Recap: Grey’s Anatomy Season 1 Episode 2 – The First Cut is the Deepest

In which a patient takes a literal bite out of crime

Previously, on Grey’s Anatomy: sex, incompetence, a secretly-ill famous parent and George querying whether everyone will survive “this”. I assume the “this” he means is internship and residency. No spoilers, but LOL. Sure, George. Soapy dramas are absolutely known for their high survival rates.

We have Tegan and Sara! We have guitar music! We have Meredith literally pinning her political affiliations up on a bulletin board! Meredith is sick of rattling about in a large house on her own, and apparently could use some extra money (curse you, student loans!), so posts the world’s worst roommate advert up. I don’t disagree with the sentiment – I wouldn’t want to live with someone who voted for George Bush either. However, there appears to be zero mention of how much the rent actually is, which is a poor start.

And then there’s the most important line. The line separating you from the people you work with. It doesn’t help to get too familiar, to make friends. You need boundaries between you and the rest of the world. Other people are far too messy.

The interns are all commuting to work via various methods – car, motorcycle, staring blankly at an elevator full of random men – while Meredith waxes on about the importance of boundaries. For those of you who are re-watching this, you too may end up snorting out your beverage of choice when you hear this. But we will have plenty of time to circle back to THAT in the future. Meredith somehow has already got someone interested in living with her (I can only assume this person thinks if there’s no price on it, it’s free), but turns her down on the basis of being too young to remember the Challenger explosion. She also turns down Izzie and George, because they spend 100 hours a week together, which honestly, I get.

Just to add to our perception of George as the bumbling soft boy we know he is, we discover that his mother irons his scrubs to which I say – this is supposed to be sterile gear, why is he taking them HOME?

Either way, Meredith wants people she doesn’t have to speak to or be nice to, and that mocha latte in her hand for Bailey is definitely not a bribe (note: it’s a bribe). Everyone gets their assignments, Meredith wants in the OR (lol, no), and Bailey let’s them all know that no one is going to be holding a scalpel until she’s so happy, she’s Mary Poppins. It is worth noting Bailey is practically perfect in every way, so that moment may not be as far away as you might’ve thought!

We have a patented Grey’s Anatomy moment, where Derek talks about ferryboats and flirts with Meredith, while she insists she wants nothing more than a professional relationship. She tells him she’s drawing a line, he asks if he needs to buy her a marker, and then bam – patient files all over the floor and they’re kissing in the elevator. Get used to this, people, without spoiling too much all I can say is that the elevators at Grey’s Anatomy appear to be a testing ground for some sort of military-grade aphrodisiac.

We have our focal patient – a young woman named Alison attacked in a park, whose shoes Meredith seems fixated on. Burke and Shepherd talk about how much of a warrior she is, and how if they catch the guy, they should castrate him, as they’re struggling to identify something they’ve just pulled out of her oeseophagus. Well, the jokes on you guys – she already did, having bitten off her assailant’s penis as he was sexually assaulting her. Cue titles!

After a quick chat between Burke and Shepherd about how Richard asked Derek to come to Seattle, we cut to the interns. George is doing his overly-earnest healer thing again (“the code team saves lives!”), while Christina complains about how she is somewhat overly qualified to be a sort of medical USPS. Alex has been assigned to Bailey’s team now, and told to shadow Christina – it’s hate at first sight, Christina because Alex called Meredith a nurse last episode, and Alex because he hates people who are smarter, work harder and are more eager to please than he is.

It’s time for another round of None Of The Interns Are Good At Their Job! George keeps losing patients, Izzie can’t find a translator for hers, Meredith utters the phrase “well what am I supposed to do with the penis” to Dr Webber while failing to tell him the truth about her mother, and Christina and Alex lack the requisite empathy to deliver good OR bad news to patients. Christina may be overqualified to deliver this news but she could definitely use some training in how to be a human, while Alex needs to learn that women aren’t all hugs, puppies and making you a sandwich.

We discover that Meredith’s obsession with the rape victim’s shoes is because she wore the same ones to the hospital, and to cheer her up, George suggests they go do something sick and twisted. It turns out “sick and twisted” translates to “going to watch the babies in the nursery”. Hmm. This is a great opportunity for a bonus round of None of The Interns Are Good At Their Job, though, because she spots a baby’s lips turning blue and tells a fellow intern from paeds about it. Mystery Intern #1 fobs her off rather than treating it.

We discover that chat between Burke and Shepherd earlier was in the service of setting these two up as rivals – Derek Shepherd has been pulled in as a potential future Chief of Surgery by Richard Webber, who had previously promised the job to Preston Burke. They can definitely handle this professionally, right? And speaking of professionalism – Christina and Alex divide up the test results and race to the finish line – who can delight the most patients in the shortest amount of time! Meredith takes time out of everyone’s busy schedules to deride potential roommates for their taste in 80s music! (Sidenote: I love Queen and if you continue to insist that Duran Duran is better, Meredith, I will find a way to invade the fictional realm in which you reside and slap you.) George leads his little snake of code team-ers through patient rooms like a holiday camp grim reaper!

We cut back to our focal patient, Alison, where they draw parallels between her and Meredith Grey in a somewhat heavy-handed manner – they’re both recent arrivals in the city, with no family or support. For some reason this prompts Meredith to ask Burke to intervene in the case of the baby she saw earlier, but he declines to intervene. Something about “rules”, but really this is about the fact that he’s sore that he’s “not the Chief or something”. Izzie gets recognised as a former model by a drunk patient, but also finally gets her Chinese patient to sit down so she can have her wounds sutured, in the first bit of medical competence we’ve seen any of the interns show this episode.

Meredith and Christina are outside discussing how on her bad days, Meredith winds up kissing “McDreamy” – this is the first but really not the last McEverything we get on this show, so steel yourself for that now. As they chat, a car pulls up, and out staggers a man with bloodstains all around his crotch who promptly collapses! It’s the attempted rapist! He’s rushed into surgery while the police and security are called, and they discuss his prognosis with barely-concealed glee – no reattachment for you, buddy.

Speaking of a prognosis – Burke discovers his chances of being Chief have plummeted because he’s coasting and he’s arrogant, not willing to go the extra mile. This is in stark contrast to Shepherd, who has voluntarily spent all night monitoring Alison rather than getting an intern to do it, or Meredith, who (after a brief interlude where the interns yet again complain about how hard their lives are), breaks protocol to speak directly to the parents of the baby from earlier. Burke puts his superhero cape on and comes to the rescue proving that, in fact, he is A Chief even if he’s not The Chief. He also takes a moment to explain to Meredith why going to the parents of a patient who isn’t even hers is ABSOLUTELY not the right thing to do. But I do feel for her here – she’d raised it through the appropriate channels and gotten nowhere. Institutional inertia! We hate to see it.

Izzie, meanwhile, goes so far to treat a patient who it turns out is undocumented that she runs out into the rain and practices medicine in the parking lot, where she is 100% not insured to do so! At your own risk, Dr Stephens. If this episode is all about drawing lines in your personal and professional life, we’re seeing examples of how not to do it in BOTH directions. Burke is too restricted, unwilling to cross any boundaries however real or imagined. Izzie and Meredith are both willing to cross the line despite the risk it puts them in. The only person who does seem to be any good at setting boundaries is Bailey. She’s clear on what she’s there to do, what the interns are there to do, and despite the fact that she has clearly wanted to dress Burke down for a long time, it takes him asking her for honest, no-consequence feedback before she unleashes an epic takedown of her boss. It is glorious.

We start to see some storylines wrap up, with George learning from Christina that 95% of all coding patients can’t be revived, the baby scheduled for a heart surgery in the morning, and a healthy conversation about imposter syndrome between Meredith and Mystery Intern #1. Alison’s condition remains unchanged, and Derek talks about his large family (four sisters, many children) and how if he was in a coma, he’d want them there. He can’t imagine having no one. Meredith, of course, can, but can’t let Derek know the truth about her mother. They’re chatting, and flirting, and talking sadly about the fact that you somehow go from an undamaged, brand new baby to someone beating the crap out of you, when Alison crashes! Her intercranial pressure has doubled and that means it’s time for some brain surgery.

Post-surgery, Alison’s skull-flap has had to be left open for the excess intercranial fluid to continue draining so she can heal, but Derek is confident that she’ll be fine – IF she wakes up. In a twist, we learn that Derek knew all along that Chief of Surgery had been promised to both of them, and quotes Sun-Tzu. However, Burke sets him straight – he’s not the enemy, he’s just the competition. Meredith signs the severed penis over to the police (while Webber struggles to say the word “penis”), and then gets to scrub in on the baby’s surgery! Hurray for her. One assumes Bailey is off teaching some children in London about the medicinal properties of sugar.

Boundaries don’t keep other people out, they fence you in. Life is messy, and that’s how we’re made.

Meredith’s voiceover begins as we wrap up the final elements of the story. Meredith lets Izzie and George move in, because life IS messy, and although she hates to admit it, she is making friends with them. They’re ecstatic; Christina tells her the babies are toxic and making her soft. Derek tells Meredith that this thing he has for ferryboats is intense, which is obvious code for the thing he’s developing for her. Having cottoned on the aphrodisiac qualities of vertical boxes, she takes the stairs down, while he mocks her for lacking self-control. The voiceover concludes that while most boundaries hem you in unnecessarily, there are some that are too dangerous to cross. Is a relationship with Derek in that list? Seemingly so, but as four of our five interns wander off into the parking lot, laughing and joking, we’ll have to see how long that lasts.

Sum it up

Episode 2 comes strongly out of the gate, albeit with some questionable lessons about boundaries (medicine comes with a whole host of really important, built-in boundaries that absolutely are there to hem you in, and for good reason). We’re set up for a few big storylines now with Derek and Burke’s rivalry, the will-they-won’t-they between Meredith and Derek, Meredith’s unwillingness to tell anyone about her mother, and of course the eternal question – will the interns ever be semi-decent at what they do? (Our survey says: maybe.) Overall rating: 8/10

Hero of the Episode: Alison, who was the hero of her own story.

Zero of the episode: Alison’s assailant, who now also has zero penis with which to do this to anyone else.

Literally Incredible: “I’ve barely started this job, I should definitely go treat patients without insurance in the rain in the parking lot with no care for my career” good lord, Izzie Stevens, are you batshit insane? I refuse to believe an INTERN would do this, even if it is the kind thing to do.

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