Well, friends, it only took 21 seasons, but yes, Grey’s Anatomy did an entire storyline around a little kid needing to fart. Okay, obviously there’s a little more to it than that, although … is there?
Nine-year-old Yusuf is recovering from bowel surgery but can’t go home until he passes gas, and who is there to help him out? Super-Surgeon and Dr. Whipple, or rather, Taryn Helm and Ben Warren in DIY superhero costumes. It’s very sweet but also kind of wild to watch Ben say the word “tooted” with his full chest. In the end, this is about Ben finally winning Helm over and the two forming a friendly co-resident relationship (and agreeing to be study buddies for the boards). But yes, it’s also very much about farting. Which Yusuf does eventually do. Whew! (Whoosh?)
Ben isn’t the only doctor this week to win over a rather obstinate person — Lucas Adams finally gets some face-to-face time with Catherine Fox. Is this finally his moment to get his remediation overturned, or will our resident Sad Boy blow it? Let’s talk about it.
“If you’re gonna go down, go down fighting”
Oh, sweet Lucas — he’s doing everything he can to get his punishment for the Sam Sutton incident overturned so he can get back in the same class as the interns he came in with. While Webber doesn’t think his meddling in the issue is going to help much, he makes a meddling-adjacent move that might do the trick: He has Bailey put Lucas on clinic duty the same day Catherine is coming in to volunteer, which is a real make-or-break moment for Lucas to prove he deserves to have his remediation reversed.
Catherine knows exactly what he’s up to from the start, which is perhaps why she’s extra testy with him as they work on a patient together. He doesn’t realize that the 14-year-old girl with the transverse vaginal septum (an abnormal development of her vaginal canal is causing the blood from her period to get trapped in her uterus) might be a little embarrassed to have a hottie doctor working on her, but Catherine sure does; she asks him to make himself scarce. It’s not ideal for Lucas’ plan to impress her.
But somehow, he manages to do it anyway. It’s not because Bailey stands up for him once again (“If you’re gonna go down, go down fighting,” she tells a grateful Lucas). And it’s not because he stands up for himself by reminding her that he “punches above [his] weight in every discipline” and will carry Sam Sutton around with him for the rest of his career. It’s also not because he’s the one who discovers a less-obtrusive way to treat the condition for the young teen — instead of slowly draining the uterus over weeks, he finds some cases in Australia where they perform a much quicker and less-invasive laparoscopic procedure — even though that, honestly, is pretty impressive.
None of those things hurt, surely, but the needle finally moves in Lucas’ favor only after he sees once again how uncomfortable he’s making his patient and gives up the procedure. It’s a selfless act, and that is what Catherine notices. She finds him after Bailey performs the procedure, and all goes well, and tells him that giving up a procedure that was “personally important” to him in order to put the patient first shows “sensitivity and good judgment,” and that is what she believed he was missing the last time they met. She’ll reverse the remediation. Lucas can move on with his class. “Are you serious?” he asks. “Do I look like someone who jokes?” she responds. Relatively speaking, Lucas is new around here, so we’ll forgive him for the transgression because, no, Catherine Fox does not look like she jokes. “You won’t regret it,” an excited Lucas tells her. All this time, Simone has gotten the “one to watch” title, but I don’t know, friends — I’ve got my eyes on Lucas Adams for this one.
It’s the old “Come look at the view up on the rooftop with me” move, huh?
It is kind of wild, in a very Grey’s Anatomy way, that a hunky window washer crashes through the window thanks to some unwieldy wind, and that’s actually not the most memorable part of this storyline. Winston and his new mentee Jules wind up working on window washer Beau, and Winston once again displays some real surgical prowess. Not only does he intubate his patient while Beau is still up tight in his harness, but he also handily gets rid of a potentially fatal clot in Beau’s carotid artery as if he’s done it 1,000 times. He also displays that he’s kind of a dummy sometimes. He sees Beau’s wife come in and assumes she must be his mother — she is not. It’s very awkward! But in surgery, Jules doesn’t hesitate to tease him for a bit, and it leads to the two of them discussing age differences and unexpected pairings in relationships. Jules is very much on the “the heart wants what the heart wants” side of things. We should remember this for later, I bet!
The mentor and mentee are growing quite friendly with each other, and post-surgery, when Beau seems to be on the mend, Winston admits to having a deep fear of heights.
Jules will not let this stand, and she has him come up to the roof with her. Winston hesitates because one should always hesitate when asked to move to a second location, but he gives in pretty easily. The moment I realized Jules’ hair was down, I knew exactly where this was going.
Her hair is down, and they’re taking in the evening view of Seattle while she talks about how in college she would always hang out in the bell tower on campus (she played the carillon) and how it helped give her perspective and relieved her stress. Plus, “look at what you miss when you never take in the view” and of course, at that moment, Winston is looking at her. And by the time she says she’s chilly and he offers her his jacket, well, this is a done deal: There are feelings brewing. With Winston as straitlaced as he is, however, we’ll see what it takes for him to act on those feelings. It doesn’t hurt that Webber, who has been trying to set his ex-son-in-law up with his neighbor (Webber always was a trusty wingman), catches the two coming back down from the roof and notices those feelings. He warns Winston to tread carefully but doesn’t generally seem against the pairing. What do we think? Will Winston Ndugu take up the time-honored Grey Sloan tradition of hooking up with your intern? There is precedent! Twenty-one seasons of it!
Our dreams of a Grey’s Anatomy does Three’s Company have been dashed — for now
Another time-honored tradition in these hallowed halls? Roommate issues. With Mika gone (miss you, girl), Simone and Kwan have lost their roommate buffer, and all the things they do that annoy each other are front and center. Also, Simone isn’t wrong when she admonishes Kwan for inviting a friend to crash for a few days without talking to her first by reminding him that it’s basically the start of every horror movie for a woman to find a strange man walking around her house. She also can’t stand that he’s up late loudly playing video games, that he leaves glasses everywhere, and doesn’t clean out the fridge. He is annoyed that she and Lucas are hooking up all over the house. You know, standard roommate issues.
Things come to a head when the two of them have to work on a case together with Webber — Yusuf’s mother is collateral damage in the window-washer fiasco — and Webber ends up kicking Kwan off the case when their bickering becomes too distracting. (And also annoying as hell, I’d imagine.) Do these interns know what Webber has lived through? Show the man some respect!
By the end of the episode, however, they both realize they’re being ridiculous and they want to make this living situation work. Simone is especially apologetic for not being sensitive to how all the PDA might make a brokenhearted Kwan feel at the moment. They promise to try to do better. And Kwan gives the okay for Simone to ask Lucas to move back into the house and take Mika’s old room permanently. This is exciting, right?
Well, no. At first, Simone is thrilled that she can ask Lucas to move in — things are going really well between them; we know this. When she bumps into him after their shift, he tells her the good news about the remediation. Before she can ask him to move in, he launches into a whole thing about how incredible this is not just for his future but also for their future. He basically has a plan for them for the next five to seven years: finding a couples match for their fellowship and moving to New York so he can be closer to his family. It’s a lot. And you can see right there on Simone’s face that it is freaking her out. When he finally stops yapping and asks her what she wanted to tell him, she asks him to dinner and makes absolutely no mention about the moving-in situation. I don’t know much, but I do know that’s not typically a great sign for a relationship.
