Spoilers for last night's "Grey's Anatomy" coming up just as soon as I plant a kiss on a strange new colleague...With the specter of Denny Duquette no longer hanging over the show (for now, anyway), "Beat Your Heart Out" was able to get back to some of the series' stronger elements, but it also featured some of the weaker ones.
After all the talk of how excited Shonda Rhimes was to write for Kevin McKidd, I've been baffled by the microscopic amount of screentime devoted to the Yang/Hunt romance. I pretty much always like those scenes and then forget about them immediately because they only take up two minutes per episode. Last night, we got quite a bit more of them than usual, and I thought the gag of having them wander the halls as if they were characters in a Jane Austen story, immediately after Cristina referred to Ellis' diary as seeming like a Victorian romance, was a good one. And Cristina's attempt to hug the demons out of Owen almost -- almost -- redeemed the earlier scene with Dr. Dixon where she got the idea. (More on that in a bit.) If it turns out the mystery blonde woman who triggered Hunt's despair is the wife he abandoned, then I'm going to be annoyed, because they already played that note with Addison(*), and they don't need to do it again.
(*) Speaking of which, it's been a while since I watched "Private Practice," but am I correct in assuming that the extent of the cross-over content in their episode was simply Addison calling Derek for his help? Or was it more significant than that?
I also thought that Derek's struggle to find the right way to propose to Meredith worked, both because Meredith is such a brittle little drama queen, and because it was never played on a life-or-death level. We know he's going to pop the question sooner or later, and that Shonda's not dumb enough to split them up again, so it's more of a relationship in microcosm moment than the precursor to a dumb sweeps twist.
Chandra Wilson continues to do great work in the Bailey-as-pediatric-surgeon arc, particularly the nearly-silent glimpse of Miranda down in the daycare center, reassuring herself that her son was okay and trying to shut out images of dying kids. After fumbling around for a few years to find an ongoing storyline that works for the one level-headed character who's never going to get involved in romantic shenanigans, I think Shonda and company finally hit on the right one here.
But then... then we have Dr. Dixon, whom I thought/hoped we were done with. She was drawn slightly less cartoonishly than in her previous appearances, but she still seems more alien than Asperger's, and I still winced at the tinkly "It's all a joke, folks!" piano music they played during the hug scene(**).
(**) The "This is how you're supposed to feel now" musical score is a problem endemic to a lot of ABC shows -- the Berlanti shows frequently suffer from it -- and I have to assume it's a direction coming from the network and not from each showrunner. Either way, I hate it. Let a damn scene breathe once in a while, folks, Please.
And then we had Arizona whatsername randomly planting one on Callie about 30 seconds after their first conversation began. On what planet, regardless of age, mood or sexual orientation, does that scene end that way for those two people? I get that they wanted to pair off Callie after the awkward, network-mandated firing of Brooke Smith, but how about a little foreplay, folks?
What did everybody else think?
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