Grey’s Anatomy – Moving on up (and out?)

Shonda Rhimes is toying with Grey’s Anatomy fans as real life news stories suggesting that Ellen Pompeo and Patrick Dempsey may be leaving the show that made them famous — or maybe not — flit across the internet. Are they returning? We haven’t been told definitively one way or another, hence the drama in watching Meredith take an interview at a prestigious Boston hospital and remark that working there would be her “first choice.”

Meredith and Derek (Pompeo and Dempsey) may well leave Seattle Grace for real. As for the other characters, we know that Meredith’s class of interns won’t be fleeing Seattle Grace en masse so it’s hard to take all the frantic scurrying about to snag interviews too seriously. I’m not going to sweat all the gift baskets Cristina has been receiving, Teddy’s tearful pleadings to Owen about Cristina’s potential departure or Alex fretting about the lousy interviews Arizona has set up for him. But Meredith fleeing, that’s something in which I feel invested.

(Tangentially, I find it interesting that Cristina and Owen have kept their separation on the DL. Wonder what drove that decision to keep their situation under wraps?)

Meanwhile, the patient-of-the-week story paralleled Richard and Adele’s in a convoluted kind of way. A teenage girl who was kidnapped, raped and tortured by her kidnapper (who also impregnated her but she thinks the baby died), didn’t remember her parents who’d been in agony for years worrying about the fate of their daughter. The girl didn’t want to see them, talk to them, hug them or hear anything about her first few years in the warm confines of her family’s home. She wanted to talk about her horrific reality, no matter how painful it was for her family to hear.

That was similar to what Richard faced, albeit with Alzheimer’s playing the role of the kidnapper, stealing Adele away from him, making her forget him and to look upon him as if he were a stranger when all she wants to do is get intimate with a fellow patient who she met at the facility where they both live. Richard, like the girl’s parents, didn’t do anything wrong, didn’t do anything to deserve getting pushed aside or held at arm’s length by a loved one. But that’s his reality. He can accept it, no matter how painful, or fight it, which is futile.

Although the scene where Richard walked in on Adele and her boyfriend in bed was shocking, the truly, quietly moving one that sliced clean through your heart occurred near the end of the episode when Adele looked as though she was listening to the most boring lecture ever as Richard told her that he loved her. She only lit up with excitement and beamed when she saw her boyfriend. Richard, realizing that he’s lost his wife to Alzheimer’s, gave the guy his chair. I honestly don’t know how he can bear it, how spouses of those with Alzheimer’s bear it, to see their wife or husband in someone else’s arms. Such a beautifully tragic love story. It makes all the silly, tired love triangles, like the one with McSteamy and Lexie, seem so very shallow by comparison.

Clacked by Meredith O'Brien
on Apr 20, 2012 @ 13:34 EST5EDT