It.

One of the overwhelming problems of the series was the way each character had drowned in her or his own narcissism, and how each of them gave no thought to how their selfishness hurt the people around them. So what's our first post-strike episode about? The interns having a contest that drives them -- most notably the loathsome Izzy -- to sacrifice their patients' physical and emotional well-being for the sake of a nebulous point system.

Look, I get that the competitive nature of a surgical residency is one of the key components of the series, and in general I like those moments when Cristina or Karev treats the latest case as nothing more than another rung on the ladder. But between Izzy torturing Cheech and Meredith taking out her own romantic hang-ups on her patient and his poor wife (even though she was right), I feel like Shonda took things too far. There's passive disinterest in your patients as human beings and then there's actively causing them harm because of your own neuroses, and the latter just makes me hate these people even more, whether or not they appeared to learn their lesson at the end.

On the plus side -- I think -- was the graphic nature of the bear-mauling injuries. They were gross, but at least when Clea Duvall took her hat off and we saw her brain exposed for all the world to see, it at least took my mind off of how little I can still tolerate the regular characters.

What did everybody else think?