Grey’s Anatomy Recap: The Cadaver Challenge

Hospitals can be scary enough on their own, but toss in some interns working on fresh-tissue cadavers (a trio of truly haunted words), youths on LSD who think they can fly, and literally any scene in which Teddy and Owen have to interact with each other, and that’s spooky season, baby.

Grey’s Anatomy loves an intern trauma training (remember April Kepner coming into her own in the pouring rain?), and for this class, Nick and Meredith have something special planned: They aren’t just training on dummies, nope, Grey Sloan has got its hands on fresh-tissue cadavers for this training session. Everyone seems very jazzed about the freshness! Sure, it’s fun to watch Owen and Winston, who oversee the training, mess with the interns as they attempt to keep their cadaver turned stab-wound victim “alive,” but really this exercise is a vehicle for Grey’s to reveal more character details in an efficient yet palatable way.

Jules gets to rant about her family, which seems to include an uncle who has been in and out of prison and parents with drug problems. When Mika makes a crack about Benson’s dad, he informs us that he never really had a dad. And then there’s Lucas, who gets to show us what kind of guy he really is. Thanks to Lucas, the interns successfully “save” the cadaver, but when it comes time to figure out who deserves the win — and the opportunity to scrub in on a surgery with Winston — the rest of the group all try to sell themselves as the reason for the positive outcome. Lucas, meanwhile, credits his good work to the good work of his fellow interns. Owen and Winston give Lucas the surgery because he “used all the hands around” him and put the patient first instead of his ego, yet this Very Nice Boy asks if all of the interns can scrub in. What a little sweetie. I mean, could he just be collecting allies because that Shepherd family secret is about to drop any second? Possibly! But I think it could also be true that Lucas is a good guy who’s underestimated most of the time.

While Simone isn’t part of the trauma training, we learn a little bit more about her this week, too. She’s on Maggie’s service and they’re working to keep teen Jarah alive after he and his buddy River took some LSD and tried to fly off of River’s roof into a pool to get away from the bats that were chasing them (in their minds). Are teenagers the scariest creatures in existence? Discuss! Anyway, River landed in the pool, Jarah did not. Things are dire! At one point, Jarah and River’s dads are arguing about which kid gave the other kid the LSD, and Bailey has to give them a big speech about how parents have to stick together or something. She’s in a Princess Leia costume while she’s doing it, which is A Choice! It works in the show, but could you imagine living this scenario in the real world? A tiny yet mighty Princess Leia shouting parenting advice in your face in the middle of a hospital waiting room? I’d have my kid transferred out of there so fast! Regardless, it’s a tense situation, and yet the entire time Simone can’t stop checking her phone. Even in the O.R. with Maggie, her phone is repeatedly going off.

After Jarah is out of surgery and the dads make up, Maggie confronts her intern about her behavior. She knows Simone is the “intern to watch,” so what gives? Simone tells Maggie about how she was pretty much forced out of her last residency program due to racist bullshit. Her suggestions, even when right, were constantly overlooked while white colleagues were uplifted, and when she’d point out inconsistencies or injustices in the way patients of color were treated, she was deemed “aggressive” and “angry.” One day, she had enough and went berserk in the intern lounge, ripping things apart, breaking anything she could get her hands on, throwing things across the room. It’s what ultimately got her fired from the program. And then today, as she was sitting with her fellow interns as they laughed at some viral video of a first-year intern going wild, she learned that the security footage of her breakdown has been plastered all over the internet. She was on her phone all day trying to get the video taken down. She’s beside herself! Maggie gets what Simone went through at her last hospital — how as Black women they are “held to a different standard” — but she tells her something that must offer the biggest relief: “We see you.” Grey Sloan is a great program, and they won’t be treating her the way she was treated at that other place. They see her. They get her. And they want her here.

Even if it’s difficult for Simone to be in Seattle because of her grandmother, Grey Sloan is the right place for her and she’s beginning to accept that. In fact, she faces her fears and reveals to her fellow interns that she’s the woman going wild in that video they were laughing at earlier. Once she explains the whole situation, the other interns have her back — they’d be doing the same thing, maybe even worse. And then they all head out to breakfast together. They’re becoming a little family, you guys? Admittedly, I teared up! What can I say, 19 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy has worn me down.

Speaking of wearing me down: Teddy and Owen and their growing resentment toward one another are wreaking havoc all over this hospital! Sure, they’re having lots of sex, but when Dr. Owen Hunt finishes and says “happy Halloween,” how hot can that sex be? “Happy Halloween”??? In what world is that sexy or at the very least, not dumb? I don’t want to side with Teddy here because Teddy, too, is being an idiot, but man, it is hard to side with the post-orgasm “happy Halloween” guy.

Teddy’s missteps might be more egregious, though. She’s working with Link this shift, and when Link finally confesses what we’ve known for some time, that he’s in love with Jo, Teddy is sort of a monster. He’s beating himself up for ruining his shot. He and Jo were best friends, so them being together was never really on the table, until suddenly it was — but he was too hung up on Amelia to see what was right in front of him. He thinks he blew it, he tells Teddy, looking for wise words from a friend. Instead, Teddy tells Link that he’s better off. Being married to your best friend, tying your life to theirs, only means that eventually that friendship will be lost. It’s a very bleak outlook and I hope Link doesn’t take it to heart. Teddy is a menace to society.

Owen might be acting like a real Sad Boy over the state of his marriage, but at least the advice he’s doling out seems helpful. Winston confides in Owen that he’s having trouble with Maggie being both his boss and his wife because she’s hypercritical and controlling in every aspect of his life now. For better or worse, Owen is actually a good person to chat with about working with your spouse — he’s done that with several women! Most of those turned out to be disasters, but at least you know he’s speaking from experience when he advises Winston to not wait until there’s resentment there that is irreversible.

Like so many of our docs tonight, Winston faces his fear and tells Maggie that he thinks he’s going to change specialties. Staying in cardio will ruin their marriage. There’s no doubt that Maggie will be offended by that line of thinking at first, but hopefully she’ll come around, because doesn’t it seem like the best solution for everyone? And it was born from advice from Mr. Happy Halloween himself! These are strange times we’re living in, people.

The O.R. Board

• Ah, you can see Grey’s crafting Meredith’s exit story as we speak: Zola’s still having trouble with panic attacks and Mer knows that the best thing for her daughter would be to find a school that fits her specific needs — even if that school doesn’t exist in Seattle. We know there’s not much Meredith would leave Seattle for, but for her daughter? Prepare yourselves!

• “Zola, I’ll pick you up anytime from anywhere, always.” I swear I’m not crying. There’s just something in my eye, okay?

• Schmitt admits to Webber that he feels like he can’t stop working — no matter how exhausted or run down he is — because if another patient were to die on his watch, he wouldn’t be able to come back from that. He barely came back from the last one! It’s honestly pretty upsetting. Webber makes sure Schmitt knows that it was the program that failed him and his entire class and Webber is going to make sure that never happens again. In this moment, that means getting Schmitt some assistance as the only senior resident. Webber tries to win Helm back, but she’s reluctant to leave her job at Joe’s … for now.

• Anybody else wondering where Nico is?

• The new interns don’t exactly line up with the original intern class, for obvious storytelling reasons, but there are certainly shades of our original fab five in this group. For now, the strongest matchup seems like Jules Millin and Izzie Stevens, right?

• Sweet little Ewok Pru!