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Grey’s Anatomy Season 12 Episode 2 “Walking Tall” Recap

There was a time, long ago in the history of Grey’s where Miranda Bailey incited fear in the hearts of those who knew her. She was the Nazi, the no-fucks-given, no-shit taken captain of the ship and we loved her for it. In the second episode of what looks set to be Grey’s Anatomy 2.0 we were reminded of where our fearless leader came from, and surprisingly to no one more than myself, it actually might have paid off.

Since her days of reigning terror upon the interns, Bailey has gone through a strange transformation wherein she’s become a better surgeon, a stronger mother, a much healthier spouse but has unfortunately lost much of her self-confidence and respect within the show. Much of her gravitas is still derived from our memories of her yelling at her underlings and laying down the law and not from anything she’s done since (probably) 2011. This week, we finally got to see her return to that no-fucks-given, no-shit-taken Führer we fell in love with. But after so many years away, it was just as hard for Bailey to get back in the swing of things as it was for us to watch.

Last week I complained about the show moving too hard, too fast; Trying to make me forget the bad and trust in the show all over again in under an hour (And seriously, ain’t no oven pre-heat that quickly). Which is why I thoroughly enjoyed Bailey reaping consequences from trying to attempt the exact same thing. If this was completely unintentional from the writers, then I apologise for giving them that much credit. Because the decision to have a staple character overstep, overreach and overcompensate in much the same way that the show is – AND THEN NAIL HER TO THE WALL FOR IT- really made me smile in a way that Grey’s hasn’t made me do in  a while.

This all happened thanks to the B.U.G. (The Big Unfriendly Giant) whose tumour on her pituitary gland has caused her to grow exponentially, meaning that her spine might (but-almost-definitely will) snap. The B.U.G. is pissed because she’s bringing the internet to Africa or something and so can’t stay in the hospital for longer than 4 hours (which sounds like a process that might’ve necessitated an assistant showing up or something. I mean repeatedly saying “I’m needed, I have to go” doesn’t make you necessarily “needed” sweet rude giant lady, I got the feeling like they were probably doing ok without you). So Bailey thinks that weeks of hardwork can be crammed into 4 hours by our loyal docs. At best this seems ridiculous and at worst is just ridiculous… which, what do you know? just comes across as ridiculous either way.

Much in the same way as Jurassic Park, life does find a way and the job gets done but it’s not with Miranda’s help – it’s despite it. The Nazi might be on her way back, but it seems like faking it ’till you make it just isn’t going to cut it – She’s going to have to put in the time and earn the position she thinks she’s earned just from making it this far (*cough* Shonda Rhimes *cough* ).

Some fun on the side worth mentioning is the further introduction of new lambs for the slaughter: McCutey and McHottie interns. Grey’s is at it’s funniest when it commits to being a moshpit of #drahmaa and in earlier years hit home when we were leaked bits and pieces of stories that we never really saw, a.k.a. the interns of seasons 4 and 5. There’s moments of this kind of humour coming from this years batch of newbies, as we’re starting to see trickles of inside jokes and inside banter shine through. I don’t know anything about McCutey or McHottie other than McCutey is letting me vicariously creep on Jo and McHottie is well, just so darn fun to look at. But what’s great is, this episode at least really seemed to realise that with so much heavy #drahmaa coming from Bailey and ‘Japril’, all we really needed them to do is make us giggle. I’m sure their time will come (pretty sure McHottie is living with Arizona now but apparently it’s a cool roommate thing not to share a single scene together) but for now at least, if we can keep seeing McBanter fly without it having to be weighed down by me caring for more people that might die, then this might just work.

Finally, just some words on ‘Japril’ developments: April is a highly accomplished trauma surgeon being told by other well-regarded surgeons that she has a rash that could be dangerous and her immediate response is “No, I’m fine, please let me go so I can treat sick people”. She then complains to her hot hot husband about wanting to fight for their marriage after her immediate response to these problems last year was “No, I’m leaving because I want to leave”. All I’ve learned here is that April’s first instincts always suck and she is literally regret incarnate. This week she just suffered from dermatitis, but next week she could be suffering from divorce… and the cream for that is a hell of a lot more expensive.

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Grey’s Anatomy Season 12 Premiere “Sledgehammer” Review

The fans of “Grey’s Anatomy” have been through a lot. We’ve loved, we’ve lost, we’ve loved again and then we’ve lost again. But after seeing so many things that once made this show great get cancer, shot, hit by busses, crushed by planes, electrocuted, hit by trucks or just get boring (that’d be you Jackson), many of us are still tuning in to see if there’s any steam left in this ferry boat. I say ‘things’ and not people, because as hard as I try, I can’t help but feel that as much as Grey’s wants us to keep smiling at the new interns and new cases, my heart to care isn’t as full as it used to be – and it’s simply because the pieces we’re left with just don’t fit. It’s become obvious that the pillars of this series aren’t the freak-of-the-week cases or the interchangeable acts of sex in an on-call room, but the core cast of characters that built the show: Characters that are now all but gone.

None of this is a surprise: excitement for the show has steadily declined as the death tolls have gone up. But at least the show is aware of the up hill battle it’s facing to try and recapture it’s spark. At the close of this week’s premiere,  Meredith tells us to “forget everything we know about Anatomy” as she takes a sledgehammer to her childhood home. But with so much riding on this season after the loss of Derek you just know that this isn’t really Mer talking about a dead cadaver, but Shonda Rhimes talking about the stagnant linchpin of TGIT.

A lot of effort was made this week to help us forget how dreary the show became last season: Arizona is bubbly again; Maggie is bursting out of her shell; Callie is laying down the law basically showing us that she’s got her “oh no you didn’t” groove back; Bailey made a speech that didn’t end with me being depressed (!); Jo and Alex are being sexy and sweet living in their loft… which is cool… I guess? And Meredith is pissed at her new living situation (girls apparently don’t just want to have fun).

But ultimately is a few goofy meltdowns, some impromptu violence against a bigot (nice swing Mags) and a new focus on ‘roommate drama’ a la season one, enough to revive what’s been lost? With just this episode to go on, the answer is no. It’s no secret that Grey’s has strayed in the last decade from what made it excellent to begin with, but it hasn’t strayed in a vacuum. I can’t imagine anyone watching is as happy to move on as quickly as the show wants us to, and unfortunately this weeks hammerhead approach to shoving what it thinks is good-old-fashioned fun down our throats is borderline offensive.

This premiere and the places are Grey/Sloan Docs are in now, owes everything to what has come before. And in it’s attempt to reboot so hastily, the show is now in danger of feeling like “Grey’s Anatomy” lite: Fat free and soul free. No one mentioned Derek and aside from a ferry boat scrub cap and an obligatory family photo on the fridge, it’s almost as if McDreamy could’ve been a McDream all along. Arizona’s re-discovered pixie-esque buzziness is nice but are any of us fooled  by a bit of hot banter with a hot intern to forget how loathsome she’s become in recent years? Umm… No. Jackson and April are (not surprisingly) headed for a season of McBrooding which only bodes well for viewers who enjoy watching attractive people avoid eye contact with each other. But we should just let this one ride out seeing as it’s  pretty much the only thing the writers have yet to check off on their list of “how do we make this relationship interesting?”.

But it’s still Grey’s: Meredith has been through everything we have and she’s still chugging along, so I’m not ready to let her go on by herself just yet. I like to think we’re heading in a better direction by trying to establish super-good-fun-times as a new starting point, but moving forward I’d like it to be a little less heavy-handed and ‘excited’ to forget where we’ve come from.

That’ll do Grey’s, that’ll do.

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Run Forrest, Run!

Ok, so this is not the blog that I intended to write when I began. Honestly when the idea of a blog came to mind, I’d pictured myself behind my laptop at one in the morning after a fascinating night of adventures that I would wrap up in universal and easy to swallow pieces a la Carrie Bradshaw. Unfortunately, it turns out that I’m not Carrie Bradshaw – and outside of the idealism of that show’s everything happens for a reason mantre, neither was she. No, when we step outside the imagery, and look at what thepopculturelife must now be, we have to take it with the grain of salt that I don’t actually have adventures.

First also, I would like to apologize to all of my reader (you know who you are) for the delay between this installment and my previous pieces. Inspiration, motivation, intellectual masturbation (which is pretty much what all blogs are, don’t even get me started on the cerebral orgy that is twitter), is hard to come by when life is genuinely boring. I was walking through the city just the other day noticing how very few people were running. Everyone was just waking from place to place. And it’s like really? No one was in a hurry to get to the next bit of their life?

I like to think I look at life differently to other people. When I look at a situation I like to romanticize it and endow it with imagery and music that it turns out isn’t really there. I have to think that while my outlook is at times extremely destitute because pretty much nothing can live up to how I imagine it to be. The alternative, the walking, the standing, the living without montage-tinted goggles must be extremely pointless. Seriously, what do people get up for in the morning if they don’t have a reason to run? I truly believe that running is the backbone of real-life magic. Running to the person you love, running to deliver life-changing news, running away from a chainsaw wielding maniac (don’t laugh, it’s real), and ultimately running to the next moment that life is capable of. I don’t really run, but I like to think that someday I’ll have a reason to. But atleast I have that goal, looking around at the masses, and taking a stab in the dark at how boring a lot of them must be, they don’t even know that this is what’s missing. We shouldn’t run everywhere, that would be silly, but if you really can’t see the magic or the music that can give the everyday moments that extra spark, you should be looking for every opportunity to run. Wave your arms, pull them tight but just give yourself a reason to get somewhere really really fast.

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the generation wars… sega do you even go here?

“Congratulations! you’ve found an item” “A’ight girl, I hope you don’t mind a little sweat”

The above two phrases are both taken straight out of extremely different video games. One found its home on a console that I cherished and learnt a lot of life lessons from. The other managed to seduce me at friends houses as something I knew I really shouldn’t have anything to do with. Two very different childhoods live in these two worlds. The world of grand theft auto, and the world of the Legend of Zelda.

My first introduction to video games was my Nintendo Game Boy, given to me when I turned 6. A Classic by anyones standards the Game Boy said a lot about me. Sometimes it even did the talking for me when most of the time I just wanted to say “go away”. Because I can tell you right now that nobody does it better than the black & white juggernaut of anti-socialness, and i’m not just talking about racial segregation… although going to an english private school there was a lot of that there too. My point is that from an extremely early age i’d already taken a side  in a war that still rages on today (i’m not talking about the race war anymore FYI, although I did take sides there to, you white devil).

While older generations; my parents, your parents, your parents parents might just see riffraff, wastes of time or the ‘playing box’ (and choose their kids futures accordingly), I see, and you should to an epic struggle for survival in the world of xbox64s, playstationwiis, gamecubeUs, Nintendo Vitas and tamigotchis. The console you choose can very well define the rest of your life because it certainly did mine. Growing up with the Game Boy I had an affinity for jumping over turtles and onto mushroom caps and I would run up to girls in the street and try to rescue them… police had to get involved by this point. But the point is that people harp on about video games being improper influences on the youth of today and thats probably right. But what people are missing is that there is a direct correlation, not between the amount of FPSs you play or hookers you stab, but just simply the console you own that defines your childhood. I wasn’t ready for a playstation, I see that very clearly now. I actually bought one recently and I own over 60 games, almost all of them are MA15+. I also own a wii and a gamecube and almost all of my over 100 games are rated M or below.

So back-to-flashback, with the Game Boy in my back pocket (they were pretty big pockets), I went on to fall in love with a friends Nintendo 64. I caught glimpses of Ocarina of time, Pokemon stadium, Majora’s mask and Goldeneye through Game Boy-tinted goggles. This was my world and Link and Mario were my peeps. I didn’t understand the war that was being fought as the dreamcast was cast into the abyss, as sega bowed out and would choose to spend the next decade bending sonic over a megadrive until the only thing left would be blue bum fluff and as Microsoft would soon enter the ring and come to define the three-tiered prong of todays generation.

So that was where I came from, good natured platformer’s, RPGs and adventures that taught me to appreciate gorgeous level design, boys in green dresses, interactive story and girls who dressed up as boys to protect and guide the boys in green dresses… did I already mention good story? As I grew I learned to love and appreciate the history that came with my new pastime and as a result I became a fanboy. I regret nothing. But kids today are coming from Call of Duty: Modern Slaughter, Resistance: Fall of Good Taste and Medal of Honor: Rising Genocide. I grew up to be a delicate and soulful young man(ish) and i’m pretty sure that Mr. Miyamoto had a lot to do with it, he did teach me so much after all. But lil’ Johnny down the street has a playstation 3 and has never known anything else, and well, i’m pretty sure he’s gonna grow up to kill Miyamoto in an air raid #stayawayfromliljohnny.

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go away, i’m talking to Buffy

Ever since i was a little girl… did I say girl? thats weird… I was a boy. Anyway, ever since I was wearing fairy dresses and waving a wand around (this time i was playing the fairy godmother in a pantomime, don’t worry though I did it ironically), I’ve pretty much been brought up on television. I learnt my ABCs by the NBCs, BBCs, ITVs, CBSs, WBs, UPNs and well ok ABCs of prime-time and i have to say, mum what the hell were you thinking?

Don’t get me wrong, I am a big fan of me and the person that television has made me, but Friends had me thinking that there was a constant sexual tension between me and my classmates when I was 7. Buffy had me patrolling the garden for vampires with a wooden stake i’d made from a broken picture frame when I was 9. Lois and Clark made me think that it was ok to lie and that Lex Luthor had hair. Dawsons Creek had me expecting sex as soon as my best friend grew boobs and don’t even get me started on Oz. With a bit of hindsight under my belt, I can clearly see how this has affected the way I live my life. First-off I live life like its a sitcom, it is my ultimate fantasy to walk into a room and say something like “Is it me or is it really hot outside” and have everyone in the room turn around and say “It’s you” at the same time, and then of course have a studio audience justify it with howling laughter. I have a lot of fun with this but its ultimately disappointing when no one catches on and i don’t get the banter that Will & Grace promised me I would have. And I also live life extremely naive of the kind of life every one else is living when i compare it with the life I lead and have expected from tv. Coming to the end of my teens which I pretty much spent locked away watching tv, I can tell you that I didn’t get the voice-over that the Wonder Years promised me, the sex that the O.C. promised me, the drugs of Skins,  the family of Gilmore Girls, the adventure of Buffy or the even the lack of work-pressure that Moonlighting told me i could have (I mean come on, no one breaks the fourth wall as much as Cybill Shepard does if you’re not pretty laid back). So with this in mind, this is what i’d been expecting from life and my teens, but the joke is that when I heard of kids doing drugs and having sex, I was just shocked and appalled. We were all in the same race and no had told me that we’d started, so they must be cheating right? These kids were ignorantly doing things and having experiences that i’d been learning about and dreaming about for years, they didn’t understand the romance, the montage, or the arc that came with these milestones. But I was ready, so why wasn’t it happening? It turns out that while I was fantasising about life experiences as a montage and an epic three season arc, my fellow teens were just living life.

I’m not shy by any means, but what I am is extremely romantic thanks to late-night prime-time. And the burden of this mindset means that i’m not going to make a move unless I know it can draw ratings. Watching the Sean show for the past 19 and a half years, i’m kind’ve of invested in my character’s journey and I don’t want him to have a mindless fling, I want him to have a house-collapsing, cubicle-bashing, self-sacrificing love affair with a co-lead. And it needs to be perfect. I appreciate that no one can really get this, and to be honest no one should really have to, but I can tell you right now that someone’s going to take this show of the air if it doesn’t get exciting pretty damn soon.

This is starting to sound like I blame TV for all my problems, which I most certainly don’t. It’s just that when the most emotional memories in your own life are Buffy killing Angel to save the world, Ross cheating on Rachel, Marissa dying, Walter White running over a couple of drug dealers looking at you and saying “Run”, then there has to be something wrong. I have lived the most exciting lives from soaking up these worlds and these characters and hot damn if it hasn’t turned me into a pretty cool guy, but unfortunately I’ve been sheltered from the real world so much that I don’t even know what it looks like anymore. I don’t know how to live in a world that doesn’t know who’s in its main cast. Who do I end up with? Who are my friends? What do I end up doing? What will my life turn out to be? Have I been dead all along?

There’s honestly no turning back now so all I can really do is sit back and hope that by the time i’m 30 i’ll be experienced enough to play an attractive 16 year old on prime time. And If nothing else, I can almost definitely say that I am the product of some of the smartest and most creative writing on TV from over the past two decades… fart.

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