Grey's Anatomy: Never Felt So Alone (20x05)

Man, Nick sucks so much as a character I cannot believe.

Cons:

I'm going to be a broken record about Jo and Link, but wow, I don't care about their relationship. This pregnancy scare is a cheap way to introduce a shot of lightly-comedic drama into their honeymoon period and I'm bored to tears by all of it. It's a shame, because I actually think both actors are really charming and funny, and yet when they're playing off of each other in a scene, I feel absolutely nothing. The idea of going through a Jo/Link marriage and babies story just fills me with a sense of defeat and ennui. Alex Karev I miss you so much.

I feel like the takeaway from this episode is supposed to be that Meredith is being unreasonable about the Nick situation, but... nah. Nick is a boring lump of coal and Meredith has a lot of trauma around the death of loved ones, and Nick should have called sooner. I just wish that Meredith had been settled off-screen with a less annoying endgame love interest. It feels like we've lost our chance for Meredith to find a new forever person on screen, because Ellen Pompeo isn't interested in doing that anymore, and fair enough, but Nick? God, he sucks so hard.

Usually I get really moved and emotional about the "very special episodes" that this show pulls off, about all manner of serious subjects. I have to say, I felt a little alienated from this one, though. There were things I liked about it, but the core of it, the med student Eddie standing on the ledge, with Simone and Kwan talking to him, just felt very... generic, maybe? It was a lot of standard talking points about suicidal ideation, without the magic of making every guest character come alive, the way Grey's usually pulls off. I don't know. I don't feel like it was terribly done, it just didn't quite grip me.

Pros:

I really liked Owen and Amelia spending the day working together. Their romantic relationship was always such a clusterfuck but I think they have the kind of friendship that really stands the test of time. They do a risky and complicated surgery to give a med student a chance to be able to walk again, and seeing them triumph and feel that thrill of surgery again together was really quite lovely! Also, when Teddy and Owen don't have hella drama going on between them, their relationship is perfectly tolerable. I liked the ending little bit where Teddy gets cleared to go back to surgery, and she and Owen are talking over logistics for picking up the kids, etcetera. Their energy together does work for me; I remember shipping them way back in the before-times.

Bailey and Ben are really the best long-term relationship on this show. I'm almost anxious about Station 19 ending, because if Ben hops back over to be more of a main character on Grey's, they might give them relationship tension and I don't want that! Ben calming Bailey down, the two of them talking about mental health and being there to support each other... this was the part of the suicide prevention plot thread that worked the best for me. Just these two married people having a frank conversation about being there to support one another.

Despite hating everything about Nick, I did like some of Meredith's stuff in this episode. Her being able to talk through her fear with Richard was really touching. Of course she has baggage and fears around specifically this outcome! Something totally survivable happening to someone in her family, but the potential of the hospital fucking it up? I like that now that Meredith has moved to Boston and she's only a part-time character, she really does feel like more of a mom. Not to be cheesy, but it's such a fitting way to wrap up the overall arc of Meredith Grey, given where we started with her, and all her own issues with her mother. I wish Nick wasn't the person she was having the conversation with, but I also liked her being willing to process her messy emotions and admit the harm she did to others because of it. Real growth for our Mer!

As I keep saying, I really do love these new intern characters a lot. Let's go through some of these stories really fast.

Jules and Winston! Jules is growing on me more and more. I love that she stood up to Winston, and that he admitted he'd been a grump lately. Her compassion and care for the people around her is so lovely, and she manages to seem like a really strong, pragmatic person all while having empathy off the charts. We love to see it.

Yasuda gets stuck with the unpleasant job of babysitting a bunch of drunk med students with minor injuries, and things take a turn for the worse when she learns from Schmitt that Helm kept her from an interesting surgery, and made her stay in the pit. We don't know the outcome of this little betrayal yet, but I'm interested to see their relationship get more of a spotlight, even if it is to work through a difficult moment! I loved Jules comforting Yasuda at the end using a technique her mother taught her. Their friendship is so lovely.

We get some insight into Kwan's relationship to his own mental health; I loved how he stepped in and talked to Eddie after letting Simone take the lead for so long. I think it's telling that in an episode themed all around connection and reaching out to people, Kwan didn't actually open up to Simone after that experience. He didn't go to Jules, or to anybody else, to talk through what had happened. We'll have to see if he's able to form those important bonds moving forward.

And as mad as I've been at Lucas for being such a dickhead recently, I did find the scene at the end with him and Simone quite lovely. It's not a fix to everything broken between them, but it's this moment where they're able to come together to comfort and hold each other. Simone definitely needed that after the day she'd had, and I like that Lucas was willing to put aside everything else and do that.

So that's all for this one. It looks like from the promo for next week that Richard is going to have some sort of freak-out or incident at work, and I'm... kind of already tired of seeing this story again. But we'll see!

7/10