Not a pumpkin pie. Not even a reference. This, I believe, is incredibly refreshing. And from that embarrassment of riches, what I find so astonishing about Thursday night’s painfully unpredictable (for me) episode of tv’s tightest medical/love affair/report on the human condition is not that it took the leap over and ignored the tried-and-true formula of matching holidays to dramas as has been done throughout tv history…but that it continues to grow and let its complex, flawed, confused and exceptional characters develop in fits and starts, and unevenly…like people, and like life, itself.
Like all of us, the complicity, duplicity and betrayal Preston and Christina felt toward and from each other, the somehow ungoofy Izzy and George, George and Dr. Torres, George and his parents, George and Burke, George and everyone(!) and the impossible pain each articulated, paralyzed with perplexed angst over difficult decision-making and the righteousness/guilt/post-mortems that follow…I was moved by the hurt each believed was only theirs to bear, terribly alone and profoundly full of terror and paranoia, impossibly real and honest, was the kind of anguish that ironically breaks real human hearts and allows them to keep beating with no surgical solutions in sight.
The writers and actors jumped over juxtaposing plot lines with tightrope dexterity and grace; the episode, like almost all of the mortally serious episodes of this medical dramedy, forced pain and change upon some of its characters, throwing some cast-iron relationships in question, others in jeopardy and tossing others still…away.
There could not be real comic relief in an episode like this; instead there was the surprise of Meredith and Derek in bed, teasing, learning each other all over again and the unexpected awkward warm tension between Alex and Addison that made a devastating car crash and the Yang-Burke brittle break bearable while it foreshadowed the possibility of a new love dance, or simply let a “moment” most of us feel all the time, feel familiar, among the accomplished and McBeautiful make-believe staff of this hit bit of current tv.
When you feel you “know” characters well, it is because they are so well-drawn by their creators. Shonda Rhimes, you are a master. And the rest is the result of superb writing, acting and directing so multi-layered, subtle, well-conceived and executed, it probably sailed over us, and denies specific global definition because, like life itself, it can deliver non-stop disappointment, tragedy and action so hard and driven, it is almost relentless… the way devastating car crash into Seattle’s famous Fulton Fish Market must render an emergency room weak and wobbly, and rip out the tender stitches that hold humans together, that get them from one crisis to another. Exactly like life.
One of my brothers is a surgeon in an ER in northern California. Another is a breast cancer specialist. They don’t watch “Grey’s Anatomy.” Because the characters are so unrealistic, I’ve asked? No, because, they get enough of it at work, all day. It simply feels too real, “too much like my life” and they feel the need to “shake it off.” And, yes, my brother told me, Sophie, there ARE McGorgeous surgeons in ordinary residency programs just as they exist -- exquisite faces with their lucky arrangements of features -- on stock trading floors, in courtrooms and in every other place humans gather to move through the usual daily business of living.
Go figure.
