Recap: Grey’s Anatomy Season 1 Episode 1 – A Hard Day’s Night

In which we meet Meredith Grey, a brand new surgical intern with questionable taste in blankets.

The game. They say a person either has what it takes to play, or they don’t. My mother was one of the greats. Me, on the other hand, I’m… kinda screwed

The show opens on two people waking up nude in a living room, which I am convinced is only a thing that happens in television and film, because sleeping naked on a wooden floor cannot possibly be comfortable. Here comes our first big Dump O’ Exposition – she’s Meredith, he’s Derek, she’s starting a new job today, her mother is very much a “was”, but definitely isn’t dead, she lives there but is selling the place, and she is a classic mid-00s Empowered Woman. That is to say, she runs off to take a shower, expresses precisely zero interest in seeing him again, and tells him to be gone before she comes back downstairs.

Honestly, if you’d had decent no-strings sex with a man that handsome, you would definitely want to do it again. I can only conclude that Derek is terrible in the sack.

Meredith makes her way to Seattle Grace Hospital (don’t get attached to the name), and we get a glimpse of our core cast, who look astonishingly young. Anyone who has even heard of the show will have heard snippets of this speech, and this is the first time we hear it. With that, we hit the title card, and Grey’s Anatomy has officially begun!

We learn that our interns are a twisted version of the Breakfast Club – a model, a hard-ass, a meathead, a bumbler and our Leading Lady, and their boss for the immediate future is the formidable Dr Bailey, nicknamed “The Nazi”. She reels off a list of five rules while the interns trail her like dimwits ducklings, starting with “don’t bother sucking up, I already hate you”. We see them treat their first patients and things seem to be going as expected with none of the interns managing to do anything right – and a special cringe shout-out to George’s overly-earnest “I would, but I’m a healer”. I am famously cringe-averse, and visibly winced. We also learn that Meredith’s mother is Ellis Grey, a super-famous surgeon.

George appears to have been picked out of the herd for extra special torture by Dr Burke, possibly due to him messing up an IV insertion earlier in the day – he’s going to be performing an appendectomy this shift! (Sidenote: this cannot be legal, surely?) The “main” patient of this episode, Katie Bryce, has been transferred to the neurosurgeon, who happens to be… Derek!

I mean we all knew that, you don’t cast Patrick Dempsey for a bit part, but hey! Drama! Shock! The same look of hungover regret I get when I remember a particularly stupid thing I said while drunk the night before! Meredith wants to forget anything happened and keep it strictly profesh, Derek wants to flirt and look at her like he’s seen her naked. She storms off to go support George perform his appendectomy while the interns bet on how badly he’s going to mess up. Which he does, in spectacular fashion. At least the patient didn’t die! But that doesn’t stop George picking up a new nickname: 007. License to kill.

We see the interns encounter yet more issues doing the basics of their jobs – Meredith yells at Katie Bryce, Izzie can’t do a central line and has to wake up Bailey, Alex dismisses the opinion of an experienced nurse AND calls Meredith a nurse. He’s saved from a smackdown by a 911 page for Katie Bryce, at which point Meredith strolls off towards the patient… only to find out that this time it IS an emergency! And that throwaway line of “I can’t sleep… my head’s all full” was not in fact “thinking”, but a key symptom. Meredith gets chewed out by Bailey and Shepherd after getting the patient back following seizures, and she runs out to throw up. It might be the hangover, it might be the stress, it might be bad cafeteria food. It’s probably all three.

It turns out that Katie is a medical mystery, even the attendings are stumped, so the interns are corralled to do the legwork and find a diagnosis. First to find it gets to scrub in on an advanced procedure. Meredith tells Christina about boning Dr Shepherd, won’t answer the question about whether he was any good (adds more weight to my theory that he’s bad), and says she doesn’t want to scrub in. Her and Christina are working together to find the answer, and while mocking Katie’s pageant talent, remembers some information about a very minor fall. The show begins its habit of Hardcore Use Of Elevators For Dramatic Purposes while revealing the diagnosis. It’s an aneurysm! Derek wants Meredith to scrub in, Christina is furious, and naturally the thought process is “it’s because they had sex”.

Not gonna lie, that would be my thought too, so fair game.

George is taught never to promise a patient (or their family) that they will be fine. You would think that would be medical ethics lesson #1 – you do have to tell them ALL the scary things that can happen during a surgery, and you are definitely not allowed to say “sign this but I promise none of them will happen”. George tells Gloria her husband is dead, close to tears himself, and is basically told to beat it. Meanwhile, Meredith confronts Derek, and is told that it was her actions earlier – managing to resuscitate Katie – that was the differentiating factor. I’m unconvinced, but it is true that Meredith really got the diagnosis. Christina was just sort of present while she worked it out.

She also gets the last laugh with Alex, providing the correct answer to Dr Webber about a patient’s post-operative complications, which Alex has managed contrary to the advice of the nurses. Webber tells her he’d have known her anywhere, because she’s the spitting image of her mother. “Welcome to the game”, apparently, because that’s the theme of this episode.

Alright everybody, it’s a beautiful night to save lives, let’s have some fun.

The last 5-10 minutes deteriorate into all the interns complaining in various ways about how hard being a surgical intern is. The attendings make it hard on purpose, quitting would be a relief, none of their parents support them. I don’t know why ANY of them were under the impression this would be easy. But, Meredith notes, they love the playing field. How any of them have ANY idea whether they love the playing field or not given they’ve been doing the job for all of 24 hours is a mystery to us all, but sure. Yang and Meredith make up in classic “not your ordinary girls” way (no hugging, only mockery).

To end, of course, we see Meredith appears to be suddenly interested in Derek now she’s seen him operate a drill. She continues to narrate, this time switching to the second person, and we cut to… dun dun dun! It’s her mother! She’s in a nursing home! She doesn’t remember who Meredith is!

Sum It Up

I mean, this is a first episode, so it is WEIGHTED DOWN with exposition. I definitely also spotted some continuity things that will get quietly retconned later down the line. It sets up a series of plot points to be mined in future episodes, and I had forgotten how young the core cast once were! They were babies. Overall rating: 007/10

Hero of the Episode: Obviously Derek Shepherd, who is bad in bed but good with handheld tools. I’m sure Meredith has a couple of other tools he could put to good use, amirite?

Zero of the Episode: Alex and his nurse comments. Let us continue to think of the beat-down he gets from Webber fondly.

Literally Incredible: Look, Bailey not telling her interns the fifth rule, then when asked, miraculously being paged, allowing her to demonstrate said rule, was cool. Of course it was. It’s Chandra Wilson being badass! But it’s not believable. I’m not saying she paid a nurse to poison a patient on cue, but it’s the only explanation that makes sense. Similarly, the whole idea of “your first shift someone who can’t fit an IV is expected to perform an appendectomy” is not credible. But it does make great television!

Did you like this episode? Hate it? Just want to tell me how much my writing sucks? Leave a comment below with your rating and what you thought overall! Alternatively, you can let me know on Twitter!