Did Grey’s Anatomy Season 21, Episode 14 Just Deliver the Most Shocking Twist Ever?!
One of the prevailing themes of this week’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy is the age-old adage “Be careful what you wish for.” Miranda Bailey certainly learns that lesson when she finally gets to work with one of her surgical heroes and learns that he’s not all that he’s been cracked up to be. And Teddy learns it when she realizes that Owen has already “tried out” the new open-marriage arrangement even though she would very much like to reconsider that decision. Sorry, babe, there’s no take-backsies on that one. All of this means that a lot of our doctors are learning some tough lessons that will surely have some type of effect on both their professional and personal lives. Let’s check in with them and see how everyone’s doing.
Even Miranda Bailey can be a bad judge of character from time to time. You know she is going to learn that lesson the hard way the moment she introduces her big surprise guest at Grand Rounds, one of her personal surgical heroes, Dr. Joseph Chase, and Simone all but has a full-on panic attack — Dr. Chase is the same guy who got her fired from her previous residency program. When Bailey announces that Simone will be the intern assisting on this case, and Dr. Chase recognizes Simone but doesn’t get into specifics, Simone decides to suck up all her anger and misgivings about Chase’s medical skills in the name of supporting her new mentor (Bailey) and their patient, Gabby.
Gabby has been diagnosed with pancreatic adenocarcinoma, and because the tumor encases several critical blood vessels, almost everyone has ruled it inoperable. Gabby is getting chemo to shrink the tumor, but without a resection, she’s looking at mere months to live. Dr. Chase, however, has developed a technique to resect tumors like Gabby’s. It’s experimental, but he’s been successful with every patient he’s taken on. Bailey is in awe of him. Simone would like to vomit.
Ozioma Akagha
Disney/Anne Marie Fox
The surgery starts off about as well as you could hope. There is applause from the gallery when Chase places the shunt — but when he begins to resect the tumor, he realizes it’s way too risky and could ruin his perfect success rate, and tells Bailey he’s closing up, regardless of the fact that it means Gabby will die. Bailey is furious. She realizes he has been doing this to countless patients and only reporting the positive outcomes, leaving the others to suffer and most likely die. She kicks Chase out of her OR — angry that she fell for his lies and let him anywhere near her patient — and refuses to give up on Gabby. Instead, she calls on one doctor she can rely on, a doctor she has always looked up to: Richard Webber.
Webber’s been out of sorts since Bailey brought Chase in. He had looked at Gabby’s case months prior and determined that the tumor couldn’t and shouldn’t be resected; he was offended when Bailey went to look for answers elsewhere. But when he gets that 911 call from Bailey, he doesn’t hesitate to join her in the OR. He had been spending the day taking Lucas — who is desperately looking for a way to impress Catherine Fox still — under his wing. (Although Webber is still very much in the camp of believing that Catherine will never change her mind.) Webber arrives in the OR with Lucas in tow, and it’s not long before Bailey comes up with another way to resect Gabby’s tumor. Simone, Webber, and Lucas are with her all the way. And it works. Bailey didn’t need Chase’s “technique” — she came up with her own. Dr. Chase, and I mean this wholeheartedly, can suck it.
Alexis Floyd, Craig Bierko, and Chandra Wilson
Disney/Anne Marie Fox
And that’s even before he goes ahead and insults not just Simone, but also Bailey, before leaving Seattle. Simone knows that she’s now in the place where she belongs, with the right mentor, and yet the dig — and the reminder of how things ended at her previous residency (with her ripping apart the scrub room) — still stings. And so what’s a girl to do but wine and whine with her pal. It’s exactly what she does — and why Lucas comes home to find Simone and Jules, who lost a patient, stewing about their day on the couch. A girl needs to vent, sure, but everyone watching — everyone except for Simone, it seems — clocks a wave of hurt that comes across Lucas’ face when he tries to tell his girlfriend about the progress he made in regard to being reinstated to the residency year — something he’s pretty excited about — and she blows him off. And these two started the day off very lovey-dovey too! Please, Grey’s, leave these two alone.
While Simone and Lucas seem okay for now as far as relationships go, we should return to the mess that is Teddy and Owen’s marriage. Back from the medical conference, Teddy tells Owen that she doesn’t want an open marriage after all — she loves Owen; she only wants to be with him. He feels the same about her, but it doesn’t take long for Teddy to learn that while she stopped short of sleeping with Cass, Owen had himself a little weekend. She is so upset to learn that [checks notes] Owen went ahead and did exactly what she had asked him to try in order to save their marriage. Be careful what you wish for, I guess. Teddy is overwhelmed with confusing emotions and isn’t afraid to take it out on her husband, who, again, only opened up their marriage because Teddy asked him to. While I’m not particularly an Owen defender, I did find it quite nice of him not to bring up the fact that they almost didn’t get married at all because Teddy was off having pre-wedding sex with another man. Remember that, Teddy? The butt-dial from hell?!
Well, of course in the middle of all of this, Teddy and Owen (and Ben and Jules) wind up with a patient, Brendon, who slipped and got an ice pick lodged in his chest after falling (literally, I guess!) head over heels for some woman. The man is in love. True love! The man is also only alive thanks to that ice pick plugging a hole in his aortic arch. What this means is he needs surgery immediately, and to get him there without moving that ice pick and letting him bleed out, they will have to move him very, very slowly down the hallway. None of these people were around when Meredith had to do this while holding a bomb in a man’s chest, and it is really amateur hour out here. They don’t have anyone in front of Brendon’s gurney? Jules doesn’t calmly tell him that she found his “true love” online instead of holding up her phone at such a distance that he leaps up to see her picture, thus dislodging the ice pick? Come on, people — be smarter!
Kevin Mckidd and Kim Raver
Disney/Mike Taing
Brendon starts bleeding out, and they rush him into the OR, but he’s lost too much blood. Teddy tries to hold on, telling Owen that Brendon “didn’t give up,” so she can’t give up on him either. There is, unfortunately, no coming back from this, and everyone in the room knows Teddy needs to call it. Finally, she does. She feels defeated, and it’s not hard to see her mentally connecting the dots between giving up on her patient and giving up on her marriage. When Ben, still trying to get into Teddy’s good graces after the heat-dome fiasco, tells her flat out that if she doesn’t think his temporary residency position is going to work out (she does not seem to be a fan!), then he wishes she would just “call it” — she can’t ignore that she is drawing parallels between her marriage and literally everything else in her life right now. She goes home and sobs into Owen’s arms. “It’s gonna be okay,” he whispers to her. And as dire as things seem at the moment, Teddy and Owen have weathered some pretty harsh storms (see, once again, the aforementioned pre-wedding butt-dial sex) and come out the other side together. It doesn’t seem like calling “time of death” on their marriage is needed just yet.