GREY’S ANATOMY: ‘Almost Grown’

This is either going to be the easiest GREY’S ANATOMY recap I’ve ever written, or the hardest. Why? Because very little actually happened this week. Seriously, if I wanted to I could sum up the entire episode in just a couple of sentences. But I suppose you want a little more than that, don’t you, fellow GREY’S lovers? I’ll do what I can for you…

The story this week has our beloved doctors divided into two groups: attendings and make-believe attendings. Chief Webber informs the real attendings that the hospital budget has a surplus of one milllllllion dollars, which he will give to whomever of them can make the most inspirational proposal on how to spend it. Since all of them will be busy preparing their presentations (“preparing” evidently meaning they just stand around trying to psych each other out), all of the residents get temporarily promoted to attendings — except not really because they still have to clear their decisions with the actual attendings, and the actual attendings still have to be there when they’re doing anything complicated, and really they’re not attendings in any way. But hey, they get to wear dark blue scrubs! It totally brings out their eyes.

Several of the make-believe attendings don’t do so well. April is back to her annoying gutless self and can’t form an opinion on whether or not her patient should qualify for a lung transplant without knowing what Teddy and Cristina think. Cristina, meanwhile, seems to have taken a major step backwards in getting over her PTSD and refuses to give her opinion on lung transplants or anything else. She spends most of the episode sleepwalking through her job until the lung guy moves her with an impassioned plea, causing her to finally find her voice and speak in his favor in front of the transplant panel.

Jackson doesn’t get as happy an ending. He makes a mistake while performing brain surgery and Derek has to step in and save the patient. Because of this, Derek is too busy to help when another patient starts bleeding into her brain, so Meredith has to do the surgery. She totally rocks it, and Derek arrives just in time to see her confidently and skillfully finish up. Gold star for Meredith!

Alex also does pretty well, though he struggles at first to convince a scared mother to let her 13-year-old son have cosmetic surgery. (The poor kid has boobs. We’re talking solid B-cups, and not even nice ones. They’re kinda saggy.) In the end he gives the mom a stern lecture about how her son will suffer irreparable psychological damage if he’s forced to go through high school like that. Apparently high school kids can be a little mean. Who knew?

Meanwhile, our real attendings tell Chief Webber one-by-one what amazing things they would do with one milllllllion dollars. Teddy wants to do stem cell research. Owen wants to put it towards emergency situation training so they’ll be better prepared the next time someone starts shooting at them. Mark wants to expand the burn unit, and Arizona just wants to help the children, the poor, sweet, little innocent children. Bailey thinks the money should be spent on practical matters like fixing broken equipment. Callie just wants it so she can one-up Arizona, oh and also maybe heal people and stuff. Derek delivers the most emotionally compelling proposal – he wants to find a cure for Alzheimer’s so he doesn’t have to worry that Meredith will get it. Guess that whole “live in the now” speech last week was just a bunch of talk.

And the winner is…drum roll…Owen! Wait…Owen? That’s a surprise. I thought Derek had it in the bag. He even almost cried. Oh well, congrats Owen! Don’t spend it all in one place now.

All in all, I wasn’t really a fan of this episode. Several of the characters seemed to have no continuity from previous weeks, and the story felt very forced, like the writers were getting things out of the way in order to set up for more interesting stories. Fortunately next week looks like it might be one of those more interesting stories, so here’s hoping this was just a glitch.

What did you all think of the episode? Did you love it or hate it? Who did you think should have won the million dollar grant? Sound off in the comments section below!

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