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Grey’s Anatomy Recap: On Trial

Grey’s Anatomy

Living in a House Divided
Season 18 Episode 10
Editor’s Rating 3 stars

Grey’s Anatomy

Living in a House Divided
Season 18 Episode 10
Editor’s Rating 3 stars
Photo: Liliane Lathan/ABC

The doctors are fighting! The doctors are fighting! It’s never fun to watch all your moms and dads fight, but that’s exactly what happens when the morbidity and mortality conference for Schmitt’s patient rolls around. It’s not pretty, but it is exciting, and I really wish they had some doctor hanging out in the back corner eating popcorn during all of this because there is drama and there is yelling and there is Catherine Fox giving people the stink eye.

You might think a lot of this outrage would be directed toward the surgeon who did the cutting, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Everyone is pretty worried about Schmitt, who still hasn’t returned to work and shows up to his own M&M late and looking like he’s been through hell and hasn’t slept in days. He’s even wearing his glasses again, so you know things aren’t going well. He begins to go through the surgery in question step-by-step. Normally, a doctor in his position would be grilled with questions about how he let things go so wrong, but not here. No one wants to interrogate Schmitt. Yet still, he begins to have flashes of the surgery and of his patient dying and eventually he says, “I killed him,” and walks out of the room.

Later, Nico finally finds Schmitt in his mother’s basement, and the guy is a mess. He tries to tell his boyfriend that this is hard but “it’s part of the job,” but that is comforting in exactly zero ways. Schmitt doesn’t even look at him as he tells him that he’s never going back to Grey Sloan, he wants Nico to leave, and he’s breaking up with him. Not Nico and Schmitt!! Honestly, it is always a bad idea to go visit a doctor who is a shell of a human after a patient’s death before they are ready for visitors. Did we learn nothing from Derek playing baseball with his engagement ring for Meredith?!! I’m still scarred from that scene! Anyway, Schmitt will have a long road back to the operating room and back to Nico ahead of him.

While we obviously feel for Schmitt, this M&M isn’t really about him in the end: It’s about the Webber Method. Everyone knows that Richard Webber’s baby is going to be put on trial at this thing — it’s why he steels himself ahead of it; it’s why Catherine comes along for support. And while he knew people would be asking why they are continuing to allow residents to operate without attendings in the room — and why they ever allowed it in the first place — Richard had no idea that the most outspoken person against the Webber Method would be his daughter Maggie. Whew, buddy, Maggie is angry. Maggie is angry that this hospital would allow this to go down; she’s angry that at a hospital that has department-head meetings for switching suture brands, they wouldn’t have at least one meeting before implementing something like this. The points against the Webber Method are extremely valid — even Jordan Wright pops up to point out how confusing the Method makes the chain of command in an OR and how dangerous that is. It’s clear what direction this whole thing is going for Webber.

Maggie tries to talk to him about it one-on-one, but it blows up into a huge argument in which Webber doesn’t hesitate to remind Maggie how she, like Schmitt, made an honest mistake in the OR once and it ended up killing his niece. Low blow, but that is indeed the crux of it for Maggie: She remembers how devastating that was for her, just like this is devastating for Schmitt, and she knows that if they were simply to always blame just the surgeon doing the cutting in these circumstances, that surgeon would never be able to recover from the loss. They need to examine the context around the surgery, and in this case, that includes the risks of the Webber Method.

Later, in a scene in which Webber is flanked by Maggie, Meredith, and Amelia — women he considers daughters to him (sorry, Bailey!) — he knows what has to be done. He had the best intent with this and only wanted to make surgery more exciting for the residents. The women remind him that he doesn’t need the Webber Method to do that; getting to learn from him, Richard Webber, is the exciting part. (SO much of this Webber Method stuff has to do with him being worried about his legacy, even if he doesn’t say that out loud.) It’s all very nice and I wish they would hug at the end of it, but I guess this isn’t that kind of group hang.

Webber has one other VIP to talk to about this: Bailey. She comes to see him in his office and informs him that, not surprisingly, she’s chucking the Webber Method for good. He doesn’t put up a fight. He takes it … maybe a little too well? He also apologizes to Bailey for railroading her into doing the Webber Method in the first place, when she had concerns from the very beginning. He knows he was wrong and he’s sorry. Is Webber dying or something? This all seems a little too neat and emotionally healthy for this show.

You know, it would be just like Grey’s to pull out something tragic right now because at the moment Meredith is just, like, incandescently happy. She gets Nick to help out at Grey Sloan for the day since they are forever short-staffed, and not only does he meet and get the approval of Meredith’s sisters, but the two have what seems like a lot of fun together. When he’s getting ready to head back to Minnesota, he lets it slip that he never wants to leave Meredith. He is a little embarrassed, but not for long: He’s super into her and he does not care who knows it. While Meredith turns down his offer to go back to Minnesota with him for a few days, it’s only because this whole thing with Webber has made her realize how “disconnected” she’s been from the people she cares about, not because she doesn’t want to go. “But for the record, I don’t ever want to leave you, either,” she tells Nick. These two are just so smitten there, standing in the snow, and yes, please and thank you, this is the kind of romance this show needs right now.

The OR Board

• Teddy must think she’s on CSI: Grey Sloan Memorial this week (a show I would very much watch) because she just won’t let up on figuring out what happened between Owen and Hayes in the car before it went tumbling down that ravine. She knows that whatever Owen said is the reason Hayes is leaving, so it must be something big. Owen begs her to drop it, knowing that it would incriminate her too, if she found out what he was up to, but she proceeds to question every person she can think of to get more information. Eventually, she finds Heather, the late Nathan’s wife, getting Owen’s car keys from him in his hospital room and follows her to Owen’s car, where she finds Heather getting the life-ending drugs Owen has stashed for Nathan’s buddies. Teddy cracked the case!

• Grey’s trots Hayes out one last time before shipping him off to Ireland for good and for what? To attempt to tell Teddy to cool it with the whole “I NEED TO KNOW WHAT OWEN DID IN THAT CAR” thing? Fine. To tell Meredith how special and important she is? Get over it. To remind us all that the show did us dirty by having this character go nowhere? That feels right.

• Link and Perez work together on a patient, Lila, whom Link only sees as a fat woman and therefore misdiagnoses her until Perez points out Link’s mistake. I’m very, VERY much here for Grey’s pointing out how stupid and awful the BMI is and the discrimination fat people are inflicted with when it comes to medicine, but once again the whole thing felt like a PSA lodged in the middle of a Grey’s Anatomy episode instead of a message woven into the story.

• After being the Most Awkward while working with Amelia all day on Francesca, a patient with endometriosis, Jo realizes that hooking up with Link is a bad idea on several levels. Carina advises her that if the “casual sex with a friend” isn’t actually casual for her, then she should end it. Jo does just that and Link doesn’t ask any follow-up questions, so once again Jo balks on telling her friend how she really feels about him.

• Aw, I loved that Bailey/Helm scene where Helm is upset because she thinks she should’ve spoken up in the OR and stopped Schmitt and Bailey, also a know-it-all who’s been afraid to speak up at times, comforts her.

• “Menstruation, pregnancy, ovarian cysts, menopause, endometriosis, I want to know what men get.” “All the research.”

Grey’s Anatomy Recap: On Trial