Amelia, we hardly knew ye? The younger Dr. Shepherd faces an ironic twist of fate this week — while Nathan and Owen royally screw up their love lives — on Grey’s Anatomy Season 14, Episode 2: “Get Off on the Pain.”
On the hunt for an abdomen
Megan is a woman of jokes and silver linings, but she has neither when she wakes up to discover her abdomen is still wide open: Meredith’s operation didn’t work. For her part, Mer is on a rampage, destroying the attending lounge as Richard and Maggie bear witness.
“Suffering is optional,” Mer says via voiceover, quoting that pithy saying we’ve all heard. “That person didn’t know that the f—k they were talking about.” (That f-bomb was cleverly censored by Mer slamming the door.)
Later, Mer is picking at the seam where Alex patched up her bedroom wall — back when she took down Derek’s impromptu mural — when she gets a flash of inspiration. She wants to do an abdominal wall transplant for Megan — harvesting the skin, the musculature, and fascia from a donor.
Megan is totally gung-ho about the idea since she feels like she’s still a hostage — a hostage to the hospital bed this time. Mer recruits the sub-interns to find a matching donor, and they fail in a series of humorous vignettes, finding a long-dead abdomen and a shotgun-blasted abdomen and a furry abdomen. Finally, Levi finds a matching tummy, but Jo steals the credit. She later fesses up to Mer, but Mer says, “If you wanna be a shark, be a shark. Don’t apologize for it.”
When Mer goes to deliver the happy news to Megan, she barges in on Nathan on bended knee. It’s awkward all the way around, and Nathan and Megan table that proposal until after the surgery. (Or, you know, until the other woman in their relationship isn’t around.)
Long surgery short: Mer is successful, and Megan has a brand new tummy. After the operation, Nathan tells Mer that Megan turned him down — whoa! — because she suspects he’s still in love with Mer. And then he tries to get back with Mer right there on the spot!
Mer rightly walks away. You just can’t go from proposing to one woman to propositioning another. Honestly, Mer and Megan should just get together at this point.
Ain’t that a sham
Before she goes under anesthesia, Megan confronts Owen about his “sham of a marriage,” with Teddy and Owen’s mom backing her up. The women are concerned that Amelia has been absent throughout Megan’s ordeal — and they’re even more concerned that Owen says he doesn’t need her support. (Also, Megan asks Owen take care of Farouk if anything happens to her.)
Owen hunts down Amelia and tells her she needs help. She dismisses him right away, characterizing the women as unreliable witnesses. (Megan just arrived on the scene, Teddy is in love with Owen, and Owen’s mom is dating someone half her age.) She even gives Owen the green light to reunite with Teddy.
And Owen actually tries to, surprising even himself, it seems. He’s talking to Teddy and telling her how Amelia hasn’t slept at home at months (and certainly isn’t sleeping with him) when he impulsively kisses her. She breaks it off, though.
“You are my favorite human on the planet,” she says. “And if we are meant to be more in this lifetime, it can’t start with you cheating on your wife.”
Let this not be the last we see of Teddy! We need her as a voice of reason, particularly if Former Grey Sloan Voice of Reason Stephanie really is gone.
It’s all about Alex
In what we’ll later learn was Levi’s mother’s basement — yeesh — Jo leaves her one night stand’s bed and, with a crunch, steps on his now-infamous glasses. Does the humiliation never stop? (Let’s hope not: This is comedy gold.) She finds Ben in line at the coffee cart and badgers him for consolation, which Ben is hard-pressed to give, especially when pops up to pester her her again. Unfortunately, Jo doesn’t notice that Alex is also in line, and he hears the whole thing. And he bursts out laughing. Oh, the humiliation!
Later that day, Alex talks to Meredith about it, and she says (sagely) that Jo sleeping with Levi has everything to do with Alex, just like Mer sleeping with George had everything to do with Derek. Meanwhile, Jo is talking with Ben, telling him that she has a history of picking violent men. (Levi, to his credit, does not seem to be that.)
That said, Levi isn’t a total pushover. He gets mad with Jo for stealing his donor, but Alex puts him in his place (and then laughs in Jo’s face again).
Even later, Ben tries to give Jo his take, but Bailey butts in and tells him to butt out: He doesn’t get a say in Jo’s love life. Then, when they’re alone, Bailey tells Jo that Alex is only violent when he is defending her. (That’s romantic-ish?)
Even later, Ben finds Alex in the observation gallery and tells him Jo is afraid of Alex hurting her — physically hurting her.
And later still, Alex talks to Jo in the resident lounge, telling her he would never hurt her… and also fessing up about having found Jo’s abusive husband, Paul.
Jo realizes that Alex met Paul and actually didn’t kill him or even beat him to a pulp — this is good progress for Dr. Karev! — and she locks the door so she can have her way with the A-man.
Feels and heels
On to DeLuca’s sister, Carina. We find out she’s an OB/GYN studying how sexual stimulation affects pain management in women, and she has wanted to work at Grey Sloan Memorial ever since finding out about its lady leadership. Now she wants MRI time to examine the brain activity of women as they masturbate.
Bailey, who has literally been chafing in the high heels of Chief of Staff, takes one look at her aching feet and says, “Done.”
(We later see Bailey wearing her sensible flats as she gives Jo her pep talk, and then we see her throwing out all of her high heels. Ben convinces his wife to keep one pair, saying she doesn’t have to be standing up when she wears them. Teehee!)
So Carina starts her research — and continues to flirt with Arizona all the while — as Bailey, Maggie, and Amelia scope out the scene. The latter ladies balk when Carina asks for volunteers, though. Hah!
Piecing it all together
Amelia is still doggedly working on her osteoblastoma patient, Beau, much to Jackson’s dismay. Even her acolyte DeLuca has his doubts.
Still, Amelia starts the surgery, and it all goes according to plan until DeLuca has to pull Jackson from Megan’s operation. Jackson finds Amelia in the O.R. holding a piece of Beau’s jaw. “It’s a little like Legos, which I was never very good at. I can’t make this piece fit,” Amelia tells him.
“It’s a little like Legos, which I was never very good at. I can’t make this piece fit,” Amelia tells him.
Jackson saves the day, and Beau is fine, but he’s still appalled at Amelia’s recklessness. But there’s a reason for all her irrationality over the past umpteen years, as we’re about to find out.
(Jackson isn’t exactly a faultless hero this week, though — April tells him it pains her that they hooked up in Montana and never talked about it. She doesn’t know where they stand, and she decides to move out.)
Post-surgery, Amelia goes to Carina for a celebratory spin in the MRI masturbatorium, and when she comes out, she sees a brain scan on Carina’s screen.
“Whoa, that is a beautiful tumor,” she says, admiring a huge dark area on the scan. “Whose brain is that?”
Carina and DeLuca don’t respond — they just look stricken — and Amelia puts two and two together. (Just like Legos!)
Helluva way to end a two-part season premiere, right? Next week on Grey’s Anatomy: Amelia doesn’t try to operate on her own brain tumor, let’s hope.