Grey's Anatomy: Judgment Day (14x20)

Oh boy. Things are happening.

Cons:

I don't know if they're trying to reintroduce the idea of Owen and Amelia, as Amelia helps Owen with the baby boy who has been unexpectedly dropped into his life. If so, NOOOO. Amelia and Owen were a train-wreck and I do not root for them together in the slightest.

There was one random intern who ate a pot cookie but lied about it and continued to work, ultimately leading to nearly killing a patient, and getting himself injured. Richard fires him, obviously. I know that over the years, almost every single doctor in the hospital has made horrible choices, but this felt particularly egregious and stupid. Am I supposed to care that this dude got fired? Because I honestly don't even know his name, and his behavior is abhorrent.

Pros:

I hope that the Owen/Amelia ship isn't warming itself back up, but even setting that element of it aside, I did really enjoy Owen's subplot. I'm sure that Owen's new foster son, like all of the kids on this show, will very quickly become a footnote. But for this one episode, it was fun to see Owen freaking out. It was fun to see Amelia go into crisis mode and handle the situation. And it was fun to see Alex, extremely high, be oddly helpful by telling Owen about his own experiences in the foster system. Very cute.

Jo got to step up and do a complex surgery on her own, because Bailey ate a weed cookie, and Meredith's hand gets slammed in the door so she can't take over. I'm glad that in this relatively light and comedic episode, we didn't have an unnecessarily tragic result here. Jo saves the patient, and actually ends up saving some of the patient's stomach by using Richard's cancer detector invention. It was a good day, and I'm really enjoying seeing Meredith continue her role as a mentor for Jo.

Everybody was pretty funny while high, some people more extreme than others. We had several pairings that were kind of stellar, but I think my favorite may be Maggie and Arizona. Maggie, for once, doesn't actually have a stupid problem to whine about. She spends her time being high playing with a big computer screen, and talking about how much she loves cheese. She was hilarious. She says she doesn't think she needs her neck anymore, and at one point says to Jo: "You're so pretty. You look like a cartoon." Meanwhile, Arizona is wondering if she's going too fast with Carina, but by the end seems solid in that relationship. These two had so many great and funny moments, and Arizona ends up letting go of some of her anxiety about Carina sticking around.

As a side note, we saw DeLuca, also high, hallucinating Sam and then bursting into tears when he realized she wasn't really there. That was rough. Almost everybody's reaction to the pot was comedic, so it was nice to see one counterpoint to all of that hilarity.

And speaking of a counterpoint... we find out what's up with the whole Catherine and Jackson and Harper Avery situation. Apparently, there were a dozen or so women who were paid large settlements to keep quiet about sexual harassment claims that they had against Harper Avery. Jackson is horrified and disgusted, but Catherine justifies what she did by saying that she couldn't have stood up for herself and for these women back then like people are starting to do today. So many things click into place: Meredith realizes that her mother took her best friend's name off of her paper because the settlement included her, and if she'd been listed, Ellis couldn't have won a Harper Avery. Everybody who has spent so much time and energy fighting for a Harper Avery is now going to feel that their award is tainted. And Jackson, unwittingly, unleashed this story upon the world. Yikes. One thing that I really admired about how this story unfolded is that there's sort of a ramp up. At first I didn't really realize why this was the "end of an era" so to speak. A dead dude was super sexist, and it's gross, but why... but then the pieces start coming together, and by the end of the episode, it does really seem like the Avery family reputation might be over for good.

Another hilarious duo, April and Bailey, freak out about this new development, because high April overheard high Catherine and high Jackson talking about it. These two together just slayed me. Bailey says that she always heard weed made you more relaxed, but that she's never hated April more. And they sing a funeral dirge for the Harper Avery legacy by plugging their noses and making weird bagpipe sounds, which had me gasping for breath. So very, very, hilarious.

I just realized, also, that this episode came out the day before 4/20, and is episode 14x20 of Grey's Anatomy. So... just... kudos on capitalizing on that coincidence. This episode was a lot of fun. They didn't go too overboard with people being high, and there were a few more serious elements to counterbalance the comedy.

9/10