‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Season 16 Episode 6: Pac North’s Got Good Bones (RECAP)
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[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Season 16, Episode 6 of Grey’s Anatomy, “Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard.”]
It’s Halloween on Grey’s Anatomy Season 16, Episode 6—a.k.a. October 31’s “Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard”—although, like Jo (Camilla Luddington) points out, nothing is scarier than Pacific Northwest General, the struggling hospital Alex (Justin Chambers), Richard (James Pickens Jr.), and Owen (Kevin McKidd) are trying to resurrect from the dead.
As the episode starts, Alex and Richard are trying to woo a group of potential investors, and when Jo shows up to scare Alex with her costume—she splashed fake blood all over her wedding dress—he ropes her into helping them. The docs’ hopes are nearly dashed when the construction crew working on a new wing for the hospital unearth a mass grave. Turns out, Pac North used to be a mental hospital whose employees dumped the remains of the patients without families. (“That sure explains why this place feels haunted,” Richard says.) Amid that creepiness, Alex and Owen also discover that the hospital has been using its own blood supply, and the blood had gone bad. (Sing it with us now: “Now we got bad blood.”) In spite of everything, the investors give Alex the funds anyway—since they’re impressed by how he handles chaos.
Kelsey McNeal/ABC
Alex is in a celebratory mood, and he gets an idea as he looks at Jo’s blood-stained wedding dress. Cut to: The two of them in a wedding chapel, exchanging vows again, having presumably mailed in their marriage certificate this time. When it’s Jo’s turn to say, “For richer or for poorer,” she says, “For richer or for pregnant.” Alex nearly chokes on his vampire teeth, but Jo is only kidding, luckily. Even by Grey’s standards, three pregnancies at once would be a little much.
Elsewhere, Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) is on her last day of lockup, after a judge ordered her to make up her missed community service hours behind bars during last week’s episode. She’s sharing a jail cell with Paula, a single mom who works two jobs to make ends meet for her family. She left her two kids alone one night when she couldn’t find a sitter to cover for her midnight shift, but her 8-year-old woke up and called 911 when he couldn’t find his mom. She also got a bit physical with a police officer, and she was arrested on the spot. So she’s not exactly crying over Meredith, whose biggest concern is the prospect of losing her medical license.
Mer wants to be sprung from jail early enough to find a costume and go trick-or-treating with her kids—who have been told that Mer is doing “sleepover community service”—but the prison guard won’t let her go without the paperwork from the court. (“You can go as Sad Mom,” he suggests.) The paperwork finally comes through, and Mer persuades the guard to let her use her inmate uniform as a costume. She heads home and reunites with her family, telling her sisters that her time in jail “was horrible.” Amelia (Caterina Scorsone) replies, “That was always my experience.”
Mer also tells her sisters that she’ll be okay if she loses her medical license. As long as she has her family, she’ll be fine. Oh, and she posts Paula’s bail. As she leaves, Paula salutes the empty jail cell, seemingly knowing Mer was her anonymous benefactor.
Back at Grey Sloan, there are two patients of the week. One is Austin, a student who was hit by a car and impaled on his plastic axe. Bailey (Chandra Wilson), Teddy (Kim Raver, and Koracick (Greg Germann) operate on him, and Austin loses his pancreas but lives to tell the tale. The other patient is one of Alex’s former cases: an 11-year-old named Mary Rose, who’s xeroderma pigmentosum makes her highly susceptible to UV rays. She has severe, infected burns on both arms, and her moms have no idea how she was exposed to sunlight. After Jackson charms her with his impression of Alex—which is actually pretty good—she admits she ran out of the house to rescue her runaway cat.
Jessica Brooks/ABC
In other news, Link (Chris Carmack) invites Amelia to lunch with his bitterly divorced parents to celebrate his “cancerversary,” i.e. the anniversary of the day his scans came back clean. His parents are entirely self-absorbed, and Link is flummoxed when they announce that—surprise!—they’ve gotten back together and they’re getting married again. Link and Amelia have news of their own, of course: Link tells his parents they’re going to be grandparents. But they’re only worried about whether her due date conflicts with their wedding date. Amelia observes that Link’s parents are making his cancerversary all about them, so once they’re back at Chez Grey, she makes him a plate of Halloween candy with a candle in the middle.
Also, Bailey tells Amelia about her pregnancy, and they compare notes about side effects. For Bailey, the biggest side effect is her tendency to cry about everything—including “Halloween Grinch” Koracick’s disclosure that his young son died just before Halloween.
Owen inadvertently mommy-shames Teddy when he hands over the intricate costumes his mom made for him and Megan. Owen doesn’t need Teddy to be supermom, of course, but she tries her best anyway, dressing Leo and Allison up like zombies. (“You dressed our babies up as dead babies?” Owen asks.)
And speaking of costumes, Schmitt (Jake Borelli) moves mountains when an adorable young patient tells him he wants to be a sunflower for Halloween. Schmitt laboriously creates flower petals for them both out of trauma gowns. Nico (Alex Landi), meanwhile, is dressed as Dracula, and Helm (Jaicy Elliot) quips, “Vampire and sunflower. That’s some serious kink.”
And Zola gives DeLuca (Giacomo Gianniotti) the brush-off when he tries to help her with her butterfly wings. She says that that was her dad’s job, and she’s worried about forgetting him. DeLuca tells her he never met Derek but has heard legends about him, and he tells her about Derek successfully removing on radiology tech Isaac’s inoperable spine tumor.
Fun fact: That Season 6 episode, “Give Peace a Chance,” aired 10 years ago this week. For all we know, we’ll see a Grey’s Anatomy Season 26 episode a decade from now that references this one! In the meantime, though, we still have the bulk of this season to watch. See y’all next week!
Grey’s Anatomy, Thursdays, 8/7c, ABC
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