Grey's Anatomy S18 Finally Remembered It Knows How To Be Fun
Warning: SPOILERS for Grey’s Anatomy season 18 episode 13 ahead.
Grey’s Anatomy season 18’s viewership may have steadily dwindled compared to its past and even just season 17, but episode 13 showed the medical drama still knows how to be fun. While Grey’s Anatomy seasons 17 and 18 didn’t forget to focus on the staff of Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital as an ensemble, they also tended to concentrate on individual characters and their development. Instead, Grey’s Anatomy season 18 episode 13 managed to show how the ABC drama still knows how to put its characters in unbelievable crises recounted in a way that can be fun and entertaining and showcase the way they work together in a quintessential Grey’s Anatomy way.
Despite being known for its drama and putting its characters in implausible situations and disasters, Grey’s Anatomy always knew how to aptly weave humorous scenes even within storylines that dealt with matters of life and death. The approach to all the drama Meredith and Cristina faced had always been to “dance it out” and, more generally, look at the funny bits of any worrying situation. As Grey’s Anatomy season 17 decided to portray the real-world crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic inside the fictional world of Grey Sloan Memorial, it lost its humor, as it had to focus on an ongoing global crisis that killed millions and had to do so respectfully.
Grey’s Anatomy season 18 episode 13, “Put the Squeeze on Me,” had one of its central storylines being about Ivan, a second-grade teacher brought to Grey Sloan Memorial hospital by his boyfriend after his Burmese python pet bit him and started coiling around him at feeding time. By presenting an odd case involving a patient, the episode echoed a time when Grey’s Anatomy more often did that while also entertainingly approaching it comically. It not only put the doctors far outside their comfort zones, revealing Link and Amelia’s fear of snakes and Winston’s fascination with and knowledge of them, but it also introduced a potentially heavy storyline about Richard Webber’s future as a surgeon.
The episode mirrored Grey’s Anatomy season 8, episode 18, when victims of a lion attack were brought to the hospital, still called Seattle Grace Mercy West at the time, after one of them had kept it as a pet named Kirby. Grey’s Anatomy season 18 episode 13’s python storyline mirrored it not only because Ivan’s boyfriend kept referring to the snake as Gigi, the name Ivan had given it, but also for Bailey’s matter-of-factly approach. Both situations were highly unlikely and absurd, but also saw the hospital react to them as a whole, with doctors being called outside, where Ivan and Gigi were and couldn’t be moved, for consultations, and the general feeling that was the case the entire hospital was talking about.
How the story was told in such a typical Grey's Anatomy way didn't only reflect in the ridiculousness of it, though, but also on the ripples it produced. As Richard Webber (James Pickens Jr.) suggested to a resident a procedure that might have caused the patient’s death because of an oversight, he began to think he might not be suitable to be working in an OR anymore. Webber’s request for a physical and cognitive assessment to be sure of his place as a surgeon was a consequence of both that mistake and of the Webber Method's failure, which also led resident Levi Schmitt (Jake Borelli) to quit medicine.
While Webber leaving Grey Sloan Memorial is undecided yet, the fact that his request for an assessment was prompted by such a weird case mirrored the way Grey’s Anatomy dealt with those big events in the past. Besides being crises that almost every main character had an opinion about or was actually involved in, they also ended up having long-standing repercussions on the protagonists. Grey’s Anatomy season 18 episode 13 python storyline might just be as absurd as other previous ones were, but it also reminded viewers how Grey’s Anatomy season 18 can still be as fun as it was.