It’s always fun when a new hotshot surgeon saunters into Grey’s Anatomy. Some doctors fawn, others get cranky, and all the while, we viewers at home get to ask ourselves the surgical version of, Are you a good witch or a bad witch? This week, the writers made that question pretty easy — at least for me, a person who first recognized the actor playing Dr. Joseph Chase, Craig Bierko, from his slimy role in UnReal before realizing he also played Carrie’s “jazz man” boyfriend Ray King in Sex and the City. Sorry, but I’ll never get the image of that man playing a banjo in the nude out of my head. I simply cannot trust him in the OR.
Of course, past roles alone are not enough to indict a guest-star surgeon. But then, there were other hints. Webber walked out on Dr. Chase’s presentation at grand rounds because he didn’t buy what he was selling, and Simone froze up at the sight of him. It turns out she worked under Chase back in Baltimore, where he got her fired for daring to advocate for a Black patient he’d ignored for weeks. Given that this week’s impossible surgery patient, Gabby, was Black, she naturally had concerns.
My question: Why didn’t Simone just tell Bailey about her history with Dr. Chase? One would think that their relationship is strong enough for Simone to burst her mentor’s bubble and reveal the truth about this would-be surgical legend, but she stayed silent the whole time and even reassured Gabby’s mother of Chase’s excellence. Sometimes, it’s best to trust your instincts — especially when someone’s life is on the line! But if there was one theme to this week’s episode, it was mistrust.
It’s not just that Simone failed to flag her concerns to Bailey. Teddy was mad at Owen for doing exactly what she said and opening up the marriage. Granted, I’m mad at him, too, but that’s just because I wanted Teddy to have the fun in this arrangement while he suffered. Instead, we got the reverse. She couldn’t go through with hooking up with Cass Beckman last week, but he had no problem sleeping with his childhood friend Nora. Now, she’s upset and he’s scrambling to fix things. Sigh. Meanwhile, Ben Warren is also trying to win back Teddy’s confidence after disobeying her orders during the heatwave. This week, he tried a groundbreaking maneuver of his own: actually apologizing. Incredible stuff. Perhaps other men will study this one day!
Also not earning anyone’s trust? Blue, who’s still acting extremely emo about his break-up with Molly. He’s moping around the intern frat house, crushing energy drinks at work, and cracking inappropriate jokes about a patient’s potential amputation. Link, who swapped to have Blue on his service for this poor patient, is not amused. As Blue comes to find out, the patient, Jack, lost his brother — an extreme adventurer — two years ago. Since then, Jack’s been running his body ragged, scattering his brother’s ashes in every far-flung location he never got to see. It’s a perfectly Grey’s-coded tragic medical briefing, and it pierces right through Blue’s self-pitying shell.
In the end, the good doctors find a way to avoid amputation, and Blue sets Jack up with a VR headset to travel the world virtually while he heals. I have a feeling we’ve still got a couple of weeks of moping left, but at least he ends this week going to a baseball game with Dr. Ndugu (who mostly just hopes he’ll be quiet).
Our other quirky patient for the week is not so lucky. Poor Brendan met the love of his life (as determined by talking to her for 17 minutes) while working at a corporate lunch event and then impaled himself on an ice pick. Because the doctors of Grey Sloan are nothing if not compulsive busybodies, they manage to find the so-called love of this guy’s life while wheeling him into the OR — and he promptly sits up to see her better, impaling his heart with the ice pick along the way. It doesn’t take long for him to bleed out on the table.
I’m just gonna go ahead and say it — that death is totally the surgeons’ fault. There’s a time and a place for sentimentality, and it is not when you have a lovestruck dummy on a gurney. This guy already injured himself once in the name of love. Why give him the opportunity to do it again? At least strap him down first! They’re lucky this poor kid’s loved ones will never get to see what we all saw because if they could, they’d sue for medical malpractice. And you know what? I wouldn’t even blame them.
But the main event here is Gabby and her pancreatic adenocarcinoma. (Say that three times fast.) Webber did a consult on her months ago and determined there was nothing to be done, but Chase — whose clinical study has a perfect track record so far — insists this is a skill issue. Because Webber refuses to let Adams watch someone “experiment” on a patient, he sits him down with some VHS tapes of his old surgeries instead. That is until they get a 911 call from Bailey in the OR.
It turns out that Chase protects his squeaky-clean record by cutting and running any time a patient’s case proves too difficult. When he realizes mid-surgery that Gabby’s tumor has breached the arterial wall, he decides — to Bailey’s disgust — to patch Gabby up and send her on her way to die. Bailey obviously is not down for that, so she kicks Chase out of the OR (in front of a huge audience who’ve gathered to watch a miracle surgery) and concocts a life-saving plan of her own, using a saphenous vein graft to repair the damage. Whatever that means, it works. Bailey apologizes to Webber, offers Simone her condolences for ever having had to work under Chase, and accepts her flowers once again as a surgical genius. It never gets old — I’ll always love to see it!
But lowkey, the biggest development of this episode might just be Adams’ growing relationship with Webber — who’s finally agreed to talk to his wife and see if Adams can rejoin his class. Could this be the end of his long, long purgatory? Let’s hope so because it’s really starting to feel unfair. Until then, though, he’ll always have the VHS tapes.
