‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Season 19 Episode 3: Sex Education (RECAP)
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[Warning: The below contains major spoilers for the Grey’s Anatomy Season 19, Episode 3, “Let’s Talk About Sex.”]
The new intern class on Grey’s Anatomy probably would have chosen scut work any day over their assignment in the October 30 episode, Season 19, Episode 3, “Let’s Talk About Sex.” Yes, Addison (Kate Walsh) is in town, and she, Bailey (Chandra Wilson), and Jo (Camilla Luddington) are having the interns record sex-education videos in the lecture room for teenagers’ edification. And there’s even a live audience of teens who are… well, less than captivated by the interns’ flat reading of sexual health facts. (“You turned it into ASMR,” a frustrated Jo tells the interns.)
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Addison recognizes Adams (Niko Terho), since — as we now know — Adams was Derek’s nephew. She greets Adams as “Shep,” but Adams interrupts her and addresses her as “Dr. Montgomery,” doing his best to hide his familial connection to the Shepherds from his fellow interns.
It wouldn’t be Grey’s though, if a medical emergency didn’t interrupt the proceedings. A teen named Diamond collapses in the lecture room, and a scan reveals she has an emergent ovarian torsion. Addison and Bailey both get surgical privileges to fix the torsion — though Richard (James Pickens Jr.) teasingly asks Bailey for her résumé and references.
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Addison also helps out when a teen named Lucia runs out of the sex-ed seminar in tears. Turns out, Lucia had unprotected sex with her boyfriend one time, and that’s the one time it took for her to get pregnant. Addison and Levi (Jake Borelli) prescribe Lucia pills for a medical abortion and guide her through the process.
Back at the seminar, the interns have a breakthrough with the remaining teens after Kwan (Harry Shum Jr.) drops a banana in the middle of a condom lesson, and Yasuda (Midori Francis) keeps the teens laughing by (literally) throwing free condoms at them. Then Millin (Adelaide Kane) finds an apt analogy to describe porn as unrealistic: “Porn is to actual human sex as The Fast and the Furious is to actual driving,” she argues.
Millin also has the idea of spicing up the sex-ed videos with music and dancing, and the next thing we know, the Grey Sloan docs doing goofy dance moves while pointing at imaginary captions in the air.
“What are we pointing at?” Richard asks.
“Oh, the facts,” Bailey responds. “We’ll put them on the screen later.”
“If you say so!” Richard says, keeping the dance moves coming.
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Speaking of intern storylines, Griffith’s (Alexis Floyd) grandmother, Joyce Ward, shows up at the hospital, looking for her daughter, Denise Griffith, whom she says is having a baby at the hospital. Adams, not realizing Joyce is his fellow intern’s grandma, tries helping her. But he gets an inkling that something is amiss when Joyce says that her daughter was headed for “Seattle Grace Hospital,” Grey Sloan Memorial’s former name. Then Adams pulls up Denise’s medical record and sees that the record is from 1995.
Eventually, Joyce and Griffith come face to face, and Joyce calls her Denise, her mother’s name. A tearful Griffith then heads outside to have a moment to herself, and that’s where Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) finds her. Meredith tells Griffith that her mother had Alzheimer’s, and she gives Griffith advice about dealing with Joyce’s dementia: “Living in her reality is the most humane option,” Mer says.
And with that, Griffith goes to find Joyce, who by that point is playing cards with Adams. And when Joyce calls her Denise, Griffith doesn’t correct her. And Griffith also tells Joyce that she just delivered a daughter, a girl named Simone.
So now Adams knows that Griffith’s mother died at the hospital. And Griffith tells him that she looked him up online and knows that he’s a Shepherd. They agree to keep each other’s secrets.
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By the way, Zola (Aniela Gumbs) — who, you might recall, had a panic attack last week on Grey’s — is hanging out at Grey Sloan in this episode. She gets bored with her homework, though, and wanders off to find the gallery so she can watch surgeries, but she runs into Nick (Scott Speedman) en route. Nick keeps her occupied by letting her play with neurocognitive puzzles, and to his surprise, she aces each one. Nick pulls in Maggie (Kelly McCreary) and Kai (E.R. Fightmaster) — who is in Seattle to spend time with Amelia (Caterina Scorsone) — to watch Zola go. And then they page Meredith and tell her that giftedness like Zola’s could result in anxiety episodes like the panic attack that Zola suffered. But Mer is just pissed that her colleagues evaluated Zola without Mer’s consent.
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Meanwhile, Bailey tells Richard she’ll return to work — but under one condition. She wants to reopen the clinic as a reproductive health center, and she wants to teach there 20 hours a week and do surgery for the other 20 hours. Richard accepts that proposal.
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Addison is also doing her part to promote reproductive health amid the stripping of Roe v. Wade, but she’s exhausted by the work, and Richard correctly guesses that the Supreme Court decision has Addison feeling “erased.” So he invites Addison to his and Catherine’s house for dinner, telling her that she can have time to relax and recharge before fighting the good fight tomorrow.
And the episode ends with the Grey Sloan docs putting their sex-education knowledge to practice. Seems like all that talk of the birds and bees was quite the aphrodisiac!
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Despite their martial tiff, Owen (Kevin McKidd) and Teddy (Kim Raver) have sex after he finds an erogenous zone on her body that he didn’t know about (and after she gives him enthusiastic consent). And at Jo’s apartment, Link (Chris Carmack) massages her feet, another erogenous zone, and that foot rub seems to send Jo into ecstasy. Amelia and Kai get down and dirty in a hotel room, while Millin and Kwan exchange a sultry glance in the locker room and head to an on-call room to hook up “just this one time.” Plus, Adams and Griffith seem to have sexual tension down in the Grey Sloan tunnels as they practice suture knots on their scrub drawstrings. (Yes, it’s weird foreplay.)
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And after Mer and Nick take Zola home — and Nick gets Mer to forgive him for evaluating Zola’s giftedness — they share a passionate kiss, too. Can you feel the love tonight, Grey’s Anatomy fans?!
Grey’s Anatomy, Thursdays, 9/8c, ABC
