‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Season 15 Episode 20: Everyone Needs Therapy (RECAP)
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[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Season 15, Episode 20 of Grey’s Anatomy, “The Whole Package.”]
And when we say everyone needs therapy, we mean it in the most affirming way possible. As we saw in Grey’s Anatomy Season 15, Episode 20 — April 4’s “The Whole Package” — many of the Grey Sloan docs could really benefit from regular sessions with a licensed mental health counselor, especially Owen (Kevin McKidd) and Jo (Camilla Luddington).
Let’s start with Owen. His sister, Megan (Abigail Spencer), shows up in Seattle with a patient named Caleb, conspiring with Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) to surprise Owen with his visit. But what she didn’t know was that Owen and Teddy (Kim Raver) are working together.
(ABC/Mitch Haaseth)
She assumes, understandably, that this means that Owen and Teddy have finally made good on their years of missed connections and sexual chemistry and that Koracick (Greg Germann) is just, like, Teddy’s realtor or someone (since she and Koracick are house hunting).
So imagine her surprise when she finds out Owen got Teddy pregnant on a one-night-stand one day after breaking up with Amelia (Caterina Scorsone) and one day before running back to Amelia to raise a foster child with her. “There is so much stupidity that my brain is struggling to take it in,” she tells him.
And later, after Owen has convinced Caleb to make use of his support system — more on that below! — Megan corners him in a stairwell and tells him to do the same for himself. “Owen, you’re not well,” she says. “Do the work to fix it.” (She also gives Teddy a lecture for house hunting with someone other than Owen.)
(ABC/Mitch Haaseth)
Caleb, by the way, is a veteran whose leg, penis, and scrotum were blown off in an IED blast. Mer and Jackson (Jesse Williams) give Catherine (Debbie Allen) the penis and scrotum transplant as a gift to cheer her up amid her radiation treatments. “My baby brought me a penis!” she exclaims. (And as if that weren’t awkward enough, Jackson also makes the mistake of characterizing the surgery as a different “ball game.”)
Catherine’s excitement wanes, however, when Caleb’s Army buddy Anna shows up and Caleb gets all embarrassed and angry, yelling at Anna to get out of his room. Catherine cancels the surgery, deciding that Caleb isn’t emotionally ready. But after Owen has his talk with Caleb — telling him, veteran to veteran, to give Anna a chance — Owen convinces Catherine that the surgery is what Caleb needs to move forward. Catherine operates, and she nails it, of course.
(ABC/Mitch Haaseth)
Meanwhile, Jackson and Mer get ready to fix Caleb’s abdominal wall, and they bond over viewing Richard as more of a father than their actual fathers. Jackson says when he found out his mom has cancer, he thought he and Richard would be left alone, forgetting for a moment that he has his biological father in Montana. Mer can relate: When Thatcher was dying, she had to keep reminding herself that Thatcher was her biological father and not Richard. (Oh, and Mer bails on their surgery — since it’s a marathon slog and she already won the Catherine Fox Award for the same operation. She tells Jackson she doesn’t “need to go to the moon twice.”)
Speaking of Richard, he’s working on a routine laparoscopic appendectomy with DeLuca (Giacomo Gianniotti), which becomes very un-routine when DeLuca finds dead bowel and diagnoses the patient with Meckel’s diverticulum. Richard calls it an incidental finding and demands to take over, but DeLuca has been studying up and staples the intestine like it’s no sweat.
During the surgery, though, Richard asks DeLuca where he sees “this” going long-term, and DeLuca unfortunately starts talking about his plans for his relationship with Mer. An unamused Richard clarifies that “this” was DeLuca’s surgery career, and a sheepish DeLuca says he’s interested in general surgery. (Surprise, surprise.) Richard tells him he’ll put in a good word for him with Meredith.
Also, Bailey (Chandra Wilson) is back at work as Chief of Staff now that her stress sabbatical is over. She’s horrified to find that Alex (Justin Chambers) hasn’t been keeping up with his reports, but then realizes that he ingeniously outsourced all the pencil-pushing to the interns. “Karev did something better than us,” she tells Richard. “And he can never know,” Richard responds.
(ABC/Mitch Haaseth)
Bailey also spends the day shepherding a group of three STEM-inclined high school girls around the hospital. The tour goes wrong at every turn, though. Bailey goes to introduce the group to Amelia just as Amelia is bragging to Maggie (Kelly McCreary) about all the endorphins she’s getting from her and Link’s (Chris Carmack) sexcapades. (Seeing the teens, an embarrassed Amelia says, “Who can define ‘endorphins’?”) Then Bailey takes the group to the urology floor just in time for them to hear Catherine yell, “I’m not giving that man a penis today!”
(ABC/Mitch Haaseth)
And then the gaggle of girls is present when Maggie and Alex realize that they’ve been giving Gus, a young tumor patient living with autism, the wrong blood type. (It wasn’t exactly their fault, though: Gus has the world’s rarest blood type, Rh-null blood or “golden blood,” grouping him with fewer than 50 documented cases worldwide.) Bailey is embarrassed by all the foibles, telling the girls that she’s usually an “excellent Yoda,” but the girls are duly impressed how much of a boss she has been all day. “Better than Yoda, you were,” one girl tells her.
Now, about Jo. She’s been calling in sick for a solid week, distraught over her distressing and unfulfilling reunion with her birth mother and over the revelation that her birth father was a rapist. Alex asks Link to check in on her, so Link brings over Chinese food, washes Jo’s laundry, and does his best to lift her spirits… all to no avail. Jo tells him about how she and her mom are both “runners” when the going gets tough (which doesn’t bode well for Jo’s marriage to Alex, we think).
When Alex gets home from work, Jo is full-on drunk and laughing her ass off. Alex thinks this is a good sign, but Link says that he’s never seen Jo in a worse place. And unlike Owen, she doesn’t even seem to be contemplating therapy. We’re scared, Grey’s fans…
Grey’s Anatomy, Thursdays, 8/7c, ABC
