Grey’s Anatomy Recap: Surgical Bingo

Miranda Bailey is back in charge of the residency program, and all is right with the world. Listen, I’ll miss Nick Marsh — seriously, wasn’t he a great Grey’s character? Fingers crossed we check in with him in Boston — but there’s just something about Bailey being at the helm of this baby surgeon ship that makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Of course, there’s nothing warm and fuzzy about the way Bailey rules the roost that is Grey Sloan Memorial. She immediately implements some new protocol for our interns: None of them will be allowed inside an OR until they complete their handy-dandy procedure log, full of back-to-basics-type medical procedures to ensure they have a firm foundation before they go cutting into bodies. It’s a sort of surgical bingo, if you will, and an attempt to stop these kids from continuing on the path toward becoming “surgical cowboys” that they are currently on. Bailey’s raised a whole bunch of quite capable surgeons, so when she says interns need structure and limitations in order to reach their full potential, she’s speaking from experience.

There is, of course, some pushback. Mainly from the interns who, as is tradition, are a bunch of whiny little bitches when they want to be. As Ben reminds his wife ahead of her first official day as residency director, kids these days have changed — they aren’t afraid to push back. The fact that I am nodding my head in agreement with this sentiment makes me feel 1,000 years old. Bailey marches on. She isn’t messing around with the procedure log. The seriousness of the whole thing only pushes the interns to hyperfocus on completing the log as if it is an obstacle to get over so they can get back in the OR, instead of seeing it as what it’s meant to be, a tool to make them better doctors.

Bailey has a front-row seat to the highs and lows of her new system when she, Winston, Kwan, and Lucas work on a 20-something John Doe who comes in with an abdomen full of bullets and sweatpants lined with thousands of dollars (he’s a fisherman who just got paid … and then robbed). John Doe is in serious condition and all Kwan and Lucas can do is act like a couple of ding-dongs, squabbling over who might get to perform certain procedures. It’s not just the interns who take umbrage with Bailey’s new system. While in the OR, Winston voices his issues with it, too: Surgeons learn by operating — “this is stunting their education,” he says to Bailey. Normally, I’d say how dare you, sir, but Bailey can take care of herself. She reminds Winston that she just won a Catherine Fox Award for teaching reproductive health care (it must sting a little extra since he lost the Catherine Fox Award to her). And yet, soon after surgery, Bailey finds her two interns still being ding-dongs about the whole thing. She has to ream them out for looking at this young man — who is basically them! Someone just starting out in life! — as a checklist rather than a human being. Maybe her system really is crashing and burning here?

The show’s messaging on this is kind of muddled. Later, Bailey watches as Kwan meets with John Doe’s parents, who have answered a missing-person alert, and he is surprisingly kind of great with them? He is both authoritative and empathetic. Is this because of Bailey’s “be human” chat or because the interns are much more capable than Bailey is giving them credit for? The show doesn’t provide any illumination here, but when even Bailey questions herself, wondering if perhaps she’s changed, perhaps she’s seen too much over the years to be an effective teacher for this group of interns, I tend to side with Ben, who tells her that all of that change will only make her a better teacher. She needs to give her system some time to work out the kinks.

And there are more kinks than just the Kwan and Lucas situation: Even Simone has a hard time adjusting and seeing the bigger picture. She, too, is so obsessed with rushing through her work in order to check off  procedures that she makes a pretty major mistake with a patient. She’s assisting Schmitt and Webber with a gallbladder surgery on a very lovely baker named Dante. Distracted by her need to, again, check things off a list, she very casually asks Dante about why he isn’t taking HIV medications since he tested positive for HIV — a diagnosis Dante had no idea about. Even though it’s a manageable disease with the right medication, it still sends Dante’s world spinning. At one point, he refuses to get his gallbladder surgery; he wants to get out of the hospital and away from facing his new reality as fast as he can. Thankfully, Schmitt’s there to talk him off the ledge and around to catch Dante as he doubles over in pain — if he doesn’t get the gallbladder surgery now, he’ll go septic and die. In the end, Dante ends up just fine and even possibly scores a date with Schmitt? I never knew I needed a surgeon-baker romance, but now that one is within our grasp, I want it so badly.

So Dante is okay, but what about Simone? Simone is beside herself with guilt over how carelessly she spoke to a patient. She messages Lucas to come find her in the on-call room. Our sensitive prince wants to talk to her about what happened; all Simone wants is for Lucas to make her feel better (with sex). She storms out when he pulls away from her, and while her time with Lucas didn’t go as planned, it does force her to go and apologize to Dante, who’s honestly pretty great about it. He understands being distracted — he received a few calls from the Health Department a few months back, but ignored them since he had no reason to believe he could be HIV-positive. It puts a few things into perspective for Simone.

Later, at home, Simone finds Lucas and admits that she has a penchant for running from the truth because she’s scared. And if she’s finally facing the truth this time, she has to be honest with him: She just doesn’t think right now is a good time for them to start a relationship. She’s become distracted at work, she isn’t sleeping, and she needs to focus on her career. She needs to put herself first. Lucas, um, does not take the news well. From where he’s sitting, Simone has never had a problem putting herself first, especially when it comes to him. He reminds her of how she went from kissing him to directly accepting a proposal from someone else. How she asked him for time apart to sort things out until she needed him to make her feel better. He’s so angry! He tells her that they are officially over, he wants nothing to do with her. They are roommates and that’s it. Now, if I am facing my personal truth head-on, I have to admit this whole thing is very hot. While there is absolutely no world in which these two won’t eventually find their way back to each other, it’s nice to see Lucas finally stick up for himself a little bit. The guy lets people walk all over him. Are we about to see an entirely new Lucas Adams?

The OR Board

• I’m so glad Teddy voiced at least a little guilt over what happened to Sam Sutton — even though Owen is right (I choked writing that), it’s not her fault that she collapsed in that OR. Her obsession with making sure her other patients are okay at the expense of her recovery is born from the guilt of not being able to save Sam. But at least someone is still thinking about the poor guy! Meanwhile, Jo and Link are living unbothered in their little love-shrimp paradise, as if they never even heard of a man named Sam Sutton!

• I don’t know what’s happening here, but I think I’m becoming endeared to post-fugitive Owen? He helps Mika out with her procedure log because he’s grateful that she saved his wife’s life, and I found it … very sweet? Help me! Grey’s Anatomy season 20 is a real ride already.

• Mika and Helm are following in the Meredith Grey House tradition of keeping your roommates up with your loud sex. Good for them!

• Jules spends the episode tending to injured parties from a family softball game and winds up winning their MVP trophy. She gets a trophy and four procedures checked off her procedure log, so I’d say her decision to focus on work and not love is really paying off. It is much less fun, though.

• Do my eyes deceive me, or are Amelia and Winston going to become friends? Wild if true. I did laugh out loud when he agreed to get dinner with her at Joe’s and she responded, “You know it would be with me, right?”