Grey's Anatomy: The Room Where It Happens (13x08)

Huh... a bottle episode. A decently effective one, at that. Although I did think it got a bit silly in spots.

Cons:

The premise here is that Owen, Meredith, Stephanie, and Richard are all working on a patient who was in a car accident and whose liver is totally shredded. Everybody is exhausted except for Richard, who comes in the middle of everything and wants to play a game where they make up a backstory for the John Doe on the table. They end up creating a character, Gail, who plays violin, works two jobs, has three kids, etc. etc. Throughout, we also see the other characters have flashes to traumatic parts of their own lives as they work to empathize with the patient.

Lots of stuff was good about this. But Richard continually interjecting in the middle of medical discussions to ask about Gail was a little distracting. I get what they were going for, but it felt beyond irritating, like Richard was this doddering old fool who doesn't know when to shut up and let the more competent surgeons get back to work. There might have been a way to balance this out a little better, if I'm being totally honest.

Pros:

Basically, the whole episode took place in the OR, and we got to see a lot of different conflicting styles and moments to shine. As Meredith, Owen, Stephanie, and Richard continually clashed, we got to see how this patient related to each and every one of them. Richard was encouraging them all to make a personal connection to the patient they were trying to save, and it turns out that each of them did find that personal connection.

Meredith was in an uncooperative and grumpy mood the whole time, and got even more upset when she found out that the man on the table has a wife and kids waiting in the lobby. She flashes back to the moment she had to tell Zola and Bailey that Derek was dead. Excellent acting. It was gut-wrenching to hear Meredith have to tell her kids this news. Honestly, that one moment made me more emotional than the actual episode were he actually died. Of course, I'm extra emotional about everything this week, for good reason. Meredith's vested interest in the patient was tied up with her own feelings of despair over losing Derek. It was good to remind us that Meredith hasn't just magically forgotten her dead husband.

Owen, meanwhile, wanted to keep trying to save this patient in more and more desperate and creative ways. Meredith kept telling him none of it would work, but he was resilient and combative. Why? Well, turns out he's thinking of his sister. We see that Megan is in Owen's head, and that he often thinks of her when he's feeling guilty about something. What with everything going on with Amelia, it makes sense that Owen would be having a hard time emotionally. Megan's introduction, through flashback/hallucination was... okay. I liked her a lot better once I realized that we weren't seeing a real depiction of her, but rather a manifestation of Owen's inner turmoil. Basically, his determination to save this patient is tied up in his own feelings of guilt over giving up on Megan. He says you've got to keep trying to save a person until you know that they're dead. With Megan, he never knew for sure what happened to her. That has haunted him all this time.

Stephanie is one of the best characters this show has ever had. I loved that she got such a spotlight here. Her personal investment in this patient is her desire to learn more and to make herself heard. As a woman of color, I'm sure it's been more than a little difficult for her to be taken seriously in her chosen profession. She figures out that the patient on the table as an Auto-Immune disease, because it's similar to what she had when she was younger. It is this that saves the patient in the end, but only after we see Stephanie as a little girl, encouraging her adult self to speak out loud and make her voice heard.

Richard spends the episode constructing a life for an imaginary patient named Gail. In the end, we learn that Gail was actually his mother, who died of cancer when Richard was just ten years old. I was so touched by this backstory. It's so brave and lovely of Richard to use his mother's memory to help teach the next generation of surgeons how to connect with their patients. While on a practical level Richard's little "let's play a game in the OR" thing seemed silly and unrealistic, I actually felt a lot for Richard when the story wrapped up.

That's all I've got. Bottle episodes have the opportunity to try something new, to really dig deep into character development. I've seen better bottle episodes in other shows, but this one still had a lot to offer.

8/10