GREY’S ANATOMY Recap: ‘White Wedding’

And the countdown continues! Only two episodes left in the season after this week’s semi-chaotic episode of GREY’S ANATOMY. The writers must have suddenly realized there’s not much time left before the finale, because between last week’s episode and this one it feels like we’ve been moving at warp speed.

For example: Callie, who at the beginning of last week’s episode could barely move, is now cheerfully bouncing around planning her wedding to Arizona. Both sets of parents are in town, which would be difficult enough without Callie’s mom acting like a passive aggressive twit – doing the bare minimum in helping prepare for the wedding, giving silent judgmental stares, and even finding excuses not to touch the baby. When Callie confronts her, Mama Torres responds that she simply can’t support Callie having a lesbian wedding and a child out of wedlock. She refuses to attend the ceremony, creating an awkward position for Callie’s dad, who’s come a long way since his anti-gay stance of a couple seasons ago. At Callie’s urging, he reluctantly leaves as well. Callie almost calls off the whole wedding until Bailey (whose role lately seems to be to disappear for most of the episode then step in with an inspiring speech) saves the day with some of her usual wise words. Meanwhile Arizona has a minor meltdown because her dead brother won’t be dancing at the wedding like they used to imagine and holy crap this has officially become the most depressing wedding EVER. Somehow everyone stops crying long enough to get through the ceremony, and Callie’s dad even shows up at the reception to dance with his daughter. Yay, happy ending…sort of. Callie’s mom still sucks.

Meanwhile, Meredith and Derek are making even bigger life decisions after Derek falls in love with one of the babies from Africa that Alex brought over. He tells Meredith he wants to adopt the baby (an orphan named Zola), and after some initial skepticism on Meredith’s part she goes along with it. She doesn’t seem quite as gung-ho as he does – though that could be because she’s distracted by Alex constantly hounding her about how he saw her switch Adele’s clinical trial papers. But despite the Alex distraction she must genuinely want to adopt this kid, because she even says yes when Derek suggests – wait for it – that they go to City Hall and finally make their post-it marriage official. The City Hall scene is pretty anti-climactic, but I guess it’s supposed to be since the post-it ceremony was the “real” wedding. Mazeltov, guys. You may now adopt babies and pay less taxes.

All the other storylines this episode are kind of rushed, which is a shame because I would have liked a couple of them to go a little deeper. Here’s the rundown: Cristina and Teddy are still at odds, meaning Cristina is sidelined on an awesome heart surgery while Lexie gets to do the cool stuff. Owen tells Cristina to apologize and tells Teddy to get over it, but neither of them takes his advice. Speaking of Teddy, she’s still dating Hot Therapist while he’s temporarily in town, when suddenly he asks her to move to Germany with him. He’s tired of his “nomadic lifestyle” and wants to settle down. In Germany, apparently. Really, dude? I don’t think you quite understand how to settle down. If you want to hold on to a girl who you’ve only had a two-month fling plus a couple of dates with, asking her to move halfway around the world is not the best plan. You know who would never suggest such a thing? Henry. Because he’s frickin’ adorable.

April and Stark also have a hurried storyline in which he still treats her like crap and she’s still mad at him for it, but secretly he’s impressed by her because he recommends to Owen that she be selected as Chief Resident. Hopefully these two will get more screen time next week – I’m still morbidly fascinated by this unlikely pairing and want to see more of it.

Oh, and Jackson saves a mouse in the clinical trial he’s doing with Chief Webber. He has a breakthrough about the experimental technology they’re testing. The mouse almost dies but then it lives. Exciting stuff.

And that’s everything for this week, fellow GREY’S lovers!  I kind of thought the episode was all over the place, like they were trying to cram all the characters in without a lot of time.  Even the Meredith/Derek and Callie/Arizona stories felt a bit thrown together.

What about you guys, do you agree?  And do you think April and Stark will make up before the end of the season?  How about Teddy and Cristina?  Tell us your thoughts in the comments section!