‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Season 18 Episode 5: Death Returns to Grey Sloan (RECAP)
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Never mind all those mini-crossovers from seasons past: The episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and Station 19 tonight, November 11, show how the medical drama and its firefighter spinoff can work in tandem and make Seattle’s first responders seem like family.
The teasers for this week’s crossover event promised that someone would die, and it didn’t take long for Grey’s Season 18, Episode 5—“Bottle Up and Explode!”—to reveal who.
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Grey’s Anatomy Season 18, Episode 5, “Bottle Up and Explode!”]
In case you didn’t watch Station 19, the backstory is that a construction worker nicked a gas pipeline, and the resulting blast took out an entire residential block. But then Station 19 firefighter Victoria (Barrett Doss) got electrocuted by a wayward power line, and her colleague Dean Miller (Okieriete Onaodowan) got caught up in a second explosion.
The first explosion is so strong, Grey Sloan Memorial gets a nasty jolt. Owen immediately assumes it’s a bomb, and he puts some of his veteran patients to work, asking them to set up a triage outside the hospital.
But the hospital isn’t overrun by patients. In fact, only two ambulances arrive at the ER. One carrying Victoria, and the other drives up with its lights and siren off. “No siren, no rush,” Bailey (Chandra Wilson) rues. “There’s a dead person in there.”
ABC
That dead person, heartbreakingly, is Dean. Ben (Jason George), who tried resuscitating his friend and colleague with CPR on the way to Grey Sloan, gets out of the rig and breaks down in Bailey’s arms.
But Ben has something to tell Bailey: He previously told Dean that he and Bailey would be the guardians of Dean’s daughter, Pruitt, in case something happened to him. But Ben didn’t tell Bailey about that arrangement because he didn’t think anything would happen to Dean. (“You’re firefighters, Ben!” an astonished Bailey reminds him.) Ben argues that Bailey brought home foster kid Joey without telling him, but Bailey says there’s a big difference between an 18-year-old and a 2-year-old.
Later, however, Andy (Jaina Lee Ortiz) brings Pru to the hospital, and you can just see Bailey’s heart melting. Seems like we can add one more kid to the Bailey-Warren household.
And speaking of child contingency plans, Jo (Camilla Luddington) worries what would happen to Luna if anything happens to her, but Link (Chris Carmack) tells her not to worry. “That’s not even a question,” he says. “I’ve got her.”
As for Victoria, she’s touch and go for a bit. Her coworker Travis (Jay Hayden) wants to tell her about Dean’s death, knowing that she would want to know that news immediately. After he breaks the news to her, though, she goes into V-fib. Luckily, thanks to Teddy (Kim Raver) and Bailey’s heroics, she pulls through.
Travis, however, knows that she won’t be OK emotionally, since she already lost her fiancé and now she’s losing one of her best friends. “I hate what she’ll have to go through, because she has already had to do it once,” Travis tells Levi (Jake Borelli) outside Vic’s hospital room.
Owen, meanwhile, gets overwhelmed by his PTSD and escapes to a supply closet, which is where Teddy finds him. She’s worried, but he assures her he’s OK—or, at least, he will be. He’s more worried about his veteran patients. “Somebody’s taught me how to manage my PTSD. Somebody taught you, too,” he says. “But nobody’s taught them, Teddy. Nobody’s helping them with anything. I need to help them.”
The other patient of the week, meanwhile, is Farouk, Megan’s (Abigail Spencer) son. He undergoes surgery to fix his constrictive pericarditis, and against protocol, Megan scrubs in so that she can hold her son’s hand while he’s on the table. The operation hits a snag when Farouk’s heart swells, but the crisis passes, and Cormac (Richard Flood) and Winston (Anthony Hill) are able to close him up.
Bonnie Osborne/ABC
And later, Cormac tells Owen and Teddy what’s been up with the hush-hush operation, and then Owen and Teddy tell Megan that they’re family and that they’ll be there for her through thick or thin.
Meanwhile, in Minnesota, Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) and Amelia (Caterina Scorsone) and their new colleague Kai (E.R. Fightmaster) aren’t having much luck with their Parkinson’s research. But they get an assist from an old friend: Tom Koracick (Greg Germann)!
Mer and Amelia are happy to see Tom and to have his help. Kai? Less so, because they were a grad student under Tom’s watch, and they’re all too familiar with his coarse edges. But David, the bankroller and hopeful beneficiary of the research, is thrilled least of all. Turns out, Tom slept with David’s daughter. But after Mer determines that Tom and David’s daughter slept together consensually, that she wasn’t coerced, and that there wasn’t a power imbalance between the two, she basically tells David to get a grip. “You’re really going to let a grudge interfere with groundbreaking research?” she asks.
Eric McCandless/ABC
She puts her foot down, and David relents, telling Mer that she reminds him of her mother, Ellis. He was there in 2003 when Ellis’s Alzheimer’s symptoms first became evident, and now he knows how she must have felt, since now he too feels less and less like himself every day.
After hours, both Amelia and Kai want to be the last to leave the lab, so we get to see more of their sexual tension! (You see it, too, right?)
Bonnie Osborne/ABC
Kai eventually decides to leave first, since they know they’re David’s favorite, anyway. Before they go, however, they ask Amelia about her family. Amelia says she has kids but that she’s single.
Kai reveals that they’re married, and Amelia looks crestfallen. But then Kai says, “To this lab. I’m married to this lab. This lab is so mad I’m leaving early.”
And in other romantic news, Meredith meets up with Nick (Scott Speedman) for a rooftop date after their workdays end. Nick, who had given Mer some advice about David earlier in the day, says that he’s glad she wasn’t fired. And then they kiss! Never mind all that death and despair at the start of the episode—you know we can never go too long without a makeout sash!
Grey’s Anatomy, Thursdays, 9/8c, ABC
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