‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Season 19 Episode 4: Anti-Viral Medicine (RECAP)
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[Warning: The below contains major spoilers for the Grey’s Anatomy Season 19, Episode 4, “Haunted.”]
The October 27 episode of Grey’s Anatomy is titled “Haunted,” but the only thing scary about Season 19, Episode 4 is how little happens. Like Necco Wafers in trick-or-treater’s haul, this episode just seems like filler to us.
That said, Bailey’s (Chandra Wilson) Princess Leia costume was reason enough for a Halloween-themed episode.
The “haunted” person in this episode is Griffith (Alexis Floyd). At the start of the episode, the other interns are watching and re-watching a viral video of a doctor throwing a tantrum and destroying a hospital room. That doctor, as it turns out, was Griffith. And after she scrubs in with Maggie (Kelly McCreary) on a surgery, Griffith explains it all…
Maggie asks Griffith in the scrub room why she was kicked out of her last intern program. Griffith says she was ousted for being too “aggressive,” when really, she was just calling out the racism running rampant at that hospital. And when she got fired, Griffith got legitimately angry, and she hulked out, throwing supplies around and nearly taking a sink off a wall. And now the surveillance footage of that incident has leaked online and gone viral. But Maggie tells Griffith she’s a great doctor who belongs at a great surgical program like the one at Grey Sloan. “We see you,” Maggie says. “Don’t ever let that haunt you anymore.”
And at the end of the episode, Griffith ‘fesses up and tells the other interns that she was the one in the video. But they don’t mock her; they empathize. They tell her they would have flown into a rage, too.
Speaking of the other interns, they’re all paged to the skills lab for a trauma at the start of the episode. And though they don’t understand why they’d be reporting to the skills lab for a trauma, they’re just glad to get out of Richard’s (James Pickens Jr.) pumpkin-carving contest. (Hey, Richard was just trying to improve their surgical precision via jack-o-lanterns.)
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That “trauma,” however, turns out to be a cadaver with a knife wound. Owen (Kevin McKidd), Meredith (Ellen Pompeo), Nick (Scott Speedman), and Winston (Anthony Hill) explain that with the rise of laparoscopic surgery, surgical interns don’t get enough exposure to major wounds. So now the attendings are having Grey Sloan’s new intern class practice their trauma skills on dead bodies donated to science.
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The interns fail to prevent their first cadaver from dying (again), but with some tough love from Owen and Winston, they come together as a team and save a second cadaver’s life. (Well… you know what we mean.) Owen chooses Adams (Niko Terho) as the MVP of the exercise, but Adams asks if all the interns can scrub in on the grand-prize surgery. They’re a team now, after all.
Speaking of Owen and Winston, they bond over the frustrations of working under their respective spouses. Owen asks if Winston still loves Maggie. Winston says he does. Owen tells him to protect that love before the resentment takes over. And Winston, clearly taking that advice to heart, later tells a surprised Maggie that he’s deciding to leave cardio.
Liliane Lathan/ABC
Speaking of Owen, we get insight into the tension of his relationship with Teddy (Kim Raver) when Teddy has a heart-to-heart with Link (Chris Carmack) during a coffee break in the ambulance bay. When Link says that he’s crazy about Jo (Camilla Luddington) — more on that later — Teddy advises him to move on with other women to protect his and Jo’s platonic relationship. “There’s nothing like ruining each other’s lives to ruin a friendship,” she says.
Even so, Teddy still seems sweet on her husband. She finds Owen sleeping in an on-call room and wakes him up to reminisce about a sweet memory: While they were on their tour of duty, Teddy complained about all the holidays they were missing, so Owen arranged an Easter egg hunt with red, white, and blue plastic eggs filled with Valentines. Owen revels with Teddy in that memory… but then he falls asleep again. Romantic moment over.
Oh, and about that Link confession: He realizes now that he missed his chance to date Jo when she still had feelings for him because he was too hung up on Amelia (Caterina Scorsone) at the time.
The patients of the week this episode are Jarah and River, two teens who tried to jump from a roof into a pool while tripping on LSD. Jarah didn’t clear the landing and suffered severe blunt-force trauma to his chest. River, meanwhile, did make it into the pool and escaped with minor injuries. But at the hospital, a still-tripping River escapes from the ER jumps from the top of a parked ambulance to the pavement below. And again, he escapes major injury — mostly because he practically landed atop Jo. River gets a concussion and a leg fracture; Jo gets a sprained wrist.
You know who else is having a bad day? Levi (Jake Borelli), who’s so overworked that he’s yelling at nurses. It’s very un-Schmitt-like, and when Richard catches him snapping at yet another coworker, Richard tells him to take a break. But Levi contends that if he takes a break, people will die.
Richard then goes to Joe’s Bar to try to get Helm (Jaicy Elliot) to give up her bartending career and go back to the hospital. But Helm is doing just fine slinging drinks. She reminds Richard that, unlike what happened with Levi, no one offered her a job when the residency program got shut down. And now she’s working a job where people value her skills. (We certainly hope Helm changes her mind eventually.)
So if Richard can’t get Helm back, he can at least take some of the burden off Levi. He tells Levi that he knows the hospital failed Levi’s intern class, but Richard is determined not to lose Levi. So Richard says he’s going to make the attendings pick up the slack left behind when the residency program got shut down.
Liliane Lathan/ABC
As for Meredith, she spends most of the episode in a hotel room with Nick (Scott Speedman). She tells Nick how hard it’s been to find a school where Zola, whose gifted-ness is resulting in anxiety, can be supported. But later, Zola calls Mer in tears from a slumber party, and that’s pretty much the end of Mer and Nick’s own slumber party. Back at Chez Grey, Zola tells Mer that she couldn’t sleep and couldn’t breathe after lights-out, and Mer assures her that they’ll find her a school with teachers who can help her. Kinda seems like this might be the storyline that gives Mer her big Season 19 hiatus, right?
Grey’s Anatomy, Thursdays, 9/8c, ABC
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