Anyone else feel like they’ve lived 20 years since we learned Alex Karev skipped town to have a happily ever after with Izzie Freakin Stevens? It’s only been a week. ONE WEEK. The world exhausts me. Because of this, I’ve resigned myself to feeling 100 percent “meh” about the end of Alex’s story. In theory, it would’ve been very easy to buy that Alex still had feelings for Izzie, but seeds needed to be planted for it to be executed well and that was impossible given the circumstances. So, now we have to live with the fact that this good and decent man who we watched earn being called “good and decent” over 16 seasons just up and left his wife after everything they had been through and while they seemed in the very best of places. This is the hand we have been dealt! There is no use getting your scrubs in a bunch over it. I mean, look at the folks over at Grey Sloan Memorial: It’s business as usual over there. Sure, people are still mentioning how crazy it is that Alex is gone, and Meredith spends a few minutes thinking about him while longingly looking out a rain-soaked window, but it has only been one week and life has moved on without Alex Karev.
Even Jo, the jilted wife, seems to have already fully processed such a brutal dumping. Sorry not sorry but I rolled my eyes so hard during Jo’s big “I will rise again!” speech. It has been, say it with me, just one week since Alex left her and after one day of being around two 22-year-olds who are so in love until the girl realizes she’d have to give up her Rhodes scholarship in order to help her boyfriend with his long recovery post-falling on train tracks mid-make-out session (it was a thing!!) and she just can’t do that, Jo is able to take a healthy look at what the end of her marriage means.
She tells Link that she is mad and she is hurt, but she won’t give up on the idea of love. She will rise again like some trash phoenix or something. She knows this because Alex helped her realize she was worthy of love. He may be gone, but she gets to keep that lesson. It’s all very nice, but it is also insane. I’m sure there will be some residual fallout down the line, but in just one episode Jo is mostly healed! There is no throwing of things or yelling at people she cares about or getting drunk and insisting that she’s fine but we all know she’s definitely not fine and then she breaks down into tears in the middle of dancing somewhere inappropriate. You know, typical “person masking true pain” stuff. This show has taken what feels like literal years to tell us who the father of Amelia’s baby is, but Jo working through her anger over a betrayal and heartbreak of the worst kind is done in a week. Grey’s Anatomy truly baffles sometimes.
The good news is that yes, what they’re saying is true: We learn who the father of Amelia’s baby is! I will not drag it out any longer because hot damn this storyline made me want to hurl things off my balcony: It’s Link. Of course it is Link. There was no way they would make us suffer through Amelia having Owen’s baby at this point, but they had to make the questionable paternity valuable story-wise, and by that I mean, make it last long enough to wreak havoc on the lives of all those involved, including the audience. Oh, has Amelia’s reticence to get a paternity test caused so many problems.
One of those problems — Link and Amelia’s relationship status being tied to the child’s paternity — is happily resolved. Link has been in agony over loving Amelia while she refused to talk to him because she somehow believed it was offensive and hurtful for him to want to know the paternity even though it had nothing to do with his feelings for her and everything to do with his insecurities in regards to her history with Owen. Okay, wow, I am fuming again. Jo tells Link that if he loves Amelia, he shouldn’t let her go. So ol’ Linky boy grabs his guitar and stands on Amelia’s front porch in the pouring rain. Okay, he doesn’t sing her a song because he hasn’t had enough time to write one, but he still says very swoony things about how she makes him want to write love songs and that he loves her and the baby and doesn’t care if he is the biological father. He just wants to be with her. And now I need to go stand in the rain, if you know what I’m saying. Anyway, Amelia’s basically like “yes, that’s all I wanted to hear, I love you and I won.” And then she tells him she got the paternity test results and these two crazy kids are really having a baby together. She does not, in the least, attempt an apology for putting Link through what she just did. She remains the worst.
Do you think at some point she’ll apologize to Owen? Lord knows Owen has many sins, but his world is about to be upended because Amelia couldn’t figure her shit out. As we all know, the last time we saw Teddy she was reeling from the news that Amelia MIGHT be pregnant with Owen’s baby and what that could mean for her relationship, so she engaged in a little self-sabotage by way of humping Tom Koracick. This was a terrible idea because (1) she’s engaged to the supposed love of her life (no offense Henry, RIP) and (2) as Maggie points out, Tom has real feelings for her and she is taking advantage. On top of this terrible decision, Teddy decides that the best way to show her fiancé that everything is totally fine and cool is by making eye contact with him in the hallway and then immediately turning and running the other way. Obviously, Owen knows something is up and when he asks her about it, she blurts out that Amelia might be having his baby. He is shocked into silence, as you might imagine one would be. Teddy lets this silence affirm her insecurities regarding Owen’s feelings for Amelia and guys, she goes back to Tom for seconds!! This is a colossal mistake, which Teddy realizes as soon as she gets home to find Owen cooking her a meal and telling her that he loves her and they will get through anything together. He might want to revise that statement when he inevitably finds out about Teddy’s extracurricular activities. Amelia, do you see what you hath wrought?
This episode is packed to the brim with The Drama because, hello, we haven’t even gotten to the Richard Webber of it all! When he discovers that Catherine has had all of his Pac-North furniture sent to Grey Sloan, the man is angry. When he discovers that Bailey has taken it upon herself to set up his office “how it used to be,” the man is livid. He screams at Bailey about how she’s just like Catherine and then he starts tossing books off the shelves one by one to show just how angry he is. It’s not that effective. Toss a desk or something, guy.
Later, Bailey gets word that Webber has completely given up his surgical service, so she returns to give him a piece of her mind. She finds him in his now-empty office and he spins a tale about wanting to go out at the top of his game, that too many people “cling to their scalpels” for too long, but we all know this is to cover for his increasingly shaky hand. Bailey is devastated. The scene in which Bailey and Meredith are alone in the lounge and Bailey talks about being the only one left from her intern class and how lonely that actually is, well, it took my gosh darn actual breath away. Not that I think Richard is going anywhere soon, but to see these two original characters — two women who have fought so hard to get to the top of their field and have lost so much along the way — together and taking stock, well, that was really something.
The O.R. Board
• DeLuca is falling apart, my friends. He’s ordered to attend counseling before he can get back to work, but he assures the counselor he’s not having a manic episode, he’s just passionate. But all the symptoms of mania this lady lays out — agitation, inflated confidence, rambling, increased sex drive — sound very familiar. That last one comes into play at the end of the episode, when DeLuca sidles up to Jo at the bar and tells her that since they’re both single now, they should hook up. It is disgusting and Jo tosses her drink in his face before telling him that he needs “to get help before it’s too late.” Look at Jo being very helpful finally!
• Tom makes an evil deal with tech billionaire Griffin Ford, in which Tom will lie and say that Griffin’s recent failure with a rocket launch was due to a rare and easy-to-miss brain aneurysm, and in return Griffin will donate a ton of money to the hospital. This will surely blow up in Tom’s face.
• In case anyone cares, Jackson and Vic break up because she moved into his apartment without telling him (??) and then when he got mad about that, she moved in with Dean (Station 19’s true treasure). He gets even more angry about that (!!!) and basically calls her lifestyle immature. All I know is Jackson and Maggie better not have a backslide, because Maggie deserves better.
• What’s going on with Maggie? Wasn’t she getting sued by her own family? Can we get back into that?
• Meredith loses a patient who was rationing her insulin because she couldn’t afford it and that really lights a fire under Meredith again. Expect her to be back on her “let’s topple the health-care system” grind.
• Another time Jo was v. helpful: “Get a dorm, face eaters!”
