But, of course, there was real medicine to tend to as well. Bernadette Peters showed up driving a smashed limo full of girlfriends in ball gowns — apparently they'd crashed on the icy roads (it was some indeterminate time of year in Seattle that involved snow) and lost their limo driver. Hated the spurting blood that happened when they took the injured driver out of the car; loved how the possibility of the ladies' injured husbands, who were being taken to Mercy West, brought out the insensitive competitiveness in Bailey and Cristina and got them to make a convincing case to bring the guys to Seattle Grace instead. Loved even more that a random Army doc happened to help the men post-crash and then show up at the hospital with them, and that he happened to be the very cute Kevin McKidd of last year's Journeyman. (Side note: It's unfortunate that his character's last name is Hunt — it sounds too much like Hahn, especially when the Chief says it. But I guess there's no changing that now unless he marries Cristina and takes her name...though I'm getting ahead of myself here.)
Last night's script screamed "written by Shonda Rhimes" because she can sell ridiculous stuff like a random Army doc who showed up to sweep Cristina off her feet, came up with ways to cure one of the car crash dudes' paralysis, and mended Cristina's icicle-induced wound later in the two-hour episode. Rhimes can also pack in the super-profound lines without, somehow, making them feel cheesy and speech-y. (Points to the actors, too, on that.) One of my faves came from old pro Kathy Baker as one of the car crash ladies, who revealed she was sleeping with her pal Bernadette Peters' husband, and explained to Meredith, "Little pieces of you get chipped away by another person. And then you shave little pieces of yourself away so that you'll fit together. Then one day you look up and you don't even know who you are." (Bernadette Peters, incidentally, was a tearjerker in this ep, too.)
Jilted nurse Rose, meanwhile, was passive-aggressively expressing her "delayed rage," as Dr. Sloan called it, at Derek in the operating room. "You changed your mind," she snapped when he explained why he'd switched medical tactics. "Got it." Then she took it even further, and gave him that promo-worthy line, "I'm carrying your child, Derek," before adding, "Ha, gotcha." Yeah, good one. Cristina, on the other hand, was sniping at Meredith what we all often long to say to her as she went on about her commitment phobia: "I'll give you a hundred bucks if you talk about something else." She didn't, of course; she just continued carping about how awful it sounded to be stuck in a house with Derek forever. "So I'll have five chatty children and a chatty husband, and I'll live in the wilderness," she worried. "And then you'll start sleeping with my husband." This is the part where I want to hate Meredith, and yet I relate so much that, well, I don't hate her. I'm sure many of you do, and I totally get that. I might even envy you a little bit for it. I envy Cristina, too, for her succinct way of putting it: "As you weigh your options, just consider the possibility of shutting the hell up." And then...holy crap! Did Cristina just slip and fall and then get impaled by a falling icicle in the side of her abdomen as she was saying Derek and Meredith would probably not last longterm? Could this have been another dream sequence? No, because the next part was one: old Meredith and Cristina cooking dinner together, presumably spouseless, several decades in the future! Old-people makeup is always cute, and I get the point, but let's just say this probably would've been cut if they didn't have two hours to kill last night.
NEXT: A Rose is a rose is a rose...
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