Grey’s Anatomy Recap: Back in the Saddle Again

Let’s assess the situation, shall we? This is a truncated season of Grey’s Anatomy; with just ten episodes, ostensibly, there should be no filler — all meat, baby. On top of that, the Grey’s cast seems bigger than ever. Sure, that means some characters are underserviced, but it also means there are so many avenues to go down as far as possible story lines. There are so many options! Bearing all of that in mind, we’re going with “Link helps Kwan darn his lucky socks before the ABSITE exam” here? Grey’s Anatomy, please be serious.

This past week, Deadline reported that several Grey’s cast members would be cut next season (Midori Francis, but for why, show?!), with possibly more to come. Now, will these characters be leaving for individual reasons, or should we be preparing for a Great Grey’s Anatomy Culling Event of 2024–25? I can only hope that shaving down the ensemble will help focus on the characters left standing, because episodes like this one point to not knowing how to handle such a sprawling cast. We could’ve gotten a whole arc with Link and Jo trying to extricate the guilt over Sam’s death from their relationship, but instead … it’s as if Sam never existed, and we get Link on laundry duty and Jo talking about how she’s stressed about quitting General Surgery and worried about her OB patients for multiple scenes. There’s so much more we could be doing here, people! And as we know, I’m not a real Jo fan, but come on, she can do more than just pace in different rooms.

The main story lines of the episode fare a little better, but not much. I do love having a long-term patient story line in Dorian, even if Dorian himself is pretty dull. The connection between Dorian and Lucas has a lot going for it. Here, Dorian will be getting surgery on his fistula (his skin has gotten connected to his small bowel), and they’re going to get rid of his ostomy. Things are finally back in a positive direction for the kid, and you can see how intent Lucas is on getting this done for him. When Simone tries to make small talk with quiz questions for the ABSITE exam while they’re scrubbing in (yep, the interns have completed their procedure logs and are allowed in the OR again), Lucas wants no part of it. He is laser-focused on getting Dorian out of the hospital.

Dorian’s surgery all goes to shit fast. Lucas kind of loses his mind in there as Bailey and Webber try to figure out how to stop this kid from needing a feeding tube for his entire life when the situation in his abdomen turns out to be worse than they thought. If Bailey weren’t also so attached to Dorian, there is no way she would’ve let Lucas stay in that OR. My angsty king is just yelling at her from across the table about how much this kid will suffer if they don’t come up with a solution! Bailey’s big “You think I don’t know that?” response really fed my longtime-viewer soul. You think Miranda Bailey, absolute ruler of fistulas, doesn’t know this? Step back, my man!

It winds up being Simone who has an idea as to how to save Dorian’s bowel (using the STEP procedure, typically only done in pediatric cases), and it works … for a little while. Then Dorian is crashing and Lucas is doing compressions so intensely that he doesn’t hear Bailey tell him to stop so they can use the defibrillator and Simone has to snap him out of it. The romantic in me is thinking, Oh, wow, the only voice he hears is hers, but a man is dying, so I’m trying to hold it together.

Dorian survives, but he still hasn’t woken up from surgery and they have no idea what his status will be if he does wake up. It’s a sit-and-wait situation. Grey’s proceeds to do two things to wrap up this story line. First, the confounding: Wasn’t it just last week I was praising how well Grey’s Anatomy tackled the maternal death-rate crisis without making us feel like we were in a lecture hall — it made a profound statement about it by letting us feel it. It does the opposite here with Dorian and the gun-violence crisis. By the end, it feels like Bailey and Webber are reading off a pamphlet or something. The show is definitely right to highlight this, but they are kind of doing it already by just letting us watch Dorian’s horrific journey as he tries to recover from getting shot. It felt so clunky. These later seasons of Grey’s have, at times, had a telling-instead-of-showing problem, and that’s what it feels like is going on here.

Now, on the other hand, we get an interesting development between Lucas and Simone. She finds Lucas spinning out in the on-call room after the surgery, so upset over what’s happening with Dorian and processing how badly he screwed up in there. But Simone only has kind words for him. She understands being overly attached to a patient. She also tells him that he has made her a better, braver doctor just by seeing the way he risks it all to advocate for his patients. Normally, I wouldn’t think “advocate” is a sexy word, but the two do end up having sex in that on-call room right then and there, so maybe I’m in the wrong here.

The most interesting part, however, happens after that: As the interns file in for the ABSITE exam, Simone is clearly looking for Lucas and tries to make eye contact — he was just inside of her, after all — but he refuses. I’d wonder if it was some nerves about the test, but this is Grey Sloan’s resident Sad Boy here, so it’s definitely because he’s feeling some kind of way about his on-again, off-again with Simone. He has a lot of feelings, okay? Let’s just hope those feelings don’t mean he bombs this exam.

Elsewhere, I am really enjoying Monica Beltrán, even if she is into Amelia (Amelia’s instincts are right here). She’s fun with the kids, and this week, she and Amelia team up to help trans teen Caroline with a tumor in a nerve behind her leg. She’s come all the way from Texas, where Monica used to work, thanks to a tip from a trans-support group. Caroline is terrified of not feeling safe or respected by her doctors. She’s afraid of being naked on the operating table and the people in the room not understanding her. Monica assures her that they see her. They’ve got her. The way Monica and Amelia take care of her is just so, so lovely and a great deeper introduction to Monica’s whole deal.

Monica’s whole deal is also that she’s in the middle of a messy divorce. Amelia picks up a few signals Monica is giving off, and eventually she works up the courage to ask the new peds doctor out. Monica is cagey as she turns her down, only just broaching the subject of her divorce before she and Amelia are interrupted. There’s definitely more to this story, and Amelia and Monica are definitely headed for a hookup, so watch this space!

The OR Board

• Helm is on the warpath now that she isn’t getting any on the regular, and Mika spends most of the episode begging her maybe-ex to put her in a surgery. When she finally gets that surgery, she happens upon Jules sobbing over her ABSITE exam book. Jules is freaking out over this test. Mika decides to ditch the surgery and help her friend. This is why we need Mika to stick around! She’s great!

• Owen and Teddy spend their day off trying to hike, but are apparently very bad at it. As it so often goes, they do happen upon a father-daughter duo who have fallen into a cave, and Owen having to walk the daughter, Rosie, through tending to her dad’s leg wound really gives the guy the jolt he’s been looking for workwise.

• Owen comes up with a plan to start some type of program or class to teach us peasants basic trauma medical skills, but he’ll need some funding from Grey Sloan to get it off the ground. He even pitches it to Catherine, who is like, Yeah, totally, let’s look at Grey Sloan’s discretionary funding. Now, friends, did you remember that Teddy secretly handed that discretionary funding to Meredith Grey to continue her research behind Catherine’s back? It’s all coming out now, baby!

• Maggie Pierce is back next week, and I swear to you if Grey’s is shipping Winston off to Chicago, I’m going to be so mad. He clearly needs more to do on this show, but at the very least, keep him around for his contempt toward Amelia. When she starts spiraling over what Monica paying for her coffee could mean, he gives a hard “I don’t have time for whatever this is” and walks away, and that really spoke to me, a Grey’s Anatomy recapper.