Saturday, March 18, 2017

Grey’s Anatomy 13x16 Review “Who Is He: (And What Is He To You)?” (Daddy Issues) [Contributor: Julia Siegel]


“Who Is He (And What Is He To You)?”
Original Airdate: March 16, 2017
            
Cheers to the third bottle episode of the season! Apparently, the way to keep Grey’s Anatomy fresh in its thirteenth year is to shelve the important storylines and use bottle episodes as fillers to make the audience forget about all the intertwining stories. This episode has been foreshadowed for a while, as Jackson and April finally have some much-needed time to deal with their rocky relationship. It’s no surprise that the action took a break to tell this emotional story, but fingers crossed that the larger storylines of the season aren’t being forgotten and shelved until the writers can come up with a good way to solve them.

Jackson and April take a trip to the Avery hospital in Montana to come up with a way to save a young girl with aggressive throat cancer. In typical fashion, the trip is more than just a simple medical call for Jackson. He goes to Montana with the sole intention of finding his deadbeat father and confronting him. This is a good surprise story because it puts Jackson in a vulnerable state that hasn’t been shown before. Jackson can be emotional, as seen in the last few episodes alone, but he rarely opens up and reveals the causes of his true pain. It is clear that not knowing his father has plagued him for his entire life and may have even been causing some additional grief lately with the firestorm at Grey-Sloan.

Jackson is a very independent character who doesn’t lean on anyone for emotional support. He always tries to be a one-man show and live up to the Avery name that is held over his head like a sword by his mother. When dealing with an opportunity to confront his father about how he was never around and left his family high and dry, Jackson wants to chicken out. April comes to the rescue and becomes his rock again to get him through the trip.

I think April has come a long way since the first time she appeared on the show. She used to need a lot of emotional and mental support and leaned on anyone who was willing to help her. Now, she is much stronger and takes charge of situations. Going through a tumultuous marriage, losing a child, and raising a new child with her ex-husband has toughened her up and allowed the character to grow up. April recognizes that she needs to be there for Jackson in his time of mental crisis, even if he is unwilling to accept her help at first.

For a relationship that has seen extreme highs, lows, and everything in between, Jackson and April seemed to be on the same page in the episode. Over the past two seasons, they have constantly fought over everything. It was weird to see them come back together after so much time apart. I honestly didn’t see them working out the first time they became a couple, so I doubt this synergy will last long. To further complicate the matter, they sleep together near the end of the episode. What that means for their future is still to be determined, but who knows when it will come back up again.

It’s great that the show wants to change things up and stay fresh after all these years by turning to bottle episodes to get very specific points across. My only concern is that these episodes are being created because there isn’t a plan for how to continue the current major storylines. For example, the biggest story of the season has been Alex and DeLuca’s formerly impending court case. One of the largest bombshells of show history was dropped through this storyline when Jo announced that she is not really Jo Wilson and that she has an abusive husband she is hiding from. Since that bomb dropped, it has rarely come up again. When will the show address this major plot and force Jo to confront her biggest fear? Why are we being teased over and over without having one story finished? It seems like more of these bottle episodes could be coming in the near future, but hopefully they can be used to finish some of the stories instead of elongating them.

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