BOO!
The episode opens with Teddy and Owen having sex, and it appears on first glance that their relationship is getting better. But as soon as they are done, Teddy is disgusted with him again. It’s Halloween night at Grey Sloan Memorial, and Schmitt is being ordered around by Bailey, who is dressed in a Princess Leia costume. She gives the poor man way too many assignments, and the dread pours off Schmitt’s face. Bailey gives Schmitt a Halloween headband to wear before he leaves and reminds the chief resident that Richard is hosting a pumpkin carving contest, but Schmitt says he wasn’t invited.
The core five interns are in the cafeteria watching a viral video of a doctor losing their cool caught by a security camera. Richard comes in with a cart full of pumpkins and announces it’s time for his carving contest. He wants elaborate designs that practice delicacy and precision. Maggie pages Richard to ask for an intern’s help in the pit, so he sends Simone her way.
Before she makes it to the pit, Maggie walks with Winston through the halls to get updates on her patients. Mer catches up with them to say that she is leaving to take her kids trick or treating. Nick then joins them to announce that he was able to secure freshly released bodies for the interns, which excites Mer. She goes to get Owen, while Nick convinces Winston to stay and help with his latest teaching exercise.
Jo and Luna, whose costume is a dog, find Link after going trick or treating in the hospital. Jo asks him what he wants to do for his cancer-versary, which apparently is on Halloween. Link wants to get dinner with her, but Jo had to take an extra shift. He decides to find a date for the night on Tinder, which Jo makes fun of him for.
Maggie and Simone meet Teddy in the ambulance bay as they wait for two ambulances to arrive. Teddy is mad that Richard couldn’t spare more than one intern. The first ambulance arrives with a 16-year-old male who fell 30 feet off a roof. He tried to land in a swimming pool and missed, which has led to severe chest injuries. The young man’s friend arrives in the other ambulance. The second 16-year-old, River, landed in the water and has no visible injuries, but the paramedic warns the doctors that both boys are on LSD.
Back inside, Richard carefully watches over the interns as they carve their pumpkins. Mika reveals to Jules that she is scared of pumpkins, particularly their texture and smell. Before too much ribbing ensues, all the interns are paged to the sim lab with a trauma call. Richard dismisses them and they run to their next lesson. When they arrive, Mer tells them that they took five minutes to arrive, which is too long for a real trauma page. Nick, Owen, and Winston tell the group that they need to learn how to work on trauma patients. They are happy to announce that this year’s trauma training session will be done on fresh cadavers instead of dummies. The interns are surprised to say the least and are a little hesitant. Luke wants to know what they are supposed to do, so Owen pulls a knife out of a body’s chest and tells the interns to save their patient.
BATS
Back in the ER, Maggie and Simone examine the more injured teen and find that he has a pneumothorax and five broken ribs. They order a CT scan to see the full extent of the damage. Their patient’s father walks in, so the doctors explain his son has severe chest injuries. The dad is in denial and says both kids are AP students and don’t do drugs. The teen starts to crash, so Simone kicks the dad out of the room as they intubate his child. Teddy checks out River down the hall, who states that they jumped off the roof because bats were looking for them. River thought they would be safe and is truly remorseful for his friend’s injuries. Teddy tells him to stay put while she goes to check on another patient.
In the skills lab, the interns frantically try to save their “patient” and argue over the best course of action. Owen and Winston make up scenarios of what is happening to the patient as if he is alive. Jules wants to humanize the cadaver by giving him a name, so the boys call him Chris. Winston announces that whichever intern does the best will get to scrub into heart surgery with him tomorrow, which makes the group work even harder.
Amelia and Mer arrive home with their kids in tow. They are dressed as assorted Disney characters and are greeted at the door by Nick pretending to be a ghost with a sheet over himself. Amelia tells Mer and Nick that they can drop Zola off at her friend’s house for a sleepover and then go enjoy the night together. She will watch the rest of the kids to give them some privacy. While they haven’t said so, it’s clear that Nick and Mer are attempting to give their relationship another go, so they happily agree and leave with Zola.
Ben and Pru arrive at the hospital and are greeted by a very excited Bailey. Ben isn’t as peppy and says he and Pru are both tired after attending a Halloween party at Station 19. He leaves to go back to work, and Bailey is practically chomping at the bit to get Pru out of her soccer costume and into her Ewok one. We then see Schmitt and Teddy working in the ER and there are a lot of kids in costumes waiting to be treated. River’s father arrives and is very concerned about his son. They go to see River and find it empty. Did anyone really think leaving a kid high on LSD alone was a good idea?
Link walks out the door into the ambulance bay and tries to call his Tinder date to set a meeting place at Joe’s Bar. He sees Jo helping a pregnant patient get out of her car and then spots River on top of an ambulance. The kid rambles about how he believes he can fly like a bat. Link and Jo yell for him not to jump, but their words don’t do anything. River jumps and lands partially on Jo, breaking his leg in the process.
After everyone is brought inside the hospital, Link looks at Jo’s wrist once her patient and her baby are taken care of. Link is worried that Jo’s wrist is broken, but she doesn’t want him to worry about her and would rather he help River. As Link goes to help River, the teen’s dad catches up with him to ask if his son will be okay. Link dismisses him and says he will give an update as soon as he can. Continuing to act out of character, Link arrives in River’s trauma bay, where Teddy is already helping the boy. She fills Link in on the rest of River’s issues, and Link goes off on River about how he could have severely hurt Jo, the pregnant woman, and her baby.
Bailey and Pru walk into the skills lab while trick or treating around the hospital to find the interns working on their cadaver. Bailey quickly covers Pru’s eyes and walks back out. Owen tells the group that Chris is losing blood. Mika refuses to help Blue, and Winston eats candy while watching them fail. Owen and Winston start bonding over hating working with their wives as their bosses. The interns continue to argue, so the attendings boss them around by saying Chris is coding. Winston flatlines the cadaver and calls time of death to signify the interns failed. Elsewhere, Schmitt complains to a nurse about not being able to handle every patient himself. He’s doing all the work and feeling the pressure and yells at the poor woman. Richard overhears and asks the resident to come with him.
Mer and Nick arrive at a hotel for the night and talk about how each intern is doing while walking to their room. Mer is worried about Zola at her slumber party, and Nick mentions that he got them a hotel room because his new place in Seattle isn’t quite ready for visitors yet. He wants to order room service, but Mer wants to take a bath and invites him to join her.
At the hospital, Maggie and Simone talk to their patient’s father about his son losing too much blood and needing immediate surgery. River’s dad finds them and yells at the other dad about how his kid must have given River drugs. They argue with each other and Bailey happens to see what is happening and steps in. She interjects about parenting being hard and that parenting teens is even harder. She says teenagers do all the things parents try to keep them from doing and that it doesn’t matter whose fault it is that both are hurt. Bailey knows the kids need all the help they can get and that their fathers can’t turn on each other because the only thing that matters is keeping the kids alive. Her speech gets through to the men, who make peace with each other.
TEAMWORK PREVAILS
Owen and Winston address the interns in the skills lab about how they didn’t properly assess their patient and only attempted to fix the main injury. Owen unveils another cadaver with a stab wound to work on. Jules gets upset when she realizes Owen stabbed the cadavers and doesn’t understand how they could defile a dead body given to science for research purposes. She’s especially emotional because several of her family members are planning to donate their bodies to science and she doesn’t want this to be their fate. Owen explains that they simulated the injuries after consent forms were signed and that the bodies were given the utmost respect. This calms everyone down, so Winston pulls a knife out of the second cadaver’s side to begin round two.
In the OR, Simone and Maggie work to fix their patient’s punctured lung. Simone’s phone keeps going off, so she asks a nurse to ignore it. Maggie asks if Simone needs to look at her phone, and she replies that she will check it later. Their patient starts coding, and Maggie tells Simone that she needs her to focus entirely on saving the kid’s life and that the phone can’t be a distraction.
Richard brings Schmitt to the pumpkins and makes the younger doctor carve. Schmitt respectfully says that he doesn’t have time for this. Richard talks about seeing art on his trip with Catherine and that the art was restorative and necessary. He tells Schmitt to take a break or else his chief resident reign will be short. Schmitt doesn’t want to lose another patient that can be saved again because he doesn’t think he will come back from that. He declares he needs to go back to work and leaves, so Richard sighs.
Teddy and Link are giving River a CT scan and chat while waiting for the results. Link thinks about being a teenager and doesn’t remember LSD in high school. He asks if the whole world has changed without him knowing, and Teddy simply says yes. She asks if anything has changed between him and Jo, which Link brushes off. River starts to squirm around and asks if his friend is okay. They tell him they will get an update soon. River asks for his dad and won’t stay still, so Link puts on a lead vest and goes into the room to calm the teen down. River panics, so Link holds his hand and tells him that he’s got him.
The scene cuts back to the skills lab, where the interns are actually working together the second time around. Through offhand comments, Blue reveals he never had a dad, while Luke finds a hole in the cadaver’s pericardium. Jules tells Blue to fix it, and he calmly sutures the hole. The group has finally figured out how to come together, which is yielding great results.
In another room, Teddy tells River that he has a concussion and needs to stay at the hospital overnight and will have leg surgery the next day to repair the fracture. She reveals that his friend survived his surgery and has a long road to recovery. River can’t see him yet and thinks his friend’s dad won’t let them be friends anymore. River’s dad tells his son it will be okay and that they will find a way through it.
As they scrub out after their surgery, Maggie asks Simone what happened with her life. Maggie knows Simone is the intern to watch and that Simone was asked to leave her last program. She also knows that the stakes are high for Simone at Grey Sloan Memorial and that she wouldn’t be preoccupied unless something happened. Simone says she was a model resident all the time, even when she endured a lot of racism. She was told to leave her previous program for being aggressive when she pointed out an instance of racism. She never filed an official complaint because she broke and acted inappropriately. The security footage of her meltdown got leaked, and Simone has been trying to get it taken off the internet all day, which is why her phone was constantly going off. It’s an interesting twist that Simone is the subject of the video the interns were watching at the top of the episode.
Richard goes to Joe’s Bar to speak to bartender Helm. He sees that she carved an aorta into a pumpkin that’s sitting on the bar. Richard says Helm doesn’t belong there, but Helm counters that she is going to make $800 tonight without any stress. She knows Schmitt is drowning because she lives with him. Helm tells Richard that she walked out of the hospital with nothing since no one found her another residency. She needs more convincing and more than money to come back, and dismisses her former boss.
Nick and Mer, clad in bath robes, chill in their hotel bed. Mer doesn’t know why Zola hasn’t returned her texts, so Nick says Zola is probably having too much fun to respond. Mer met with Zola’s principal, who wants Zola to skip two grades. She isn’t keen on that since Maggie skipped two grades and was miserable. Mer looked into an academy, but didn’t like it much. She gets a phone call from a crying Zola, who apologizes instantly. Mer tells her daughter to take a deep breath and that she’ll come pick her up. Zola asks her to stay on the phone, and Nick says he will drive. Mer is now even more concerned about Zola, and the real reason for this new storyline will be revealed at the end of the episode.
THE NEXT STEP
Teddy finds Link in the ambulance bay, and they agree that they both don’t like Halloween anymore. Link complains that the whole world is stupid and cruel, and Teddy says that is never stops because one stupid impulse can ruin your life at any stage of the game. Link reveals that he is crazy about Jo, but Teddy isn’t surprised and has caught onto that. He goes on to say that Jo was his best friend, being together romantically wasn’t an option, then it was, and then he was hung up on Amelia. He was confused and scared and didn’t want to ruin their friendship, and he knows he missed his moment to take it to the next level. Teddy advises him to let the moment pass and sleep with other people until he is over Jo. Link is shocked to hear Teddy say that being with your best friend causes you to ruin each other’s lives and ruins the friendship, which has happened to her and Owen. It doesn’t sound like Teddy and Owen’s marriage nor friendship will survive this season.
In the skills lab, Owen and Winston tell the interns that their patient is stable. Jules, Blue, and Mika fight over who should be the one to assist on Winston’s surgery and Luke is the only one to downplay his role in the exercise. Owen decides Luke will get to scrub in, so Luke asks if they all can. Winston agrees, which excites everyone. He tells them to go home and sleep and that they will be emailed the case details in a few hours. Winston tells Owen he will do a lap around the CCU before leaving. Owen asks Winston if he still loves Maggie, and Winston quickly answers, “Of course.” Owen tells him not to reach the point where resentment takes over before leaving.
Outside of their patient’s room, Simone shows Maggie the viral video and they laugh together. Maggie gets that Simone is held to a different standard and always has to have exemplary behavior because of her race. She hates that Simone’s one bad day now lives on the internet forever. Maggie says that the hospital is a great program and assures the intern that the doctors see her and that she doesn’t want the video to haunt her. River and his dad arrive and the teen wants to apologize to his friend’s father. Simone gets the other father to come out of his son’s room. River apologizes and the father understands and is glad River is okay. Both dads shake hands to show that everything will be fine.
Richard finds Schmitt working in the pit and tells the resident that the hospital failed him. He doesn’t like that Schmitt has to carry the load by himself and acknowledges that the kinks of the new residency program are still being worked out. Richard has decided that starting now, the attendings will help pick up the slack of having less residents. Richard wants to take half of Schmitt’s patients to help out and takes over his current patient to let Schmitt go home.
Maggie finds Winston asleep in the lounge and wakes him up. He says he checked on all the patients, changed, packed his bag, sat down on the couch, and fell asleep. Winston reveals that he is considering changing specialties. He loves Maggie and loves being married to her. He wants it to stay that way and feels that he needs to leave cardio to keep it that way. Maggie is shocked to say the least, so it will be interesting to see where these two go from here.
Link is finally ready to leave the hospital for the night and finds Jo in the lobby with a brace on her wrist. She says her sprained wrist isn’t bad, and Link gives her specific treatment instructions. Jo gives her best friend a trick or treat bag of his favorite candies as a gift for his cancer-versary. She thanks him for worrying about her. Link smiles and says he will see her at home. He looks longingly at her as he leaves.
Teddy goes to an on-call room and finds Owen asleep. He wakes up when she sits on his bed. She reminisces about missing a lot of holidays while being overseas in the military. She recalls the time where he made Halloween all the holidays at once for her and says that was her favorite Halloween. Owen falls back asleep, so Teddy takes off his blanket and walks out. Downstairs, Simone shows the interns the viral video and tells them she is the star. They support her and have her back. Mika suggests they all grab breakfast, so the interns walk out together.
At Mer’s house, Zola apologizes that Mer and Nick had to pick her up in the middle of the night. Mer assures her that she will always pick her up anytime, anywhere. Mer asks what happened, so Zola says she was thinking about Mer and Maggie and Alzheimer’s. She couldn’t sleep or breathe and asks why this is happening and when it will get better. Mer says they need to find her the right teachers and school, even if they need to look further than Seattle. And in that ending sentence of the episode, it is finally revealed how Mer will be written out until the very end of the season. Out of all the possibilities, this is a pretty solid solution that shouldn’t cause a ton of fan dissension.
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