I watched this episode in the early hours of yesterday morning and maybe it was the lack of sleep that made me feel slighty detached from it all. Or maybe it really was the episode itself that left me surprisingly detached from it all. I think it’s the first episode I don’t feel compelled to watch again to write my review. I don’t feel compelled to watch it again at all. Not necessarily because it was really bad, because I even re-watched (complete or parts of it) the episodes I didn’t like much to be able to tear it to pieces in my review :-) The writing or storytelling of “The Time Warp” wasn’t necessarily as bad as in the George/Izzie or Dead-Denny-Sex days. It was just rather boring and I just didn’t see point of it all.
I’m usually open for trying out new things on a TV show. I liked the 2nd (or 3rd?) episode of this season where the same story was told from various points of view. Flashbacks to important events in our characters’ history can be great. If these flashbacks tell us something new about the character and/or help to move the whole story forward. This episode did neither. Parts of it were kind of interesting to watch, but it could have been reduced to much shorter flashback (2-3 minutes) like it has been done before. Meredith on the carousel, while Ellis and Richard were breaking up. These kind of things.
The Callie storyline was so so horrible. Sorry to say that. We know she has or used to have low self-esteem. She told us about it and we already saw it. Her stage-freight was so over the top. It was awkward and painful to watch and not in the usual still good way, in which we love to watch our characters in awkward situations. The case she presented was kind of interesting, but until the end I haven’t quite figured out what the point of her lecture was. Never give up on your patient? Operate a dozen times if you have to?
Alex’ involvement in this storyline seemed so so forced. It was typical Alex to sneak himself onto this case as intern. Not unusal for him to have celebratory sex with Callie in the end either. But there is no way, that he wouldn’t have thrown that into George’s face some time later, when George fell in love with Callie. Alex mocked him endlessly and he told him about Callie and Mark (during the fishing trip). And we’re supposed to believe that Alex wouldn’t have added “Oh, and I screwed her as well, weeks before you even noticed her?” No way.
Richard and Ellis. We’ve known about them being the outcasts (black/female) during their residency. We knew Ellis was a dedicated and great surgeon. We knew she put her work before her family. (We didn’t know little Mer was such an adorable girl, though. That definitely was fun to see). So nothing new there either. I have to admit that the case about one of the first AIDS cases in the early 80s was not dull, because I completely forgot about the way HIV/AIDS was discovered and diagnosed and all. It still didn’t warrant 15 minutes of valuable Grey’s screen time. Oh, and of course it had to be Ellis who introduced Richard to alcohol. Maybe it wasn’t the sole intention to put the blame on her, because in the end it was his decision to keep drinking and all. But it still felt off to me.
When Richard talked to the AA group in the beginning I started to feel some respect for the man again, but that was almost lost again with the rather boring oath at the end of the lecture. Once again, I get what the writers tried to tell us, but think they could have done it in a more compelling and shorter way.
Bailey’s backstory was the least boring and for most parts interesting to watch. We knew about her low self-esteem and being a nerd in school from the episode with the football (?) player from her fromer highschool. It was entertaining to watch the timid and silent Mandy Bailey on her first days as an intern. And to see how the chief saw her qualities and started to mentor her. I love that one thing Webber said to her in the OR “God made you short. But who made you quiet?” . It was fun to see Chandra Wilson play two so different versions of character and to see the “Nazi” Bailey keep her audience’s attention the way she did.
But all in all: What was the point? Unlike a lot of other fans I didn’t even mind the absence of the usual friendship/couples moments, because they really didn’t belong in an episode that was set up like this one was. And I got my tiny MerDer fix we got in the end, when they left their workplace together in this very ordinary couply way :-) So the absence of more of the usual storylines could have been totally fine, if the whole episode just had meant something to me. Which it didn’t. Sadly.
The episode, in my opinion, was the epitome of filler. It served no point in terms of giving us any new information at all. It was a way to pull a few sight gags with “the way they were” and for the “Superfans” as Shonda says nuggets to point out: same old anesthesiologist, Callie’s old look, anatomy jane in Mer’s hands, etc.
Total dullsville that not only did not develop storylines, it was inaccurate in its portrayal of established fact of the show.
Yeah, I had my problems with this episode too. I think, I wrote the shortest of all my reviews about it and couldn’t even think about more. Bailey was very amusing. But especially the Alex / Callie didn’t work for me either (and I didn’t even thought of Alex mentioning the Mark thing to George). As said above, there was no development in the show.