Grey's Anatomy: Episode 5.17 "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" Recap

  Tonight's episode of Grey's Anatomy episode begins with Derek (Patrick Dempsey) wallowing in his own misery in the middle of Meredith's filthy living room, take-out cartons strewn everywhere around him. He has been avoiding going to work and instead eating all of Alex's marshmallow cereal out of the box. He is taking the aneurysm patient's death from last episode very hard, especially since her husband is suing him for malpractice. (Remember how he called Derek a murderer?) Meaning, it's raining and thundering outside, but if Grey's Anatomy were really trying to go for realism, it should be snowing. (We've gotten a really unusual amount of snow in Seattle this year.) Cristina (Sandra Oh) is at the hospital and sees Major McHottie (Kevin McKidd) taking a nap on a gurney in the hallway. She walks up to surprise him, but he wakes up with a start and throws her across the hallway into the shelves of supplies, resulting in a gash on her elbow. She doesn't take the accidental attack personally, aware of his PTSD. Instead, she reminisces to him about how once had a bad dream once and woke up pulling Meredith's hair. However, Major McHottie is spooked and spends the rest of the episode avoiding her, so as to protect her from his uncontrollable, war-learned violence. Izzie (Katherine Heigl) still has her patients working on diagnosing Patient X, which arouses the curiosity of her fellow residents. Cristina is annoyed that Izzie is stealing all of her minions, and jokes that if Izzie doesn't get more time in an actual OR, she might become the next O'Malley. Alex (Justin Chambers) jumps in to defend his girlfriend. Bailey (Chandra Wilson) assigns the residents to their various surgeries. Meanwhile, Richard (James Pickens Jr.) is passive-aggressively bitchy toward Bailey because she applied for a peds surgery fellowship last episode, against his wishes. Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) and Cristina are with Bailey today, and their patients are two sisters and a brother, whose family has been ravaged by cancer. They each have a three in four chance of developing cancer themselves, so they have come in to the hospital to have their stomachs pre-emtively cut out. Only, it turns out that only the eldest sibling wants to do the pre-emptive surgeries. As soon as other two Siblings of Cancer find out the consequences of having a gasterectomy, like dumping syndrome and anal leakage, they're all like, "Woah, hey, I didn't sign up for anal leakage." But the older sister demands that they all do it to avoid dying a slow death like their mother and the rest of their family. Alex and Major McHottie's trauma patient is a marching band girl, Band Geek Beth, who had a grand mal seizure on the football field during a marching band performance. She is still seizing when she is brought in and doesn't respond to meds, so McHottie decides to shock her, even though it might kill her. After a very tense moment, she finally regains consciousness. She wakes up and bemoans the fact that she seized in the middle of the performance. Two fellow band geeks, the Seizure Patrol, are very angry that their performance was ruined, as the band is favored to win some kind of marching competition. These two are about seventeen kinds of mean, but it's probably because they look much, much older than high school students. Mark (Eric Dane) is out of commission, surgery-wise, since his hand was hurt in his fight with Derek last episode. That, coupled with the fact that Derek isn't showing up for work, makes Richard stress out about getting all the surgeries done, until Dr. Nelson, a.k.a. "Shadow Shepherd" steps up to do a craniotomy. Nelson is a bespectacled, diffident sort, who used to be the head of neurosurgery before Derek swooped in with his red cape from New York. He has been at Seattle Grace for 10 years, but nobody seems to remember him, which explains why we have never seen him before on Grey's Anatomy. Izzie, since she is soon to be poor, dear, departed Izzie, gets nostalgic and misty-eyed at random times during the episode. She tells Alex that he'll grow up to be a great surgeon some day, and she tells Cristina and Meredith in the cafeteria that she can just see them years from now, in a nursing home together, talking at each other but not listening just like always. Bailey, Richard, Meredith and Cristina take out the stomach of the oldest sister and find that she has stage one cancer. Richard is still being a pain in the ass, undercutting Bailey's suggesting to use a stapler, rather than hand-sewn sutures, to patch up the patient's stomach. He gets all up in her face, saying that she shouldn't be calling the shots in a surgery (that I'm sure she's done a thousand times) since she'll be going to peds anyway. After the operation is over, the doctors tell the other two Siblings of Cancer that they caught their sister's cancer at such an early stage that the gasterectomy was probably curative. This puts the fear of God into the other sister, making her immediately change her mind. Now she wants the surgery. Band Geek Beth starts coding and then has a seizure, which isn't the normal way an epileptic seizure usually happens, leading Alex to believe that she actually has a heart condition instead of epilepsy. He wants to do a cardio workup, which involves shocking her heart. Arizona Robbins doesn't agree because if the girl's heart is fine, it could kill her. Major McHottie, once again, exhibits the flimsiest backbone ever for a trauma surgeon, and leaves the decision up to Alex. Back at Patient X Central, the interns think that Patient X might be fine, but Izzie angrily tells them to keep looking because there is something definitely wrong with her. George (T.R. Knight) finally gets to say more than one syllable at a time. He and Izzie have a nice moment in which she praises him on his work ethic and says that she would be proud to become the next O'Malley. But as soon as George starts to ask her what the deal is with Patient X, she runs off. During the cardiac testing on Band Geek Beth, Alex, Major McHottie and Arizona discover an irregularity in her heart beat that is causing her to have seizures. Alex was right all along! He stands at the ready with the paddles, just in case he was wrong, and he gets really emotional when Major McHottie says that he saved her life. In the surgery of the second Sibling of Cancer, Richard continues his adult tanty, yelling at Bailey and everyone else in the room that this is his hospital and everyone has to listen to what he says, God damnit! Afterwards, Bailey wants to talk to him about what his deal is, but he just gives her the cold shoulder. Yet another reason why Seattle Grace is falling in the national rankings: their chief of surgery has the emotional maturity of a kindergartener. The interns, thanks to Lexipedia (Chyler Leigh), correctly diagnose Patient X with cancer in the brain, liver and skin. The prognosis is five months at best with chemo. She has a five percent survival rate and is pretty much toast. Like a bunch of annoying ninnies, the interns want to know what their prize is for finding the correct answer, and Izzie yells that they don't get a prize every time they do something right. Being doctors is their prize. You know, these interns are dumber than a bag of rocks if they can't figure out that Izzie is Patient X. They also have the emotional maturity of a chief of surgery. As the third act begins, Adele walks into the hospital and demands to speak to Richard and Bailey. Apparently, Bailey tattled on Richard to her, so she came down in rush hour traffic to make him apologize to her. She sits them both down in a room and lays down the law: they will start acting like grown ups or else! Alex tells Band Geek Beth that she will be getting a pacemaker that will regulate her irregular heart beat, which will stop her seizures forever. She is overjoyed because even though she still has a serious heart condition, she can now lead a normal life and she won't be known as the sick kid at school. Once they see you as sick, she explains, that's all they see in you. The Seizure Patrol come in and bitchily suggest that maybe she should join another extracurricular activity since her seizure cost them the band competition. Alex sticks up for her, saying she is completely fixed, and that they are all band losers, anyway. Great scene. Lexie thanks Izzie for the big learning experience, diagnosing a patient from beginning to end. Izzie asks her how she would break the news to Patient X. She doesn't know. Lexie eventually says that she would tell the patient to screw the odds of survival and just live life. It's hard to tell what is meta-going on here because it seems nobody is actually talking about what they are really talking about, if you get what I'm saying. Izzie, I think, is actually talking about herself, but Lexie's "screw the odds" speech, I think is really about Mark. Arizona and McHottie compliment Alex on his good work. Arizona is duly impressed that he is rising to his potential, and she says that she can see him as the future of this hospital. He excitedly runs to Izzie to brag. It's very cute. He says that he doesn't want to be the future of this hospital if she's not there with him, so he tells her to get her ass in gear and start practicing surgery. Aww. She says she will, and gives him a kiss, but it's more of a good-bye kiss. Richard and Bailey work out their issues in the conference room. Bailey wants to know if Richard thinks that pediatrics is a "soft" specialty and that's why he's so mad at her. It seems to her like every time she does something he thinks as soft, such as having a baby, and leaving work to spend time with the baby, and going into peds to work with babies, he gets upset with her. I can hardly make myself care about Richard's stupid insecurities, so I don't remember what he says, but Bailey thinks that he might do with some softness in his personality. Richard asks Meredith's help in bringing Derek back. He knows that he is not fine, despite what she says to the contrary. She thinks sometimes people just want to be left alone, and Richard breaks the news to her that Derek is planning to propose to her. I don't really see how one thing has anything to do with another, though. Buoyed by what she said to Izzie about screwing the odds, Lexie runs to Mark and tells him that she may have broken his penis and his hand, but she really wants to work at their relationship. Marks says that Lexie didn't break him. He was broken before he met her, and she fixed him. As they leave the hospital together, Dr. Nelson asks Mark to have a drink with him, but Mark barely sees him, calling him John instead of Jim. Looks like Dr. Nelson is going to go back to being invisible again. I wonder what the point of that was? Arizona runs after Callie in the elevator. Callie is avoidy at first, but then Arizona asks her out. Callie plays coy and says maybe, she'll get back to her. But that was a fake out, because Callie immediately comes back to suggest tomorrow. Yay, sapphic love is alive and well at Seattle Grace! Meredith finds Derek at his trailer, miserable, drunk and hitting beer cans with a baseball bat. He moved all of his stuff out of her house too. She tells him that he shouldn't hide from his mistake, but he turns into a Jason Mesnick-size jerk, telling her that she is the one who is an expert at hiding and running away from problems. He accuses of her of not being able to commit to anything, which is totally unfair because she has been all about commitment this season. She tells him that she knows about the ring, and that she is not going anywhere. She is going to fight to keep their relationship afloat. He takes the ring out and hits it out into the open field with his baseball bat, then goes into the trailer and slams the door. What a jerk. Why must someone with such beautiful eyes be such a jerk? George offers his ear to Izzie. She isn't ready to tell him yet, but she needs to tell someone, so she picks Cristina because she's a robot and can take it. She doesn't say yet, though. The two women go down to the secret steam room in the basement and tells Cristina about her prognosis. Cristina, though she may be a robot, looks sad and moved.