The jaunt down memory lane was poignant. Owen telling Cristina that she’s beautiful. Cristina and Owen sharing a special, shadowy refuge in the bowels of the hospital. The agonizing fight over her abortion.
Put them together with Sandra Oh’s moving depiction of a wife who feels as though her abnormally thick skin has been transformed into one big exposed nerve because of her husband’s infidelity and desire to wound her, and you’ve got a story that simply obliterated the lame “Ladies Night” tales, McSteamy walking around with a Bluetooth issuing dictates and trying in vain to assert his temporary authority, Meredith’s angst over being unable to help Cristina and the cadre of surgeons hell-bent on saving a patient regardless of what McSteamy says.
The Cristina and Owen relationship has always been magnetic yet fraught. Owen was the hardcore, damaged, fresh-from-the-Iraq-War surgeon who stapled his own wounds closed without any anesthetic. Cristina found him irresistible, even when his post-traumatic stress caused him to start choking Cristina in her bed. She, this pillar of strength, resorted to covering up her bruises because she’d fallen for him so completely.
You bought this relationship, even the old fashioned early aspect of it where Owen complimented her neck and Cristina, also a hardcore surgeon, started wearing her hair up to expose her neck for him.
You bought Owen’s genuine struggle with his passionate feelings for Cristina and his deep friendship and attraction to Teddy when she arrived at Seattle Grace, bringing with her reminders of their shared experiences in Iraq.
You bought this relationship even after the hospital shooting when Owen, very unwisely, thought it would be a good idea to marry the semi-catatonic Cristina when she was in precarious emotional shape. He so should have waited.
You bought that he desperately wants kids as much as she desperately does not. (If ever there was a public service ad for having the kid discussion before marriage and before a pregnancy, this was it.)
And you bought that Owen — who pretended he was supportive of Cristina’s abortion when he was really irreparably crushed — having sex with someone else as a way to work out his rage at Cristina.
“I have an M.D. and a PhD.,” Cristina half-laughed and half-cried after Owen came bursting into the bathroom. “I’m a freaking cardio-thoracic surgeon. I’m supposed to be studying for boards, the most important exam of my life and I’m locked in the bathroom crying … because of a boy.”
Cristina’s realization that Owen wanted to hurt her for the abortion by sleeping with someone else appears to have been the final straw. Even Owen’s final declaration — “I’ll always be in love with you. You’re the love of my life. I will never love another woman.” — while he had a bag full of his belongings slung over his shoulder in preparation to leave, wasn’t enough to bridge that giant breach between them.
This was the only story about which I cared. The only one about which the writers really made me care. To watch Cristina and Meredith sit on a silent phone line, that had power, much more so than the other stories which thoroughly paled by comparison.
What do you think will be next for Cristina? Will she revert back to season one’s eager surgeon with a hardened heart, or evolve into something, someone different?
Clacked by Meredith O'Brien 
on Apr 13, 2012 @ 11:04 EST5EDT
I’m going to book mark your website and keep returning often.