About Last Night…BROOKLYN NINE-NINE, GREY’S ANATOMY, A MILLION LITTLE THINGS, and More

Let’s talk about Thursday night’s TV!

BROOKLYN NINE-NINE: It’s very surreal to watch Jake and Amy go through their ordeal to start a family while knowing that Melissa Fumero was pregnant in real-life while filming it. I’m really impressed the show isn’t rushing in her pregnancy just because Fumero is pregnant. Also, holy moly, they just rushed through a lot of time?

GREY’S ANATOMY: Before I get to the episode, I want to acknowledge this upfront: With Justin Chambers not returning (in person) for Alex’s exit, obviously the options for how to write him out were limited. And with his on-screen wife, Camilla Luddington, sticking around, having him exit with Jo didn’t really seem like it was in the cards. The writers were in a tough spot. (Especially if they didn’t want to shove Jo back into a spiral of depression.) I absolutely get it. With that being said…

I wish they had killed Alex off.

Three weeks ago, I didn’t feel that way. He was Meredith’s person 2.0. Alex and Jo were one of my favorite couples in the show’s second half of the series. The idea that he could one day come back—no matter how slim—was a lovely thought.

This? This, I’m not okay with.

To compare it to another show, this feels like HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER’s very forced series finale, which would have made sense if the show had run half the time it did. Instead, HIMYM came across as an ending the writers clung to despite the characters moving long past where it felt plausible.

I don’t believe the ultimate end game, had Chambers stayed, would have been for Alex and Izzie to reunite. They were together and split when they were young. One of the reasons this stings so much is that, frankly, I didn’t like that Alex. He was not someone I enjoyed—outside of a few rare moments—until well after Izzie’s departure.

Since their divorce, Alex grew. He became more confident in his abilities at work. He’s had loves and losses. He developed a truly beautiful friendship with Meredith. He nurtured Jo through some of the toughest times in her life. He brought the people who Meredith helped to the hearing so she could save her medical license. This Alex cared. This Alex wouldn’t have ghosted his wife—whom he had just officially married!!!!!—and his best friend. His (relatively new) job. This Alex was an adult.

The Alex we got tonight…well, that was the selfish intern who plastered Izzie’s modeling photos all over their locker room because he thought her humiliation would be funny. An Alex who thought it was okay to go off the grid and abandon his responsibilities and the life he spent years building. Who left his wife without having the guts to tell her to her face that he didn’t want to be with her.

(It felt like, to some degree, the show realized what a stretch this was, because the clip show format—including the long montage of Alex-Izzie moments—tried very hard to explain and justify it all.)

It doesn’t matter he has biological children with Izzie. There was no real reason he couldn’t have A) been a grown adult and told Jo as soon as he found out and B) given her the option to decide if she wanted to uproot her life to go on this journey with him. They. Had. Just. Gotten. Remarried. And, you know what, if he didn’t want to be with Jo and was committed to building out a life with Izzie, he could have come home to tell her goodbye and said it to her face. He had promised to spend the rest of his freaking life with Jo. They weren’t dating. It wasn’t casual. He knew what she had just been through. He was a selfish jerk who decided to make her doubt herself and ghost her versus be an actual adult. Instead, he wrote her a “Dear Jo” letter.

This ending might be satisfying to some. (And I’ve absolutely loved television couples where one actor left and rooted for them to return for the end of the show’s run/their on-screen partner’s final arc.) But this feels like something that would have worked if Alex left five years ago. Or if an OG fan tuned in tonight because they knew he was leaving and hadn’t been following his progress throughout the years. This feels like HIMYM all over again. And as someone who has marveled at how much the show has allowed Alex to grow, I’m absolutely heartbroken. This isn’t the last memories I wanted of this character.

MOM: I love Bonnie and Adam so much. Bonnie in full jealously mode isn’t entirely new (remember Louise from Trader Joe’s?), but rarely is she actually spot-on about it. But it was fun to see Adam complain about Bonnie constantly mocking his hair, and then later Bonnie be horrified when Adam admitted she was correct about Sam…but she didn’t want to hear it when she was wearing a face mask.

A MILLION LITTLE THINGS: I loved this episode. It’s hard to introduce new players into a strong ensemble series, but AMLT did it with three new characters and all of them worked really, really well. Lindsay had a fun dynamic with Eddie. I loved Darcy’s banter with Gary, and can’t wait to see her actually interact with Katherine. And Delilah and Miles! That was a fun twist.

But, uh, still worried about Rome/Regina/Eve. That feels in absolutely no way over.

Which shows did you watch last night?

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