Welcome the TauntBot 3000: With a competition underway to decide who would get to perform a solo surgery, everyone wanted practice, and no one could figure out how to get it. The Chief offered up a robot that they could operate on, but that wound up being a cruel prank that ended with the Chief speaking through the robot, telling George, “I can’t believe you even passed your intern test.”
Looking for a few warm bodies: The interns needed practice, too, and Lexie thought practicing IV placement on each other was “creepy-basement crazy.” So she sought something less creepy-basement crazy, which turned out to be, naturally, charming ill-gotten corpses out of the guy at the morgue. Unfortunately for Lexie, the bossy residents wanted practice, too, and they eventually took over, making it into a dissection free-for-all. The fun stopped when Bailey walked in and, appalled, ordered them to stop mistreating dead bodies.
Have a heart…but not that one: Izzie was horrified to realize that a patient Hahn had been treating for years was dying because Izzie stole his transplant heart to give it to Denny. She panicked, and it didn’t help when her Denny visions returned. Eventually, she helped the patient and ordered Technically Dead Denny to stop tormenting her. Presumably so that she can get on with being tormented by Technically Alive Alex.
Trouble in paradise: News broke this week that Brooke Smith, who plays Hahn, was being unceremoniously dumped after this episode. ABC and "Grey's" showrunner Shonda Rhimes publicly insisted it wasn’t the increasingly explicit lesbian storyline; saying the show was just done with the story.
Onscreen, Hahn flipped out when she learned what Izzie once did with her patient’s heart, and she threatened to make a big stink. Callie encouraged her not to, they argued, Hahn made some fleeting reference to how Callie can’t be a semi-lesbian, and that’s apparently the last we will ever see of her. If you believe that’s the organic ending to a completed story, you probably also believe the part about Denny’s ghost.
Slipping away: This week’s quietest story concerned an elderly couple who agreed to a Do Not Resuscitate order for the wife. When her heart stopped, her husband panicked and kept it beating with chest compressions. He couldn’t tear his hands from her chest to allow her to die, so Bailey took over the compressions. She was ultimately relieved by Derek, who finally let the patient actually die. Simple, but surprisingly effective, that story.
She’s got it: Cristina had a rough week. Dr. McArmy verbally annihilated her, Alex, and Lexie for pushing and shoving to do procedures on a dying patient. He didn’t kiss her again this week, but they did have a reconciling moment when she talked warmly about her father’s death. Meanwhile, McSteamy tried, at Derek’s request, to hit on Cristina so she’d stop calling Meredith at home. (Seriously.) To the surprise of no one but McSteamy himself, the plan was a McFailure.
Linda Holmes is a writer in Washington, D.C.