Grey's Anatomy recap: Parental Control

Oh, procreation, you crazy-but-necessary-for-survival force of nature, how you vex us and our Grey’s Anatomy brethren. Let us count the ways:

You give us parents who write in their journals about eyelet cell transplants as their brains slowly slip away to them due to Alzheimer’s, thus forcing us to choose between diabetes studies and Alzheimer’s studies.

Okay, so this happens only to Meredith Grey.

The Chief gave a speech about how she should do the diabetes study her mom thought up because, “I think she owes it to you. She didn’t give you a lot of love, but she gave you her talent and her name. … It might change the way you think about her. It could be the greatest thing that both of you ever did.” But in the end, Meredith chose, I think, wisely: She’d stick with curing Alzheimer’s with Derek, while the Chief could cure diabetes with the spirit of her mom. Love all around, cures all around, the Chief even gets something to do! I don’t know who’s going to be fixing patients what with all this curing, but so be it.

You give us nutty parents who are overprotective even when we are still in utero — and sometimes, if one of those parents is a lesbian, that means we have three nutty, overprotective parents.

I was seeing the benefits of threesome parenting at first — for instance, I am in a band that has three people in it, and I find the odd number enormously helpful when we make decisions. This Arizona-Callie-Mark arrangement could work the same way: Two out of three wins! End of story! I was even considering this a legitimate argument in favor of polyamory. In this fashion, it was determined Callie would no longer drink coffee, due to caffeine’s possibly adverse effects on fetuses.

However, Callie’s lack of caffeine had an adverse effect on many around her, like April, whom she told, “I need you to speak differently.” (Amen.) Hilariously, April replied, “Like, with an accent?” Callie sent her to get her a muffin and coffee … or, wait, no coffee. Next, we saw Callie pouring herself some coffee in the lounge, only to be caught by Arizona. The anti-caffeine studies, Callie explained, were only done on rats, and, furthermore, she was not a rat. Yet she was still guilt-faced into giving up her coffee again.

Callie finally got her cup of coffee by flipping out on April and Owen, who insisted she have some caffeine, baby or not. Yay.

You give us parents who drive us nuts much later in our lives, too.

So Mer and Lexie’s father, Thatcher, was back in the hospital yet again. (Anyone else groan at this? He bugs me more than he bugs the Grey girls. I just never really care what happens to him, a rarity among Grey’s characters for me.) Anyway, he was having abdominal pain, maybe because he was rejecting the liver Meredith gave him that other time he was in the hospital. “Of course, he’s rejecting it because it’s my liver,” Meredith quipped. They had to go talk to him about his symptoms because, Bailey complained, she needed “someone who speaks Grey.”

Turned out Thatcher had a super-young girlfriend with him, which continued to not interest me, except insofar as she looked vaguely like Kyra Sedgwick, like she could play her daughter in a movie or something. I do like Kyra Sedgwick. Lexie saw this, and ran to tell Meredith to come talk to him. “Does he want more organs?” Meredith asked. Lexie lured her by answering, “He didn’t say. He was too busy loving up on a tattooed 20-year-old.”

As Thatcher suffered more shooting pains while the Grey girls arrived, the girlfriend freaked out a little about the prospect of prostate cancer. “That’s what happens when your boyfriend’s an old man,” Lexie snapped. “Old men get cancer.” You can’t begrudge her the honesty. However, Meredith stood up for his right to have a super-young girlfriend if it made him happy, even though Lexie wanted company in hating him.

NEXT: Babies lost and saved …

You give us super-sad stories of babies lost, and uplifting stories of babies miraculously saved.

Why Alex would be insensitive enough to barge into the NICU first asking for a “turnip” — a baby who was brain-dead at birth and thus could donate a heart to a fetus in need — and then simultaneously hit on the person he was asking this is beyond me. Even for Alex, a little much. But he went at the hot blond new OB-GYN — we will now learn her name, which is Dr. Lucy Fields — with the ill-advised, “I thought I knew all the nurses on this floor. How did I miss you?” Her response: “I guess I’m just lucky that way.” Liking her more and more! She then proceeded to bar Alex from the NICU, whether or not she actually had that authority.

Alex was off the surgery — Dr. Lucy told Arizona about Alex’s faux pas — but it was still going ahead: Dr. Lucy would deliver a baby by C-section four weeks before the due date. Alex was displeased. Alex and Lucy officially hated each other. You know where this is eventually going — that Alex loves him some pretty blond doctors. He complained that he deserved to be on the surgery. She soon explained to him that she’d delivered the baby who died, which, she said, “makes me kind-of lose interest in what you deserve, Mr. Where’s the Cabbage Patch.”

The tiny baby heart surgery worked, though, and there was almost a moment between Lucy and Alex as they watched from the gallery. They’ll get there.

You give us genetic shortcomings, like whatever gene that makes one think it’s a good idea to film oneself in a human slingshot.

Grey’s is all over internet culture these past few weeks, this time taking a shot at people who do dumb stuff to get on YouTube: A patient who put himself in a human slingshot ran into a wall while his friend was filming him in hopes of online fame. He dislocated both hips. He and his friend thought it would be cool for Callie to snap his hips back into place on film, outside the OR, without anesthesia, “for the art.” But he screamed when she barely touched him. “That totally cheered me up,” Callie said. Owen quipped, “Well, art has that effect.” Everyone was a stand-up comedian tonight!

You give us genetic blessings, like Jackson’s cheekbones. And his … everything else.

Sloan celebrated having Jackson on his service at last, due to his God-given attributes — helpful in plastics to look good, it seems. You know you’re great-looking when the people on this show acknowledge you in their great-looking world as being particularly great-looking. He balked at being judged on his looks, which gave us this fine run of Sloan lines: “Oh, poor Mr. Green Eyes. Let’s not pretend being beautiful’s a burden. Now, come on, Mrs. Johnson’s nose isn’t gonna fix itself. How about a little sparkle?”

We learned how horrifying nose jobs are as the two beautiful men cracked into poor Mrs. Johnson’s face, then we learned how manipulative Mark could be when he dangled the prospect of taking lead on a surgery to get Jackson to find out for him why Lexie has been sad. “You want to be on my service, then serve,” he said. “Use that Avery sparkle.” When Mark wanted still more information, he hinted at the prospect of cleft palate surgeries. “We are not close,” Avery said of his relationship with Lexie. Sharing feelings, he said, “is not something we do.” Mark told him to ply her with peanut butter cups. Only a supremely confident man would send something looking like Avery to console his ex girlfriend for him. That’s all I can say.

Indeed, the candy worked on Lexie. She poured her heart out to Avery about her dad and Mark and the baby, etc. She even had an insight then, realizing, “My dad’s tatted up skank isn’t a bitch. I am.” She thanked him for listening, and we knew Mark had officially done something he will come to regret in unleashing Avery and his listening on Lexie. Avery reported back to Mark that the peanut butter cups had gotten him nowhere, and Mark, bless him, let him scrub in anyway. Man, he’s going to be sorry.

In the end, Lexie sorta made peace with Thatcher’s girlfriend, who revealed she’s five years sober. Lexie tried to show interest, of a sort, in her, by asking, “Is that a hooker on your shoulder?” The answer: “I was drunk.” The Internet guy learned an overwrought lesson from Owen, who told him about a guy whose injuries were much worse because “that guy threw himself on a grenade so he could save six soldiers. He didn’t launch himself into a wall so the Internet could laugh at him.” Jackson, not-so-coincidentally shirtless in the locker room, asked Lexie to grab a drink. She was tired, but, she said, “Maybe tomorrow.” Tomorrow, indeed.

Most importantly, Callie declared a new voting system: The baby, she said, gets a vote. “As I house the baby, I’ll be speaking for him/her. And because I will be squeezing this baby through a very small hole, my vagina gets a vote. … Now, anyone want to argue with my extra-special vagina vote?” No one did.

What did you think, Grey’s watchers? Does that seem like a fair voting system to you? (If not, are you going to tell the pregnant lady, because I’m not.) Do you care about Thatcher more than I do? How are you feeling about the new potential couples: Lucy-Alex and Jackson-Lexie?