Grey's Anatomy: She's Leaving Home Part 1/Part 2 (11x22)

Well. This is not the episode I thought I was going to get, but that doesn't mean I absolutely hated it. I'm kind of... confused about how I feel. Let's go over what happened.

Meredith tells everybody that Derek is dead. Everybody is understandably shocked by the news. Throughout this double episode, we flash forward through nine months worth of time, making stops at every holiday and checking in with our ensemble cast of characters as they process their grief and move on with their lives. Let's take each little thread separately.

Meredith disappears with her kids, to everybody's concern. Alex continually calls her throughout the year, begging for a hint that she's okay. Meredith eventually answers and tells Alex to stop calling. We see that she has run off with Zola and baby Bailey. She is pregnant with Derek's child. Throughout her section of the episode, she has flashbacks to her time with Derek, and also to her mother's own experience with childbirth and with running away. Meredith collapses as she goes into labor, and Zola calls 911. This is paralleled to the time in Meredith's life when she called 911 after her mother tried to kill herself. In the end, Meredith delivers a healthy baby girl, and names her Ellis. Alex shows up to the hospital because he was Meredith's emergency contact person. He helps Meredith move back home with her three kids, as she gets ready to move on with her life.

Owen and April both decide to go on a tour of duty and work for the army. At first, it was supposed to only last for three months, but April keeps extending her stay, making Jackson increasingly anxious. April says she needs to be there because she's trying to move on from the death of their child. Jackson is terrified when a phone call with April gets cut off after he hears the sounds of gunfire. April finally returns, to Jackson's joy and relief.

Amelia is in denial about Derek's death. She makes inappropriate jokes about it, which disturbs Stephanie, but she otherwise seems totally fine. When Richard tries to ask her about going to a Narcotic's Anonymous meeting to deal with her grief, Amelia yells at him. She later gets some drugs and contemplates taking them. Owen finds her, and manages to talk her out of taking the drugs, encouraging her to feel the feelings of grief instead of running away. Amelia lets in the grief, and collapses into Owen's arms.

Bailey and Ben talk about what they would do for each other if they were ever brain dead. Bailey tells Ben to pull the plug, but Ben says he would want extraordinary measures to keep him alive. Bailey is shocked that they could disagree about something so fundamental. Eventually, Ben gives Bailey his living will, giving Bailey the right to pull the plug. Bailey is upset that Ben gave up on the idea of a miracle, and says she loves him too much to contemplate anything bad happening to him.

Jo works on two burn victims, women who bond while they wait in intensive care. Unfortunately, one of the women dies, leaving the other one all alone. As another patient comes in, the remaining patient decides to help her, like her friend helped her in the beginning.

Richard wants to propose to Catherine, but she says that it's a bad idea to propose to somebody without knowing what the answer would be. She says that you should enter into a marriage like you enter into a business arrangement. Richard says that proposals are supposed to be romantic. Later, as Catherine is talking about it to some of the other doctors, Maggie suggests that maybe Catherine is taking something away from Richard by not letting him be romantic with her. Catherine realizes that relationships are about compromise. She plans an elaborate proposal, asking Richard for his hand in marriage in front of the entire hospital. Richard says yes.

Callie works on a patient, Dan, who she had previously been on a date with. She had decided not to go out with him again because he was boring, but now they're forced into a close patient/doctor relationship. Over the months, they bond, as Callie has to remove Dan's leg. He is fitted with a robotic leg, and as Dan finally is able to walk again, Callie cries, thinking about how much Derek would have loved to see how his brain mapping was making lives better. Dan expresses his gratitude for Callie, saying that he could not have gone through this without her.

Those are the basic plots. There were lots of little details in this episode that I really enjoyed. This was the first episode in a long time where I felt like we got a balanced representation of almost all of the characters. A few people took a backseat, like Arizona and Stephanie, to an extent, but even they had their moments. I want to start by talking about what I didn't like about this episode, though.

Overall, the decision to quickly skip through nine years of these peoples' lives means that we miss out on a lot of the nuance of these characters' relationships. So, Meredith disappears, and it seems like Alex and Maggie are the only ones who care. Derek dies, and Owen doesn't even seem to realize that they've been connected for years by their shared love for the "twisted sisters." Nobody mentions Mark, or any of the other people they've lost over the years. Richard should have been more worried about Meredith's absence. Bailey too.

There were two different breakdown moments in this episode. While one of them worked really well (Amelia), one did not. When Bailey had her little sob fest, I did not buy it at all. It worked for Amelia because she was just coming off of months and months of denial. For Bailey, it felt super out of place. I don't know if it was the script, the buildup to the moment, the acting... but Bailey's breakdown really didn't work.

But there were a lot of good moments about Bailey's plot thread, and about the episode in general. Bailey and Ben's argument about hypothetical scenarios was sometimes funny, sometimes sad, and I liked the mix. Bailey asked Ben what she was supposed to do if Idris Elba showed up and wanted to sweep her off her feet, but Ben was technically still alive. That was hilarious. And Idris Elba... yum.

I think the winner for the most understated and oddly moving plot thread of the night would have to go to Callie and Dan. The intimacy between them after long weeks of working close together doesn't have to be romantic. But it could be. I like that we got to see Dan again. I liked him, and I wondered if he was going to be coming back into the story. Callie starts crying about Derek when she sees Dan walk, and this felt like the most touching, personal reaction to Derek's death. Callie and Derek weren't best friends, but they were friends, and they were close colleagues who greatly respected each other's work. When Callie gives Dan, and others like him, robotic limbs, she's honoring Derek in the best way possible. I love that.

It was pretty random for April to run off and join the army, but I think they managed to pull it off convincingly enough, especially when April came home. Very sweet. Also sweet was Catherine's proposal to Richard. Leave it to Catherine Avery to find a way to bring in the romance Richard needed while still remaining typically feminist and switching the role of who proposed to whom. Lovely.

Another one of my favorite moments was when Alex hosted a Christmas gathering. Arizona makes a sad tree with lights that only go halfway up, Jackson spends the evening talking to April over a patchy connection, and Maggie offers everybody egg nog that's mostly alcohol. It was just so cute and utterly Grey's Anatomy to see all these botched, pathetic holiday moments. Jo tries to make food on Thanksgiving, but then Alex brings home takeout when she fails. Stephanie is forced to wear a bunny suit on the pediatric's ward on Easter. Each of these moments made me smile.

I must praise the way this episode used flashbacks in a way that felt authentic. There was quite a bit of material in this episode that was spliced together from earlier moments. A lot of early Derek/Meredith moments were in there, and those are always fun to see. Or... not fun, given how tragic this all turned out to be, but... nice. In a depressing way. We also had a lot of Ellis, which I loved. I think the editing and the splicing together of the different scenes worked really well. I think what this episode showed us is that Meredith and Ellis have a lot of fundamental similarities. A lot of things about them are driven by the same basic qualities. But while Ellis tried to kill herself, Meredith never did. While Ellis told her little girl not to call 911, Meredith told Zola to call. Ellis ran away because Richard left her, and she gave Maggie away. Meredith ran away because Derek died, and she is going to love their little girl for the rest of her life. They're cut from the same cloth, but they're also very different.

Given the limitations of bringing back certain actors for this episode, I did appreciate that they tried to show Cristina and Addison being involved in some way. Cristina was at the funeral, and Addison called Amelia to see how she was doing. I understand why they couldn't bring these actors in. They did the best with what they had.

I lasted most of the episode without crying, but I'll admit I got rather misty-eyed when Meredith wore Derek's ferryboat scrub cap there at the end. That was always such a symbol of who he was as a doctor, and as a person with hope inside him. Aww.

I think that's where I'll stop. Like I said at the beginning, this was definitely not the episode I was expecting to get. But upon some rumination, I think skipping ahead like this is the smartest thing they could have done. Otherwise, they'd have to spend the rest of the season dealing with the shock of immediate grief. Ultimately, Derek leaving the show isn't a good idea narrative-wise. But if it's what they had to do, I think they handled it the best they could.

8/10