Grey's Anatomy 7.12 – "Start Me Up"

After spending the morning at the ER for my 2nd IV of the recent corticoidsteoroids cycle, finishing Stephen Fry’s “Moab Is My Washpot” and doing some laundry I finally found the time to write my Grey’s review. [I’m doing ok with the meds by the way, got six hours of sleep last night, in intervals, but still and didn’t feel too agitated the rest of the day (yet). If it stays this way I’ll be happy].

When I watched the episode last morning I thought it really sucked. I quickly fast forwarded through it last night and found a few bits I liked, but my opinion all in all didn’t change much. But maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood for Grey’s? I don’t know…

It should come as no surprise for regular readers of this blog, that the reason I’ve started to watch Greys and why I’m still watching is the lovestory of Meredith Grey and Derek Shepherd. I like(d) a lot of the other characters and their stories but MerDer are my “ship” and the main reason I watch the show. Over the last few years I had to come to terms with the following:
a) MerDer are just one of the many couples/characters of the show, but not necessarily the center of it (anymore)
b) because of the many characters on the show, there often will only be MerDer bookend scenes and/or their storyline might not be featured regularily but only in every other episode
c) seeing happily married drama free MerDer in their everyday life would bore 99% of the TV viewers to death
d) to keep viewers interested there has to be drama, like infertility in this seson 7.

I don’t like any of the above, but like I said I’ve come to terms with it. Coming to terms with this also means that compared to the early seasons (up till season 4) I nowadays have become rather detached from the MerDer storylines and basically the show itself. I like seeing my favourite couple on screen, but I’m not that invested emotionally anymore, because I know how the TV business works (drama on screen, ratings and such…).

A lot of MerDer fans uttered their frustration about the recent developments and I can understand their frustration, I just don’t want to waste my energy and time to share it :-) Yes, I’d love to get a McBaby soon instead of seeing them deal with infertiliy problems. Yes, I’d definitely would prefer a planned and wanted McBaby to the accidentally Callie/Mark offspring. But that’s just not the way Shonda’s mind works and I’ve come to terms with that a long time ago too.

My tiny highlight of this episode happend in the MerDer scene at the end: the “hardcore / softcore / porn?” talk just made me smile. At least Derek hasn’t lost his sense of humor and knows enough ways to cheer up his wife. And practicing can’t hurt anyway, can it…?

There were a lot of spoilery hints floating around the Grey’s section of the internet in the last few weeks so it was really no surprise to me that Callie was being knocked up from the one-night-stand with Mark. Someone on twitter put it so perfectly: “That’s a ‘twist’ that’s so far from being twisty”. Seriously, it’s such a typical daytime soap-opera plot, that I don’t know if I should laugh about it or cringe. Or both. I think it’s rather painfully embarrasing to watch.

So was a lot of the rest of the episode. Teddy and her husband and the insurance fraud or not… Such a waste of my time.

I love Bailey. I even like that Eli guy. But not together, please. Can Bailey please go back to being the asexual being she used to be. This new giggly “dirty” Bailey is scaring me.

I’m happy to see Cristina back at SGH and to being Cristina. But I somehow still think there should have been more explanation / talk / sign that something has changed after the first half of the season was mostly about her breakdown. She seems unchanged and if she really hasn’t change or learned anything from it I’m wondering what was the point of her storyline in season 7 so far?
The chief must be mad to think she’d make a good chief resident. She might be the best surgeon but she is not a good teacher and… really just not the right person, even though she did talk to her med-student in the end and gave him some advice. The whole med-student storyline seemed rather pointless and boring to me as well, but maybe that’s just me and the mood I was in when I watched it.

Arizona and Callie are still getting on my nerves and I hate that, because I actually have liked them in the earlier seasons. But they are both acting childish and I don’t actually recognize this Arizona. She wasn’t this arrogant about her flawlessness in previous seasons, was she? And I don’t think the “I bail when things get hard” is consistent with her character as we got to know it. She was the one who told Callie’s father that she was taught to be “the man in the storm” and stand by the people you love. How does “bailing when it gets hard” fit into this?
Callie is acting unfair as well. Yes, Arizona choose the job in Africa and left, but Callie offered to go with her and never ever once told Arizona that she actually didn’t want to go until the moment at the airport. She can’t blame Arizona for leaving when Callie didn’t gave her any sign in advance that she didn’t want Arizona to leave and that she herself didn’t want to leave Seattle.
I really don’t care much about the upcoming relationship baby drama and what it will mean for Mark and Lexie as well. Mark will want to be involved, Arizona will not want him to be involved… drama galore.

I admit I can be a geek sometimes, when it comes to things I have a thing for. Like I have a thing for Scotland, since I’ve spend 2 wonderful weeks on vacation there in the summer of 2009. Since I’ve become a fan of the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon and read all the books in this summer of 2009 and listened to the wonderful audiobook versions in 2010. Since I’ve discovered the wonderful music of the scottish band Runrig.
So this gay couple were celebrating their domestic relationship with bagpipes and kilts, because the one guy was Scottish and loved being  Scottish. When I watched this scene I interpreted the “being Scottish” as actually “being from Scotland” in the sens of being born and raised there. And the guy on the gurney was so not a Scot but the average US or Canadian actor and that really bugged me. They had british, spanish and whatever actors with the various accents on the show before, why didn’t they cast a real Scot for this part? When I watched the scene again during my fast-forwarding I realized that “being Scottish” in the US probably just means that he had scottish ancestors and I know how much the “Scots” in the US love their tradition and celebrating their connections to the Scottish culture. So it was ok for me after all, but it bugged me at first and thus I didn’t really pay close attention to the rest of their storyline.
But I actually liked the underlying (and in some part even so obviously stated) message “pro same-sex marriage”, real marriage and not just domestic partnerships in this storyline. I think Wilson Cruz did a wonderful and touching job pleading for the rights of gay and lesbian couples in his scene with Sara Ramirez.

So yeah, this scene and the message it transported and the MerDer softcore porn talk were the two things I actually liked in the episode. The rest… not so much. Sadly.

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3 Responses to Grey's Anatomy 7.12 – "Start Me Up"

  1. Mella says:

    Ich weiß genau, wie du das mit dem Mer/Der shippern meinst. So gehts mir grad mit dem Großstadtrevier. *seufz* Und bei Greys nervts einfach, dass die beiden zusammen nur noch zu Beginn und Ende zu sehen sind. Callie ist momentan einfach unfair zu Arizona und Teddy geht mir ebenfalls aufn Keks. Sonst ging die Folge eigentlich.

  2. liljan98 says:

    Ich glaube es ist einfach der Lauf der Dinge, dass nach so vielen Staffeln die Luft raus ist, bei den Autoren und den Fans. Schade aber wohl nicht zu ändern… Ich werde trotzdem weitergucken jede Woche :-)

  3. I wish the show would be on more. I don’t like all the weeks off as of late.

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