Grey's Anatomy recap: 'Come on Down to My Boat, Baby'

Boats and bros! Boats and bros! All aboard the USS Scrubs and Six Packs for a day of male bonding with Grey Sloan Memorial’s finest.

But before we embark, we first check in at Owen’s house, where Amelia is nervously looking over her notes. Today is her first day back in the OR since her tumor was removed and she’s understandably nervous. Once again proving he’s a better friend than husband, Owen comforts her before they reiterate their decision to divorce. They also remark on Meredith’s JSA (Journal of Surgical Advancement) cover that she got for her paper on Megan’s groundbreaking abdominal wall transplant. Amelia jokes that she’s now she’s going to be impossible to live with, and perhaps she shouldn’t move back in with her after all.

As Meredith, Maggie, and Amelia walk into Grey Sloan Memorial, Meredith is besieged with her colleagues holding up their own copies of JSA. Even Amelia’s arrogant mentor, Tom, compliments the cover girl before saying his farewell; since Amelia is back and he cleared her for surgery, he’s no longer needed. He tells Amelia to knock ’em dead — figuratively — before he goes.

Karev asks Meredith to be nice (“not Mer nice, but real nice”) to Jo because she’s bummed she’s not on the paper. Meredith laughs as a response before being gently teased by Jackson about her JSA appearance. Karev reminds him that he can buy his own magazine and put himself on the cover, adding that if he had Jackson’s money he wouldn’t be there. He’d be on a boat. Action Jackson takes Karev up on the idea, and with a few taps on his phone, he’s bought himself a yacht.

Not one to rest on her laurels, Meredith is facing an uphill battle with her patient, Judge King, a court hero for immigrants and domestic abuse survivors, who has stage 4A colon cancer and isn’t eligible for a transplant. Her plan is to do a surgery that will be the first of its kind on the West Coast.

Amelia’s “welcome back” surgery is on a mom of three who needs — what else? — a brain tumor removed! But Amelia is so nervous about it, especially after one of the children asks her if her mom is still going to be her mom after the surgery, that Amelia literally throws herself in the way of Tom’s car as he’s backing out of the parking lot. She needs him to stay to help her get through it.

Arizona and April are hanging out at the nurses’ station, each Tindering on their phones. Arizona tells April she accidentally broke up with Carina, but that it’s okay because she has to get ready for Sofia’s arrival anyway. Maggie joins them and starts Tindering as well. Bailey interrupts their swiping to ask why they’re all standing around, then grabs Maggie’s phone from her and swipes right on a guy named David M. Before Maggie can even process, they’re interrupted with an emergency.

Meanwhile, as Karev and Jackson are leaving, they run into Ben, DeLuca, and Owen. It doesn’t take much coaxing to get the guys to go check out Jackson’s boat with him. But because he literally just bought it, he didn’t have time to find a captain, which means they’re going to be all yachted up with no place to go. As the Grey Sloan Memorial-street Boys (minus DeLuca, who was sent for food) board Jackson’s new toy with coolers and fishing poles, Karev teases Jackson about not knowing the name of his boat. “It’s Shut It, Karev,” he snaps back. Turns out a quarter of a billion dollars buys you some shade, too.

Meanwhile back in the ER, the women are fighting over who gets to deal with Danielle, an 18-year-old brought in for abdomen pain, because they don’t want to deal with Mr. Nelligan, a hypochondriac and frequent visitor to the ER. Bailey draws the short straw, however, and tends to his requests for unnecessary tests as Arizona, April, and Maggie are trying to find out what made Danielle collapse. “If you swallowed something,” Arizona begins, but she’s cut off by Danielle who yells, “I DIDN’T SWALLOW IT!” before a gun fires, shooting both Danielle and Mr. Nelligan in the next bed. As everyone is frantically trying to figure out where they gunshot came from, Arizona realizes the wound in Danielle is only an exit wound. “Did you put a gun in your vagina?!?” she asks, as incredulous as the rest of us.

Turns out Danielle’s boyfriend is in prison and she was trying to mule the firearm in at his request. And you thought your love life has issues.

Poor Mr. Nelligan is going to need surgery, too, which Bailey and Maggie scrub in on. As Maggie starts questioning whether or not she’s like Mr. Nelligan in that she makes everything harder than it needs to be, her phone pings. Turns out David M. is a match. In an attempt to be an anti-Mr. Nelligan, she tells him to meet her in the lobby at 8. Bailey tells her that her move is “not gun-in-the-oven bold,” but bold nonetheless.

Meredith is attempting to get the judge to sign the consent form for his risky surgery. He asks her what would she do, but ethically she can’t direct him. Leave it to Jo to step in and tell him that she would get it done in a heartbeat. Before the surgery, though, Meredith goes to talk to him again to make sure he understands the risks and to explain that what Jo did was unethical. He tells her that he didn’t sign the consent form because of Jo. He’s signing it because his wife, who died unexpectedly eight years ago, would tell him to fight.

In Amelia’s surgery, which Tom has reluctantly scrubbed in on, he tells her that the hand is mighty but the mind is weak — before something Amelia does makes the patient’s brain start bleeding. “Ooops,” he says, “Maybe you were right. Maybe you weren’t ready.”

Dockside, the boys have bonded over a knot-tying competition when DeLuca finally shows up with lunch: a bunch of raw fish. This prompts them to talk about their family when DeLuca bemoans that his sister ends up sleeping with all his friends. Owen ends up offering him a place to stay since he’s going to have to move out of Arizona’s apartment since Sofia is moving back. As they lounge around the hot tub later on, Ben admits to the guys that he’s applied to the fire training academy and got in, but that Miranda doesn’t know. Talk about gun-in-the-oven stupid. (Recap continues on page 2)

Arizona and April have a full house in the gallery as they attempt to remove the firearm inside Danielle. Webber and Carina are among the audience members, and after exchanging the-worst-thing-you’ve-removed-from-a-human stories (Webber wins with a pen out of a stripper’s penis), he invites her to the new-intern mixer later. As is becoming commonplace in this season, everyone in the gallery cheers as Arizona delivers the weapon safely.

Amelia is able to get the bleeding under control and remove the tumor, but not before being insulted a few more times by Tom. Eventually, though, he later compliments her and admits that she’s better than he is, which of course proves to be just the foreplay Amelia needs.

Meredith’s revolutionary surgery on the judge is a success, and as Jo is seeing to his recovery, she asks him for advice on her own domestic abuse case. He inspires her enough that she later tells Karev she’s going to seek a divorce from Paul.

At the mixer, Webber is agitated as the majority of the surgeons aren’t there yet. Turns out boats do come before bros because the guys totally forgot about the mixer, which is why the come busting in just as Webber starts his welcome speech. Clearly drunk, Jackson, Owen, and Ben are having difficulty standing as Karev starts randomly shaking interns’ hands.

Before Meredith can get to the mixer though, she’s paged into Judge King’s room. He’s unexpectedly flatlining, and they try to use the defibrillator with no success. Turns out he threw a massive clot.

It’s on this news that Meredith heads into the mixer, only to be greeted with applause: She’s been nominated for a Harper Avery Award! But, for obvious reasons, she’s less than enthusiastic as Jo explains that they just lost Judge King.

Jackson steals Bailey away from the party to tell him that on his boat today, he realized that even as a plastic surgeon who sits on the board of the hospital where he works, he’s still not “in the game.” He gleefully announces he’s giving her a (pun intended) boatload of money to start her own surgical competition, to “drive and fund innovation.” This is why it’s good to party with billionaires.

As DeLuca and Arizona are walking through the halls, he tells her he’s found a place to live. He’s going to live with Owen since Amelia is leaving. They happen to look over to a supply closet, and who do they happen to see? His new roomie Owen! And he’s making out with Carina, whom he had just met at the mixer. Guess DeLuca wasn’t exaggerating on the boat.

Just when things couldn’t get more awkward for DeLuca, he runs into the new interns, and we can only assume one of them is an ex-girlfriend. “They’re both so pretty, I wonder what’s going to happen next,” another intern remarks.

Yes, will he swipe left or will he swipe right? Either way, it’ll just be nice to see him finally have a love story of his own.

In the final scene of the episode, Bailey asks Meredith why she’s not celebrating her nomination. Meredith tells her there are six liver patients who don’t qualify for transplants. In other words, there’s still so much work to be done.

“Congratulations, Dr. Grey,” Bailey perfectly tells her before grabbing a highlighter to help Meredith with what’s to come. I think we’re all excited for this more mature, more enlightened Meredith Grey.