“Help Me Through the Night”
Original Airdate: January 23, 2020
A lot has happened since the midseason finale of Grey’s Anatomy aired in November. First, Justin Chambers announced that he has left the show and his final appearance was in the moving 350th episode that aired in November. However, his name remained on the cast list for the midseason premiere. Losing Alex Karev is going to be a huge deal for both the audience and the characters, and he will be sorely missed by both groups. Second, the midseason finale’s cliffhanger of a car crashing through the side of Joe’s Bar and trapping several doctors and Station 19 firefighters inside picked up with the season three premiere of Station 19, which now airs in the 8/7c time slot on ABC. Having Grey’s Anatomy move to the 9/8c time slot allows the sister shows to have more weekly crossover potential, so hang on tight for what is shaping up to be a wild back-half of the season!
BACKUP NEEDED
The episode opens as a direct continuation from Station 19. If you didn’t watch that episode, Helm, Parker, and Koracick’s protégé Blake Simms were all injured in the bar. Jackson, Nico, and all the firefighters (including Ben and Pruitt Herrera) made it out unscathed. Schmitt was also not hurt, but he spent the last show in a state of shock and disbelief and was left practically useless. We pick up with the injured doctors arriving at Grey Sloan via ambulance as Bailey (who found out her husband was inside the bar and went to see if he was okay) and Ben walk back from the bar. Bailey gives Ben hospital privileges, as the injured interns are going to need all the help they can get. It’s been an incredibly rough day for Bailey, who had a miscarriage earlier in the day. She tries to take a moment to let her emotions come out in a supply closet and finds Schmitt crying in there. Bailey gives one of her classic speeches about having to put emotions aside for the night and needing to get to work to save lives. Schmitt agrees to help and goes to check on Helm.
The other cliffhanger gets addressed pretty quickly, as the scene changes to Alex and Jo’s apartment. Jo tries to convince a stunned Link that she didn’t kidnap the baby that was surrendered at Station 19 and insists that she only wanted to give the little guy one normal night before putting him in the hands of a social worker. Link is clearly not buying what Jo is saying, and both of them freak out when there is a knock at the door. Good news: it’s only Meredith and not the cops, as Jo thought. Mer wanted to have a night cap with Alex, but he’s still in Iowa visiting his sick mother. Jo invites her in, and Mer starts complaining about Cristina’s “gift”: the new chief of pediatric surgery Dr. Cormac Hayes, a.k.a. McWidow. Mer notices the baby and says the situation looks a lot like when she stole a baby, which allows for a short bit of comic relief. Then all three docs get alerts that there are multiple traumas, so they pack up and head to the hospital to help with the baby in tow.
Back at Grey Sloan, Amelia asks Koracick if he’s seen Maggie around since she’s looking for someone to spill her potential baby drama to. Koracick breaks the news that Maggie quit. They run into DeLuca, who hasn’t heard about the bar accident, and Koracick sends him to monitor a patient in the ICU to spare him from seeing his fellow colleagues in bad shape. Amelia then sees Link in the hallway, who wants to know how the ultrasound went. Of course, Amelia doesn’t tell him that she’s 24 weeks pregnant and that Owen might actually be the father of her baby because Owen and Richard show up to help. Mer called them in as reinforcements, and Bailey begrudgingly grants them full privileges too.
When all of the assorted doctors make their way to the ER, Bailey assigns them their patients. Jackson, Owen, and Koracick will work on Simms, who has multiple facial fractures and was given a tracheotomy in the field. Meredith, Link, and Richard are assigned to Helm, who is in stable condition despite tibia and fibula fractures and pain in her pelvis. Meredith asks Bailey where DeLuca is, and Bailey reassures her that he wasn’t at the bar and is helping a patient somewhere in the hospital. Amelia and Teddy take Parker, who has a brain hematoma and amnesia. Bailey is clearly having some emotional difficulty during the whole process, as she knows she is going to have to once again operate on her own residents. Ben decides that now is a good time to tell Richard about the miscarriage and asks him to keep an eye on Bailey. Neither are fine after the miscarriage news, but we don’t get to see them deal with it together in this episode.
COMPLICATIONS
While giving Parker an MRI, Teddy asks Amelia how far along she is in her pregnancy, which Amelia lies about. They find that Parker has bruising on his temporal lobe and realize that he is having a bout of PTSD from his military days. Parker runs out of the MRI mid-scan, which neither Amelia nor Teddy see because they are too caught up in their own conversation. They then run all around the hospital trying to find Parker.
We then get an update on Helm, who has bruising near her liver, a clot near her kidney and loss of blood supply to her foot. She is rushed to surgery. In the imaging room, Jackson, Owen, and Koracick learn that Simms’ scans show that he doesn’t have a head injury, but he needs surgery to fix his facial fractures. Koracick is overly cautious and emotional about his resident, which translates to him being tougher on his doctors than normal. He tells Jackson that he better be on his A-game if he wants to operate on his protégé.
Jo has brought the baby to the nursery for a checkup before he gets passed off to a social worker. It takes Jo a little too long to realize that the new doctor taking a look at the baby is none other than McWidow, and she seems pleased to meet him. Over in the OR, Mer and Schmitt perform a procedure on an awake Helm before her main surgery. Helm, who is drunk from the alcohol that Jackson and Nico gave her to numb the pain at the bar, is very talkative and admits that Mer is the love of her life. Mer laughs it off and takes it as a compliment. Schmitt starts to look a bit pale and then passes out. After the commercial break, we see Mer doing a full workup on Schmitt, who may be having a heart attack. Mer tells him that he will be fine and simply needs to calm down.
ROCK BOTTOM
At this point in the episode, things start to go from bad to worse. Koracick pops into the OR to check up on Simms. Jackson is super sarcastic to Koracick and doesn’t want to put up with him anymore. After Koracick leaves, Jackson tells Owen that he is surprised that he hasn’t gotten engaged to Teddy yet. There’s a bit of hostility in Owen’s response that he wants to do it right and not rush things, which indicates this isn’t the last we will hear about it in this episode. In the other OR, Helm starts to code while Link and Nico are fixing her broken leg.
Teddy is scanning the security camera footage for signs of Parker when Amelia shows up and declares that she couldn’t find him in the basement or the morgue. Teddy feels especially close to her missing patient because she understands what he is going through as a fellow veteran. This leads her to ask Amelia if she feels that Owen’s PTSD could be triggered and that’s why he feels obligated to be with her. Amelia quickly denies that Owen is having an episode and feels that he truly loves Teddy. However, Teddy isn’t quite convinced because she feels that if he loved her, then he would propose. Amelia says that if Owen felt trapped, then he would have already proposed, so it’s a good sign that he hasn’t. The security footage finally shows Parker hiding out in the hypobaric chamber, so the women make their way over there as Bailey finds her way to Helm’s OR. Helm now has a distended abdomen, which is a sign of internal bleeding. Richard arrives and scrubs in to help out.
DeLuca finds Amelia and Teddy right as they find Parker to tell them good news about his patient. He is none too pleased to find out about the accident at Joe’s Bar this way, but he gets over it quickly when Teddy gets a page from Mer to meet her and Schmitt in the cath lab. Before more starts to go wrong, the scene switches back to Jo and McWidow in the nursery. McWidow deems that the baby is ready to be put into the care of social services, but says they can wait a few more minutes when he sees the look on Jo’s face.
Back in Helm’s OR, Richard and Bailey can’t control her internal bleeding and determine that they need to crack her chest. Bailey decides to let Richard take over as lead surgeon and take charge of the OR, which is the best decision that Bailey could have made. Once Richard cracks Helm’s chest and clamps a heart vessel, he has one minute to find and stop the bleeding before Helm’s heart suffers too much damage. Bailey makes one last emotional plea to Helm to not die, and her prayer is answered when Richard locates the bleeder and repairs, putting Helm on the path to recovery.
Over in Simms’ OR, Owen and Jackson continue their frank discussion about Owen’s personal life. Owen admits that he is afraid of marrying Teddy because he feels that it won’t make up for the fact that he didn’t propose to her years earlier. Koracick chooses this moment to show up for a status report, which is a bit awkward. Jackson feels they are done and ready to close, but Owen notices that cerebrospinal fluid is leaking from Simms’ brain.
BACK FROM THE BRINK
In the cath lab, Schmitt apologizes profusely to Mer for passing out in the OR. Teddy gives Schmitt the good news that he didn’t have a heart attack. Rather, he is suffering from broken heart syndrome caused by extreme stress. Back in the nursery, Jo says goodbye to the baby by telling him that he will be fine despite his bumpy start. Link is with her and she admits to falling a little in love with the baby. That gets Link gushing about how in love he is with his unborn child and tells Jo that she can hang with his kid anytime as long as she doesn’t kidnap it.
The good news keeps coming when it is revealed that Simms is going to be fine. Bailey can’t believe that all of the patients have an optimistic outcome and survived the night. It is a bit surprising that no one died, but a happy ending is better than a sad one. Bailey gets emotional while talking to Richard and finally lets the tears roll over the tragedies of the day. More emotions are revealed when Simms’ grandmother tells Jackson and Owen how emotional Koracick always is and to cut him some slack. Both men are surprised to hear that their boss is not who they thought he was. That’s when Koracick comes by and thanks Owen for catching the CSF leak. Owen and Koracick tentatively make up, so maybe Owen will be back at Grey Sloan permanently.
Jo sees Mer talking to McWidow at a nurses’ station and tells Mer after he leaves that she sees why Cristina sent him. If Jo and Cristina both see it, then Mer shouldn’t be too far behind once she puts her pettiness aside. Down the hall, Owen finds Teddy, pulls her into an on-call room, and gets down on one knee to propose with his mom’s ring. After a very sweet proposal, Teddy tells him that she doesn’t want him to propose. She doesn’t want him to feel obligated to propose or fall back into a PTSD pattern. Owen assures her that she is wrong about his reasons, and they passionately kiss. Amelia finally decides to tell Link about what she learned from her ultrasound, but is interrupted by Teddy and Owen telling everyone that they are engaged. Of course, this complicates Amelia’s situation further, so she only tells him that the baby is a boy. Link is very excited and declares that he wants to name the baby Scout in reference to his name, Atticus, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Poor Koracick hears and sees the engagement announcement from slightly further down the hall and is clearly very upset by the news since he is still in love with Teddy. Mer and Richard show up at Bailey’s office to comfort her, and Mer opens up about her own miscarriage to lend Bailey some support.
The episode gives us an unexpected twist at the end when DeLuca shows up at the Grey/Shepherd/Pierce residence. Maggie answers the door and learns some good news about her patient from DeLuca. He then admits that breaking up with Mer was a mistake and that he doesn’t know how to undo it. A woman shows up looking for Maggie and serves her legal papers. Maggie is being sued for the wrongful death of her cousin, Sabrina Webber. This should be an interesting story to follow down the pike.
0 comments:
Post a Comment