Grey's Anatomy - That's Me Trying recap/review

Why did we include a picture of the HPV Tree Guy? To gross you out and remind you it existed, of course. HA.

Ern and Leeard like their little jokes/to mess with people.

So many people think this season of Grey's Anatomy isn’t dramatic enough, but we like the low-key, season one-vibe episodes. The show is semi-realistic again, the characters aren’t annoying, and the humor is back. We aren’t spending too much of the season getting rid of characters either. After the finale and laughable plotlines of the last couple of seasons, it's time for this show to calm down and get respectable again. This episode was on par with the rest of this perfectly decent season. Entertaining, but not mind-blowing and too dramatic.

Mark and Lexie: A patient, tired of only gaining weight in her upper arms (we hear you, sister), came to the plastics department to get very large butt implants. It was great to see Mark and Lexie flirting, working together, and getting out some of their issues. We liked this patient and the way she told Lexie that she was getting the surgery only for herself.

Callie and Arizona: It turns out Callie didn’t really want to go with Arizona to Africa, so she bummed around, acting morose about it, and Mark called her out on doing something that wasn’t good for her for her girlfriend. At the airport, Arizona burst out that Callie was ruining Africa for her, and that she didn’t want Callie to come. Callie said that if Arizona got on the plane alone, they would be over, and Arizona left. DON’T FREAK OUT. Arizona is not off the show. She will be back. The actress is simply on maternity leave.

Owen, Jackson, April, and Alex: Owen, in typical Owen fashion, created another crazy training program for his underlings (remember the pigs from season five?). He set up a trauma routine with dozens of dummies in the parking lot. They were all supposed to be dying, and Owen put many young doctors into teams and had them try to save the dummies. It started to rain, Owen kept making it harder, the fake patients were dying, and it took a long time for anyone to win the contest and pass Owen’s test. Jackson walked out and April started creating her own rules to make the situation better for the doctors. April went a little crazy, commandeered an ambulance, screamed incoherently, and “saved” her one patient. We guess being crazy is what it takes to be a good trauma surgeon at Seattle Grace, because Owen was impressed with April’s trauma potential. Then Owen went to Jackson, chewed him out for making the “my friends died excuse” when all Owen’s friends died in the war (we guess THAT’S why he had to ask McDreamy to be his best man), and Jackson went back to complete Owen’s crazy training. Way to put a million bucks to good use, Hunt. While this entire thing made almost no sense, we liked it, because it was funny. We especially liked April ripping Alex’s rain-protection off of him and putting it on her dummy.

Bailey and Derek, the sad sacks of the week: Bailey moped around doing Mary’s autopsy, which came up inconclusive. Derek moped around trying to write a grant proposal for Alzheimer’s studies. He failed, because he was too worried about Meredith to get any work done. He had to tell his wife that she couldn’t be a part of the trial, because his worry for her would get in the way of the work.

Cristina and Meredith: The Meredith/Cristina friendship is on the rocks, because Cristina broke down and told Meredith that she blames Meredith for her mental breakdown. Cristina said that if it were anyone else’s husband on the table on the day of the shooting, she would have walked away. She also resents Meredith for facing a lot of the same pressures Cristina faced that day and coming out of it fine, while Cristina is ruined. Cristina managed to keep a patient alive this episode and was commended for it by Teddy. But, at the end, Cristina went to the chief and quit her job. Yikes.

It took a while for us to warm up to the Pathetic Cristina storyline, and we certainly railed against it in the beginning. But give us a break, it started out lame and took out one of our favorite characters. But since then, we’ve discovered that Cristina’s crisis as a surgeon is long overdue for the character, realistic, interesting, and well-written. It also gives Sandra Oh a good acting opportunity that doesn’t involve romance. As long as Cristina comes back strong as a surgeon in an awesome way, we are behind this storyline. It is the one in which we are the most emotionally invested at the moment.

Episode grade: Somewhere between a B and a B+