This week’s episode was a nice change of pace from the normal hustle and bustle of Seattle Grace / Mercy West. As part of the lecture series Derek has reinstated, we took a trip back through time to visit some of the ground breaking moments in the careers of Bailey, Callie, and Richard. We didn’t get a whole lot of new information, and none of the current plotlines were advanced beyond Richard celebrating 45 days sober and being told that the board has turned down his reinstatement for now. Derek offered him position in general surgery, but Richard turns him down (for now).
Bailey
We start off seeing Bailey get ready for her presentation, looking snazzy in pink, and getting checked out by the Gas Man (whom I think we still haven’t been formally introduced to, but the internet tells me his name is Ben Warren). It’s hard to tell exactly how much time has passed, but we know that this is at least 45 days after the Chief went to rehab, so I think it’s safe to bet that Bailey and the Gas Man have gone out on at least one day by now. Things seem to be going pretty good so far.
Not surprisingly, Bailey is an excellent public speaker. She entertains the masses by awarding them with candy. Cristina, having been pelted with a piece of candy for not paying attention at the beginning of Bailey’s talk, is super competitive. Even Arizona is seen munching on candy at one point during the lecture.
Bailey takes us back to 2003, when she was just three days into her internship (3 years before we met her). Back then she was timid and quiet, our first look at the band nerd, star wars geek, awkward bookworm, that we have been told about in the past. “Mandy” (as she was still calling herself) is sporting some pretty awesome pink glasses and long braids. She in constantly stuck at the back of the intern pack, hidden due to her height and meek voice. When she tries to speak up during rounds, catching Richard’s eye, her resident from hell, played by the always enjoyable Missi Pyle, gives her a hell of a smack down and reminds her that she is at the bottom of the surgical food chain. While their patient is in surgery Bailey quietly pipes in with some useful info about the patient being a vegan. Richard is impressed with the thorough medical history Bailey’s taken. Missi Pyle is not amused, and punishes Bailey with scut.
The patient comes and goes, and comes again. At one point Bailey thinks her appendix might be what was causing the issues, so she gets to remove it. Unfortunately, the appendix was perfectly fine. Oops! Oh well, at least she got some rocking advice from Richard during the surgery.
“Surgery's a shark tank,'' he told her. ''And sharks have teeth. Make sure you're a shark, too. And not a minnow . . . . God made you short. Who made you quiet?”
When the patient is sent away again without a diagnosis, and after some lame credit steeling by Missi Pyle, Bailey drowns her sorrows at Joe’s. This was mostly so we could see Joe with awesome long hair. Well worth it.
Finally, when the patient is admitted once again, Bailey goes from minnow to shark. She figures out that the woman suffers from prophyria, and cancels Missi Pyle’s surgery. She then gets to let loose with her very first Bailey speech, telling Missi Pyle off for being scalpel happy and not caring enough about the patients to take a good history put the pieces together. Richard is listening the whole time and eventually has to step in because Bailey is loosing it a little, and really shouldn’t be yelling at her resident like that. He pulls her into his office, pretends to scold at her, and tells her that she is going to be an excellent surgeon.
Callie
Public speaking and Callie are not friends. They might in fact be mortal enemies. It’s funny that someone as inherently hardcore and kick-ass as Callie would be so completely undone by the idea of giving a lecture. We first find her on her bathroom floor, with Arizona brushing her hair. She’s cursing Derek Shepherd, but Arizona tells her to calm down and to not vomit again, because she just finished getting all of the puke out of her hair. That is love, ladies and gentlemen.
She is a complete mess on stage. To start, she nervously fidgets with her laptop trying to pull up her presentation, doing what Cristina identifies as her pee dance. She accidentally pulled up a cute picture of her and Arizona before getting to the right picture of legs horribly contorted by Polio. She is a mess. She mumbles quietly, drops her note cards, and panics. Arizona yells out for her just to talk – to tell them what happened. She continues to be a complete mess until Alex helps move her along (he worked with her on the case). Finally, by the end of the episode she was sitting at the end of the stage, talking pretty much directly to Alex, and she made it through the whole thing, getting around of applause and everything. But seriously folks, don’t ever put Callie through that again.
The case took place during what would have been season 1 of the series. We didn’t meet Callie until later on, but of course she was around! Alex flirts his way onto Callie’s case, letting her believe that he was “the heart in the elevator guy” (RIP George). The case was a grad student who suffered from severe polio. His legs looked like an “S”. Callie, being the Ortho God that she is, promised the patient that she would be able get him to walk again. Richard is angry at Callie for making that promise, which was admittedly pretty cocky. He tells her that her career at Seattle Grace will hinge on this surgery.
The surgery starts off well, and Callie is able to fix the patient’s clubbed foot, but his lungs were too weak to the surgery. She tells the patient that she doesn’t think they can do another surgery, but he wiggles his toes for the first time since he was a child and says she can do it. They go back into surgery again, but this time something is up with his heart and she needs Alex to “do the heart thing” like in the elevator. Confession time. Alex admits that he wasn’t that guy, but Callie says he’s going to do it now anyway and talks him though it. In the end Callie was able to straighten out the patients legs (the X-rays get a big round of applause in the lecture), and he is able to walk with crutches. Callie gets a nice approving hand on the shoulder from Richard, and she and Alex celebrate. And by celebrate she means they totally had sex in her basement apartment. She invokes the cone of silence, and they never speak of it again. There’s a moment at the end of Callie’s lecture where Arizona realizes Callie and Alex slept together, and she isn’t too amused.
Richard
Richard delivered a compelling and heartfelt lecture. The man was born to talk. He takes us back to a case he worked on with Ellis Grey in 1982. He and Ellis were both treated horribly by racist/sexist men of Seattle Grace. They were both outcasts, which meant the worked twice as hard as everyone else for a tenth of the recognition. So this is the hard-core Ellis we have heard so much about (played by the always wonderful Sarah Paulson). Richard (played by J. August Richards – who will always be Gunn to us) and she worked together to diagnose a patient with AIDS, back when it was still being called GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency). The patient pitched a fit, threatened to sue them for slander, and got them in trouble with their boss, who I’m sure had a name but I’m going to keep calling Mitchum Huntzberger (Gilmore Girls). A little while down the road the patient comes back back with complications from Kaposi’s Sarcoma, admits he is gay, and no one in the hospital will get within 20 feet of him besides Ellis and Richard.
This was the first case of AIDS in Washington, and no one understood its cause, how it was spread, or how to treat it. They were repeatedly told that he was going to die anyway, so they shouldn’t waste their time. When even the patient echoes this sentiment, Richard suggested that there could be a cure next week for all they know – why not right it with everything they have? They performed surgery on the patient, but he eventually died with complications from pneumonia. They held his hands while he died.
In other new news, Ellis and Richard were sleeping together this whole time (which we already knew), and they were pretty hot together. When we saw young Thatcher, who looked like a poor man’s Howie Mandel, we really couldn’t blame her. Little Meredith was adorable, however, with her Anatomy Jane doll. Ellis was just as cold to her as we’d expect, but to be fair it was wicked lame of Thatcher to bring her to the hospital like that. Ellis tries to convince Richard to leave Adelle. She says that their marriages were a lie, that what was between them was real. He says that he couldn’t do that, but she responded simply with “We’ll see.” We of course know that Richard doesn’t leave Adelle for Ellis, but Ellis does leave Thatcher and go all sorts of crazy. We also see Ellis encouraging Richard to man up and drink liquor. Well that sure turned out super for everyone. At the end of the lecture he has everyone stand and he recites the Physician’s Oath.
More than anything this episode made me miss the Richard from the beginning of the series. The one who wasn’t obsessed with hospital finances and appearances. The one who molded residents into great surgeons. The one who fought for what was right. All three lectures showed us the best in Richard. Let’s hope he’s on the way back to his former glory.
No comments:
Post a Comment