Grey’s Anatomy Recap: Bad Romance

You know that line from The Devil Wears Prada, where Stanley Tucci tells Anne Hathaway, “Let me know when your whole life goes up in smoke — means it’s time for a promotion”? The same goes for Grey’s Anatomy. Anyone who gets everything they want at Grey Sloan needs to be on high alert, because some other part of their life is probably about to crumble before their very eyes. This week, that curse has come for Lucas.

I’ve really felt for Adams lately. Every time one of his classmates gets excited about a new surgical win, he’s forced to remember that he’ll be stuck repeating the year as they continue to advance. And for what? Because a patient died on his watch after he broke the rules and operated on a patient without supervision after his attending collapsed? We all remember Izzy cutting an LVAD wire and stealing a heart only to watch Denny Duquette die, right? Give us a break!

After weeks of sulking around the hospital and begging anyone who’d listen — mostly Richard — for help convincing Catherine to reverse his remediation, Lucas finally caught a break this week. Richard might’ve wimped out on talking to Catherine for fear he’d make things worse, but he pulled some strings and plunked Lucas onto Catherine’s service for the day instead. After all, why let someone else tell Catherine what a deserving surgeon Lucas is when he can just show her himself?

Just one problem: Catherine’s busy. She’s busy calling insurance companies. She’s busy attending to patients. She’s busy telling off — [checks notes] — POTUS, apparently? Now that, I would have loved to see. The point is that Catherine does not have time or the patience for Lucas’s desperate attempts to show off his knowledge and skills. Every time he tries to impress her while treating Navy, a patient whose transverse vaginal septum has flooded her uterus with blood from periods she didn’t know she was having, Catherine brushes him off with that trademark Catherine coolness and devastating side-eye. Ultimately, she tells Lucas that the only way to impress her is to find a surgical protocol that, to their knowledge, does not exist — one that’s less medieval than the only option we have in the United States. (Typical, both of Catherine and the U.S. medical system.)

Poor Navy. As if it isn’t bad enough that she’s got a cute surgical resident talking about her uterus, her best friend is also chatting up the boy she likes (the latter of whom still has the nerve to entice her with a request for tutoring). I’m guessing they will not be signing one another’s yearbooks by the time all of this blows up, but for right now, Navy’s too worried about Lucas operating on her to notice. Because, surprise, he actually did find a miracle protocol from Australia. But when Lucas sees how mortified Navy is at the idea of him looking at her on the table, he does the difficult thing: makes up an emergency surgery and bows out to preserve her dignity. All of his showboating might not have impressed Catherine, but that does the trick.

By all accounts, this is incredible news. Adams will no longer be isolated from his class, which means he and his girlfriend, Simone, can advance together and plan their careers side by side. And the timing could not have been better, considering how she’s been asking him to move back into the intern frat house anyway, right? … Right?!

Well, um, funny thing about that. You know how Simone is our new Meredith? As we know, that’s not just a product of her surgical skills and having a relative with Alzheimer’s. She, like Mer, also struggles with commitment. So when Lucas starts gushing about their futures (and planning way ahead), Simone takes a big gulp visible only to us and decides to pump the brakes on the moving-in thing. Instead, she asks Lucas to grab dinner with her at Joe’s. He’s too high on his big win to notice, so I’m guessing this will blow up next week or the week after. But in the meantime, sigh.

But enough about these two and their wavering attachment. Did anyone else notice what was going on between Jules and her new mentor, Winston, on the roof? Webber sure saw it in Winston’s eyes when they came back down. And like any good supervisor, he gave Winston a clear, if veiled, warning about it.

My question is this: Do we really want another intern/attending relationship? Is that where things are headed? Some of us suspected this was coming last year when Jules got all starstruck over the cardio attendings and later told Winston off for being dismissive about professional cuddlers. (Lol.) But watching Jules and Winston on the roof, I couldn’t decide if that’s really where this was going. Really, it felt like one of those “she’s looking at the view, but he’s looking at her” situations, which invites the possibility that Winston could pine after Jules for a while when she has no idea. I might like that a little better, but to be honest, I’d rather Winston just date that woman with the pugs that Webber was trying to set him up with earlier. At least she wouldn’t be a colleague!

I guess we should talk about more of the patients now, but to be honest, they were really boring — a real accomplishment, considering that one of them was a window washer who came crashing through the window. But there was no tension in any of these stories, no real sense that anyone was in danger. The window washer’s wife seemed pretty terrified, and so did Jules when Winston did his cardio-god thing, but still, my emotional experience of the surgery was a flatline. Our other patients, besides Navy, were a boy who desperately needed to fart and his mother, who got injured when the window-washing rig came through the window. In both cases, you never really got the sense that either was in any real danger. Mostly, it felt like they were there to kill time and facilitate some conversations between doctors, which, fair enough — this is a hospital drama, after all. But overall, they left me cold.

Really, most of this episode felt pretty lacking in stakes. Lucas and Simone fighting again is hardly momentous, and I’m reserving my feelings on Winston and Jules until things have a little more time to take shape. What else? Simone and Blue were fighting over roommate issues and resolved their differences by the end of the hour. Ben Warren wanted help studying for his boards, realized he has no friends in his class, and decided to buddy up with Taryn, who has a lot more work and less support after Levi left for Texas. Together, Ben and Taryn played superheroes and led Fareed around the hospital to try and help him fart, which was cute in an instantly forgettable sort of way.

Not every episode can be a banger, but this one felt off. The puzzle pieces never quite fit together, and apart from Lucas’s hard-earned relief, it was hard to feel invested. Hopefully, this is just a blip while the show reorganizes its OR board. Speaking of which …

The OR Board

• I love the idea of Jules sitting up in a bell tower learning to play the carillon to fulfill a college arts requirement. I know she loved the view, but I’m guessing she also hooked up a lot in there!

• Blue letting his med-school roommate’s cousin’s boyfriend crash at the intern frat house without telling anyone is absolutely despicable behavior, but sadly, anyone who’s ever shared an apartment with strangers in New York has likely dealt with some version of this. (At least, that’s what I tell myself to cope with the memory of the year when I lived with not one but two roomies who spent months simultaneously renting out their rooms to random European tourists on Airbnb!)

• I know Ben didn’t mean any harm, but enticing your wife with a date night as a ploy to get her to help you study for exams should be a jailable offense. Let Bailey eat her takeout in peace!