Intern-al medicine: The interns, who were so recently dabbling in blood-taking and sutures, escalated their secret project by performing first an epidural and then an appendectomy. Exhibitionist Sadie naturally volunteered, and when Lexie flinched at the slicing moment, Sadie simply opened her own abdomen to move things along.
Naturally, Sadie’s surgery went south when she actually turned out to have an inflamed appendix, making her whimsical surgery rather serious. Lexie fetched Meredith, while Cristina wised up on her own after finding the still-numb Epidural Guy. Both burst into the interns’ Frankenbasement just in time to hear that Sadie was dying. They called in Bailey, who helped repair the botched surgery, which the interns had apparently done with safety scissors and glue sticks. This all somehow led to Meredith and Cristina fighting, George noticing that Lexie is in love with him, and Bailey hating general surgery because she resents the appendix. Seriously.
Crime and non-punishment: Hilariously, it was decided that, for performing unauthorized and unnecessary surgery on a patient they almost killed, the creepy interns would get probation. PROBATION. This is why next year, Seattle Grace will be number one hundred and twelve in its much-talked-about ratings.
Zzzzzz: A widower showed up badly injured after walking through a second-story window while sleepwalking. It turned out that his young daughter was managing his night terrors by never sleeping and never telling him how bad it was. Eventually, McSteamy figured out that the father needed his epilepsy treated and the daughter needed someone to reassure her that it was safe to go to sleep. (The urge to make tasteless jokes about how Sloan’s tucking-in powers apparently work on women and girls of all ages should be ignored.)
Ghost in the bedroom: Izzie was sequestered in her bedroom getting very lucky with Not Dead Denny. But at last, she melodramatically had it out with him over his death and abandonment, rending her purple track suit and sobbing, and finally leaving him for Even Less Dead Alex. Raise your hand if you think this overwrought storyline is the writers’ revenge for Katherine Heigl’s comments about not receiving enough material for her Emmy reel last year.
Never believe the Internet: A hypochondriac showed up, convinced she had stomach cancer, but she learned that her fondness for mail-order antibiotics had killed all her good bacteria, and she needed more. Shockingly, this meant a procedure to run a tube up her nose and down her throat to introduce someone else’s waste — her husband’s, to be specific, since they share household germs. As she put it, it’s “a poop transplant.” Welcome to your Genuinely Disgusting Medical Procedure Of The Week. When her husband (played by an underused Joshua Malina of “Sports Night” and “The West Wing”) refused to participate until she admitted that her previous “staph infection” was just a pimple, Alex helped him figure out that her hypochondriac fears are entirely real for her, even if they’re ridiculous to him.
Linda Holmes is a writer in Washington, D.C.