The last season of Grey’s Anatomy left us in total chaos — Teddy was on the OR floor with no pulse, Lucas and Simone had opened up cute lil’ bag of bones Sam Sutton as he was flatlining, Kwan had ignored Maxine’s DNI order, and Jules was professing her hate/love for him, Meredith was blowing up her career while simultaneously jump-starting her stalling love life — and chaos is exactly where we find everyone as season 20 kicks off. You know what? Chaos feels like the right move for such a momentous occasion. Twenty seasons of Grey’s Anatomy! Two decades! The amount of time I, and so many of you, have dedicated to this TV show is, frankly, disgusting, but I regret nothing! In fact, I get a little weepy just thinking about how long we’ve all been together on this journey and with these characters. We are all aware that Grey’s Anatomy has thrived on chaos for 20 seasons — this, the show of ferry boat crashes and electrocutions and people’s legs getting chopped off via elevators and MUSICAL EPISODES (#neverforget) — chaos is tradition. So, yes, tossing us right in the middle of the chaos after an extended hiatus feels right and good and true. It feels like home.
It’s the morning after all the aforementioned chaos went down, and everyone who was in Boston for the Catherine Fox Awards — including Meredith “I left Seattle” Grey — is at Grey Sloan surveying the damage inflicted during their absence. Everyone is panicking and yelling at each other, but none more so than our five baby surgeons who, the moment Nick Marsh asks for an explanation, do not hesitate to turn on each other. Like, I know Kwan enjoys being a dick, but is he really that riled up over Simone ditching her wedding for Lucas? He calls Lucas a homewrecker? I honestly cannot believe Kwan doesn’t get punched in the face more often. Of course, the anger these five are hurling at each other stems from fear — the fear of Teddy dying right after they watched Sam Sutton die, the fear of losing their jobs. Nick threatens them with the latter but then has to run off and orders them all to stay put — no one is practicing medicine until further review.
They all almost immediately disobey that order. It’s just like old times!
Lucas needs some air because, in the span of mere hours, he’s been inside both Simone and Sam Sutton’s bodies. Simone follows him outside because she needs to talk to him about both of those things. Before they can really get into the sexy details (the first thing) or the gory ones (the second thing), they get pulled into an emergency. An EMT calls them over for help — they have a motor vehicle crash victim fading in the back of their ambulance, and the engine is dead; they need help keeping him alive and figure out how to transport him to the ER. The two paramedics step out of the rig to let the doctors start working on the guy before moving him, and just as they do, well, wouldn’t you know, a car rams into the back of the ambulance, locking Lucas and Simone inside with the victim. Oh, and also, did I mention, the car is a malfunctioning self-driving car; the employee tasked with beta testing it — excuse me, the car has a name, and that name is Wayne — is trapped in the back as the car rams into the ambulance over and over again. No one is able to shut it down.
Meanwhile, Meredith is roaming the halls of Grey Sloan after being dragged across the country in a real move by Catherine Fox. Catherine just wants to yell at her for telling all the Fox Foundation donors that everyone has been wrong about Alzheimer’s for decades and making Catherine and the Foundation look like wackos. Meredith can either stop talking about her theories, or Catherine can pull all the funding from Meredith’s lab. That’s literally all she has to say to her! I know she’s mad, but Catherine, dear, that could’ve been done over Zoom. Anyway, this frees Mer up to (1) listen to Nick complain about the mess the interns have gotten the hospital into and stress about possibly having to fire one or all of them and (2) be available to help when Bailey pulls her aside and tells her the interns are in trouble again.
What follows is several excellent scenes of Meredith and Bailey tag-teaming to instruct the interns trapped inside the ambulance how to treat their dying patient. Watching these two work together will never cease to warm my heart — and even they seem to enjoy it, too. The scene inside the ambulance is much less cozy. When Mer and Bailey can tell from the symptoms Lucas and Simone are relaying to them that the victim is bleeding internally, they tell their interns that they’re going to have to perform an ex-lap by themselves. Basically — they’re going to have to open up that guy’s abdomen right there in the back of the rig that is still being repeatedly slammed by a car to stop wherever the bleeding is coming from. Chaos reigns!
Simone is understandably hesitant after the Sam Sutton incident and begs to handle this another way. Couldn’t they just feed him fluids to keep him alive until they can get out of there? It’s possible, but if he’s as bad as it seems, he’ll most likely die if they don’t cut him open. Lucas and Simone are the only ones with eyes on the patient; they need to make that decision. Lucas says they need to try. Simone says, “I can’t have another death on my hands because of you!” It’s harsh but true, and yet not the best way to start a new relationship.
Lucas has the scalpel, and he decides to cut. It’s dicey for a little while, but eventually they get the bleeding under control. Lucas made the right call. Thankfully, around this time Kwan realizes they could just puncture the tire of the driverless car with something to get it to stop. Oh, friends, I laughed and laughed. There are that many doctors and EMTs and a guy who works for the car company hanging around, and not one thought, hmm, maybe we could take out the tires? I know people were busy, but come on.
Meredith and Bailey take the victim into the OR, and he ends up being fine. More importantly, we get a lovely little exchange between the two of them about Meredith’s intern class. Bailey reminds her former student that her intern class caused just as much trouble as this one — cutting LVADs and sabotaging clinical trials. “And look at me now,” Meredith responds. This sweet little trip down memory lane is a reminder that Meredith is only a genius surgeon because she had a genius teacher as an intern.
It’s that fact that’s at the forefront of Mer’s mind when she runs into Nick again. He admits that part of the reason he’s so frustrated with the interns for repeatedly breaking the rules is that if it continues, he won’t feel right leaving Seattle to start his life with Meredith in Boston. He can’t just leave those dummies. Suddenly, Meredith has an idea that might solve more than one of her problems — hello, nobody does this job alone, not really.
First, Meredith tells Catherine that she’s totally cool with shutting down her research in order to keep her funding going. How Catherine is not more suspicious of this is beyond me. Meredith immediately goes to Amelia, who has come around on Mer’s theory that the development of plaque in the brain might not be the singular cause of Alzheimer’s, and hands all of her research to her sister-in-law. Meredith wants Amelia to continue looking into things for her here in Seattle since she can’t in Boston. Amelia seems on board. She really needed a good project to keep her busy this season.
Then, Nick heads in to finish up the chat he paused with the interns earlier. He informs them that despite all of the havoc these five continue to wreak, no one is getting fired. He, however, is leaving (not because he hates them, although no one would blame him if he did). He’s headed to Boston, but only because — thanks to Meredith, no doubt — he found someone to take over the Residency Program. Someone just as capable, more so even, than him. Oh, friends, it’s Miranda Bailey. She walks through the door and says, “I have five rules,” and the credits roll. I have never felt so alive! Miranda Bailey bossing around interns with her five rules — what a time we are having here in season 20.