Happy Halloween, Grey’s friends! There were lots of scary things going on in “Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard” to keep with the theme of the evening: You know, things like mass graves! And Bailey and Tom sort of bonding? And Meredith’s time in the slammer being so unbelievably anti-climactic. Okay, I guess not all of those things are scary to the general population, but for Grey’s Anatomy fans, watching this “Meredith committed insurance fraud and might lose her medical license” storyline drag on for what seems like 300 years is truly terrifying.
So, yes, Meredith’s in jail for about 20 seconds, which isn’t ideal, but everyone seems fine and she’s just waiting to get released on Halloween when we come across her. She once again makes an ass out of herself as she whines about her current predicament, only to have her thunder stolen by her cellmate who is a single mom with two kids and two jobs and was arrested for a ridiculous charge and can’t pay her bail, so her kids are in foster care and she’s in jail while she awaits her hearing, which probably won’t be for a month. It’s always great when Meredith gets a dose of the real world. Like, the actual least she can do for this woman is pay for her bail, which she does in the end, because Meredith saves people regardless of if she’s holding a scalpel or not, I guess (please dear lord get her holding a scalpel again soon).
Surely, the more dramatic aspect of this plot will be her medical licensing hearing — hopefully we’ll get some great Grey’s throwbacks during that spectacle — but even that is sure to be a little lackluster since there’s no way they’re going to strip Meredith of her medical license. Which means all we can really do is twirl our thumbs until this whole mess is over.
The one interesting little thing to come out of Meredith Sleeps Over in Jail 2019 is the conversation it forces between DeLuca and Zola. DeLuca’s been stepping up big time to help Maggie and Amelia watch Mer’s kids while she’s in lockup (seriously, if she questions if he’s serious enough for her, I will hurl myself into the ocean), but he runs into a problem when he offers to help Zola with her butterfly wings. “You’re not my dad,” she tells him. Kids: truly the scariest.
Zola’s cold to DeLuca all day, until finally he takes some advice from Cool Dad Jackson, and figures out a way to get her to tell him the real reason she’s upset. So basically Jackson’s advice is “talk to her.” And so after she runs off, DeLuca eventually finds Zola sitting in an OR gallery and asks what’s going on. The thing is, Derek is the one who fixed her butterfly wings, one of the few memories she has of her dad, and she’s afraid of forgetting him. Little does Zola know but it was actually Derek and Ben who fixed those butterfly wings back in season ten’s Halloween episode, “Thriller.” We won’t make her feel any worse. But now that DeLuca knows the truth, he’s able to help. This man! He says the exact right things to this poor child: he talks about Derek being a legend and tells her a story about one of his surgeries (Derek operated on Issac the lab tech in season six, for those who couldn’t place it). If Meredith ditches this guy, I will … well yes, I guess once again I’ll hurl myself into the ocean. It is the only way.
Not only are we waiting out this Meredith storyline, but there’s also this whole Pac-North thing that continues to be a bit puzzling. It seems unlikely that our doctors will be split between two hospitals for the rest of time, but there’s no clear ejection plan either. In fact, just as things seem their most dire at Pac-North — construction workers building the new research wing discover a mass grave underneath AND all the patients start crashing because the blood from the hospital’s blood bank has gone bad — Alex gets a lifeline.
While both of those seemingly terrible things are happening and the hospital is going into crisis mode, Alex has investors there taking a tour. Alex is sure that his investors will want to pull out of funding projects immediately, like any normal investors would, but instead they’re impressed at how well Alex handles the chaos. They probably don’t know he was born and bred in Seattle Grace Mercy Death, actual Hellmouth.
With Alex, Webber, and Owen getting things in order at this castle of ineptitude, and a set of truly bonkers investors behind them, could Pac-North, like, actually become a functional hospital? Stranger things have happened, perhaps.
Aside from the investors, someone else is quite impressed with Alex Karev: His wife, who has been hanging around Pac-North all day in her Corpse Bride costume because this woman who is supposed to be working on a research project that could herald in the future of medicine has literally nothing else to do. She does use her own wedding dress for her costume because wedding dresses are stupid expensive and she wants to get some real use out of it. Honestly, Jo Karev has never made more sense to me than in this moment.
After a day of watching her husband crush it as Chief of Surgery, she’s super proud and the happy couple wants to celebrate. Alex sees his wife in her wedding dress, fake blood and all, and suggests they head to the courthouse to make their marriage legal. Just a corpse bride and vampire promising to love each other until death do they part.
Laughter Is the Best Medicine, Apart From Real Medicine
• Perhaps the weirdest thing about the Pac-North of it all is that I kind of like it over there? Call me crazy, but I’ll take “The blood has gone bad!” shenanigans over not one but two storylines having to do with Halloween costumes any day. The heart wants what the heart wants, we know this.
• Speaking of: I really love Link and Amelia together, and I don’t just toss the “L” word around carelessly. I’m not Owen Hunt. In this episode, we meet Link’s parents who, up to this point have just been those two divorced monsters who made Link’s life hell what with their constant arguing. When he and Amelia meet them for Link’s “cancer-versary” his parents tell him they’re actually getting remarried. Surprise?
• Bailey being confused about why her hormones are out of control seems a little ridiculous for a woman who is both the Chief of Surgery at an elite hospital and someone who has been pregnant before, but, okay? She’s really dreading crying in front of Tom, Chief of Chiefs, for the entire episode, but once he opens up to her about how much his late son loved Halloween, she just couldn’t stop the tears from flowing. No one could!
• There was an entire storyline about Teddy feeling inadequate because she didn’t want to make her kids Halloween costumes from scratch. I know we’re in season 16 here, but is this all that’s left?
• It was perhaps only worth it for the reveal that Teddy dressed Leo and Alison up as zombies. Or as a horrified Owen asks, “you dressed our babies up as dead babies?”
• Jo finally scaring Alex by telling him that she’s pregnant during their courthouse nuptials scared me, too. I was worried we’d be dealing with three pregnant ladies this season and that would just be too much for my weary soul. Thankfully, it was all just a Halloween trick. Never trust a corpse bride, you know?
