Grey’s Anatomy – Taped and glued together

The stats: Eighteen people were shot. Eleven were killed.

And those who survived the bloodbath at Seattle Grace during last season’s Grey’s Anatomy finale — who witnessed the carnage and who had guns shoved into their faces — have returned, a month later, after having tenuously attempted to tape and glue themselves back together. But they’re not yet whole and they might never be again.

“Everything is wrong … we are not better,” Meredith told Cristina, the only other surgeon aside from herself who’d not been cleared for surgery by the trauma counselor who’d been hired to speak with the survivors of, what the babbling, now-brunette, now-crazy-eyed Lexi called the “mass murder.”

Meredith — who witnessed her Post-It husband Derek get shot, offered herself up to the shooter as a sacrificial lamb, briefly thought Derek died, then, while working to save Cristina’s guy Owen, miscarried her five-week-old pregnancy and had to undergo a related medical procedure alone — hasn’t yet told Derek she’d been pregnant. “Not better” is an understatement. Damaged seems more appropriate, on top of Meredith’s substantial pre-existing damage. Seriously.

And yet it’s Derek — the chief target of the shooter’s animus, who nearly died — who’s overtly acting out, nonchalantly telling people he’s spending less time thinking and more time doing. There were three scenes of Derek, whose own father was shot and killed during a mugging, driving in excess of 125 miles per hour on the highway, getting busted and making Meredith go to the police station to pick him up. On that third time, however, just before Owen and Cristina’s wedding, Meredith went to make sure that Derek was okay, then left him in jail.

Prior to that scene, Derek publicly quit his job as chief on his first day back to work, took on a radical brain surgery and spontaneously told Meredith, “Let’s make a baby,” completely unaware that his wife was one month removed from a crushing pregnancy loss.

This season premiere deftly wove its way through the aftermath of the massacre, using the sessions with the counselor to dramatize the character’s flashbacks to the day of the shooting, as well as to the hours immediately following. None of the doctors, not even the ones who’ve been cleared for surgery, is really okay. They’re eating their lunches in a basement hallway, away from the rest of the hospital staff so no one will stare or mistakenly call them by the name of a dead intern. Or they’re hastily fleeing to their parents’ home. Or clinging to bridal magazines in an attempt to focus on “simple” things because “simple” people don’t get held at gunpoint while operating on their best friend’s dying husband.

Alex, who’d been shot and gravely wounded, is the only one who projected an outward sense of normalcy, coupled with a generous dollop of false bravado. Until Lexi, who knows him too well, called him out on it: “You think that you are so bad ass ’cause you lived? I’m the reason that you lived. And while you were dying, you were crying out for the wife who left you. So let’s see, opposite of bad ass, for whatever it’s worth.”

But the others are, clearly and obviously, messed up. Aside from Derek’s speeding and suddenly relinquishing the chief’s post, a nervous Cristina impulsively decided to marry someone who already had battlefield-induced post-traumatic stress problems of his own. (This was the woman who had to be literally cut out of her previous wedding dress because she felt trapped and confined by it.) Lexi was temporarily involuntarily committed. After the shooting, Miranda grabbed her son and retreated to her parents’ house for month, leaving her boyfriend — who’d been cluelessly golfing at the time of the shooting, cell phone off — in the dust.

I suspect and greatly hope, that Grey’s will take its time in letting Meredith and Cristina, and the rest of the staff, try to find their way through this, that it’ll be an authentic recovery, particularly for Cristina who, as a child, watched her father bleed out and die. I took Miranda’s speech to her boyfriend as an indication that Grey’s head honcho Shonda Rhimes won’t rush through the after-effects of jarring the bloodbath:

“You’re a good man. You are handsome and kind and smart and good but you’re perfect, but, um, I’m, busy, holding myself together with tape and glue, and a piece of me wishes that you hadn’t played golf then you’d be all taped and glued too and maybe you’d be where I am. You’re too much for me right now because I’m busy with the tape and the glue.”

Clacked by Meredith O'Brien
on Sep 24, 2010 @ 11:00 EST5EDT