Grey's Anatomy Season 18 Episode 10 Review: Living In A House Divided
Well, okay then.
Is anyone else utterly confused by the state of many of the characters these days? It's starting to feel like characterization and logic have gone out the window, and the series prioritizes doing whatever they think suits the plot they're focusing on at the moment.
In addition to Grey's Anatomy Season 18 Episode 10 serving as an incredibly understated, lukewarm sendoff for Cormac Hayes, it was an assortment of unusual character beats and moments. At least half a dozen of Grey Sloan's finest felt out of character of "off."
Cormac Hayes departs Grey Sloan Memorial with little fanfare. As a fan of the character for the mere fact that he held so much potential, one begrudgingly admits that his departure was as tepid as his overall presence on the series because of how criminally underused he was.
And yet, my Hayes loving heart is still broken that he's gone.
Mer: And your plan was to leave without saying goodbye?
Hayes: Yeah.
Mer: Why?
Hayes: Because if I said goodbye to you, Grey, I would never leave.
- Permalink: Because if I said goodbye to you, Grey, I would never leave.
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Of course, his departure barely clocked in the top four significant plots of the hour. It probably speaks to how little he connected with anyone outside of Mer and the Hunt-Altman clan that no one batted an eye over him leaving or even so much as gave the man stale Twinkies from the vending machine in the lobby before bidding him adieu.
They tossed out a nugget for the MerHayes 'shippers when Mer casually mentioned his impending absence and inquired as to why he didn't intend to say goodbye to her.
To be fair, Hayes has barely been on Mer's radar for a minute now, and what has proven to be a patter in more ways than one, she was about as unfazed by the news as she was with anything else.
Respectfully, it's getting harder to recall a time when Pompeo wasn't phoning it in on this series.
But Hayes, with that charming Irish lilt, recited some flattering words about how much Mer changed his life and made him believe that he can love one day again --after Abigail -- and the typical bit about how he wouldn't be able to leave if he had to face her again.
The words sounded oh so pretty, but it still pains me that we never got to see them in action, you know?
By then, Hayes deserved to pack his little box and head home, which made it all the more frustrating when Karen, I mean, Teddy, came at him like a persistent gnat every five seconds to ask him about what happened in that care instead of working through all of that with her husband.
It felt insensitive to Hayes and the traumatizing ordeal he went through while in that car (because he isn't a Gold Star Grey Sloaner who has suffered every conceivable catastrophe in the history of the world -- he's an ordinary man who responds to things reasonably, you know?).
Even if Teddy concluded that whatever Owen told Hayes made him want to up and quit his job and leave the country, that sounds like a Teddy and Owen problem. Let the poor man go!
Hayes was a good chap, though, and he didn't throw Owen under the bus, and then he presumably caught one and was out of there, and that's a curtain close on Cormac Hayes, folks.
Teddy couldn't leave well enough alone, and sometimes there are things that you shouldn't go looking for lest you find out something you don't want to know. We're supposed to be basking in the Golden Era of Towen and all that good stuff.
Tell me what you got out of my husband's care or I'm calling the police.
Teddy
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However, it felt a bit rich for Teddy to bemoan how Owen was keeping something from her, and she was on the warpath through the hospital to get to the bottom of it.
The same Teddy kept so many secrets from Owen before they got married, including who their daughter's namesake was to her, so this sudden dogged pursuit of a dark truth coming from her is weird.
She got to the point where she followed Noah's wife out to the parking lot to confront her, and it's ridiculous that her beef with Owen is becoming everyone else's problem but hers and his.
Teddy even threatened to call the cops -- to say what, woman? It was a good cliffhanger for the hour, even if this storyline is a hit-and-miss one.
But the M&M was wild, too! We've seen the procedure before, and it's always eventful.
Shockingly, what started as a tardy, shell-shocked, depressed, mentally unstable, bespectacled Levi attempting to discuss what he did before fleeing the place turned into an inquisition against Webber and this method with Maggie, Lin, and others leading the charge.
Maggie, who shared MVP status along with Zander, didn't hesitate to call Richard out, and it's one of the best things about her. She doesn't let her love for a person interfere with logic and reason.
The Webber Method was a problem, and they needed to discuss it. Maggie was right about how messed up it was that they pushed this practice through without consulting it with the other doctors.
Webber can be stubborn as hell, but it was ludicrous that he went off on Maggie like that for having the audacity to challenge and criticize him. He threw up her not being there as if it should've mattered either way when he admitted later that he used Catherine to force the procedure and shut down Bailey's criticism anyway.
No one should've had to tiptoe around Webber's feelings, yet we got a great deal of that as he worked through the fact that the method needed to get benched.
It was a great moment when he spoke to Bailey, making amends. It's evident that Webber takes for granted how much everyone values him and wants to make him proud, and he unwittingly uses it to his advantage too.
It was also sweet that he had that particular scene with the sisters and expressed how they're like his daughters.
But it remained weird that in no part of this situation did he have a single conversation with Levi, who is the very definition of unwell right now. And the same thing goes for Bailey.
When Bailey wasn't making insensitive, dismissive comments about how the residents may need safe spaces, she was abruptly flipping the switch to have a heart-to-heart with ....Helm, not Levi.
You publicly humiliated me in a hospital that I worked in for over 30 years!
Richard
It was hard to enjoy the sweetness of the moment and the rare time where Helm got some decent screentime because it was puzzling that an ashen, emotionally unwell, unkempt Levi stumbled out of the conference and never came back, and no one gave a damn?
Unfathomably, Bailey, who battles mental illness, in not only a Post-Bipolar Andrew DeLuca timeline, but also post-COVID, where doctors like Levi tirelessly worked understaffed through a pandemic to save people, would be this insensitive, dismissive, and unfazed by one of her own having an emotional breakdown over losing a patient.
Even Helm's frustration over others asking her about Levi was weird. Nico is the only one showing any concern for this kid, and now Levi wants out for good.
It's such a stunning lack of consideration and acknowledgment of a person's mental health state that it's distracting.
Is this the last of Jo and Link already? They both enjoyed the sex, but Jo realized it's inadvisable to sleep with him when her heart is in it after talking to Carina.
What are we to make of this? Who knows? But most of the issue also seemed to be how annoyingly awkward Jo was working that endometriosis case with Amelia.
A series rarely covers the topic of endometriosis, so I appreciate its exploration, despite the love triangle stuff in the background. For some reason, Amelia made some huge leaps with why Jo was behaving strangely on the case, and it led to an unusual exchange that had me actually siding with Jo for a change.
But the worst yet was Link and Perez's case with the plus-sized woman. It's not the first time that a series has tried to address the topic of fatphobia in the medical field, and as much there were some annoying aspects of it on The Resident, they at least executed the storyline much better.
It felt like they sprinkled in these bits, sandwiched between way too much other stuff, only to get to the big payoff of Zander, and later Bailey going off on Link about how the BMI is bullshit. And they're right. The message was on point, but the way of getting there was clunky.
Zander is a gem of a character who is criminally underused. Still, again, if he's not getting a sassy line in there here and there, he's the guy who deals with racial comments directed at him because he's brown, and now he's the one who has to educate an attending about weight because he's plus-size.
And that attending was Link. Inquiring minds would like to know who Chris Carmack pissed off to get whatever the f*ck this writing is for Link? What exactly is the reasoning for this character assassination?
Once again, it felt like they made him an insensitive asshole to suit the plot.
Who is this Atticus Lincoln that they're trying to sell us on, and why does it feel like they're trying to make him the bad guy to prop characters like Amelia and Jo? It's not necessary at all. Who asked for this?
And suddenly, he's okay about Amelia after sleeping with Jo, and he doesn't even care about her putting a pin in their sex life. Did Jo's hoo-ha suck out all of his sadness, kindness, and his bedside manner?
On the Meredith and Nick front; he stepped in to do surgeries, but sadly, we didn't get to see any of them. It was cute when Maggie and Amelia met him and teased Mer about him.
It's been ages since we had some quality screentime for the sisters, and honestly, when Mer told Nick that she needed to spend more time with her people (and kids), I appreciated it.
Over to you, Grey's Fanatics. What are your thoughts about this one? Sound off!
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