‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Season 16 Episode 13: The Last Waltz (RECAP)
Spoiler Alert
Pick Us, Choose Us, Love Us!
For exclusive news and updates, subscribe to our Grey's Anatomy Newsletter:
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Season 16, Episode 13 of Grey’s Anatomy, “Save the Last Dance for Me.”]
Well, Catherine (Debbie Allen) did it: She had the Fox Foundation buy Pacific Northwest in Grey’s Anatomy Season 16, Episode 13—a.k.a. February 13’s “Save the Last Dance for Me.” And now all the Pac-North staff—Richard (James Pickens Jr.), Owen (Kevin McKidd), and Maggie (Kelly McCreary) included—have to interview for jobs at Grey Sloan. (And it was supposed to be Maggie’s first day at Pac-North, too.)
Koracick (Greg Germann) does the interviewing as Catherine takes a post-breakup trip to Paris, and he assures Richard that Richard’s job is safe: Catherine instructed Koracick to keep Richard on. Richard, resentful about being bossed around, tells Koracick to tell Catherine to go to hell. Later, Koracick makes a show of interviewing Maggie, but Catherine set her up with a job at Grey Sloan, too—although now Teddy (Kim Raver) is her boss. And Owen? Well, Koracick keeps him in suspense all day. Amelia (Caterina Scorsone) reassures Owen, though, saying that Owen won since he stole Teddy from Koracick.
When Bailey (Chandra Wilson) hears about Koracick’s shenanigans, she gets Richard, Owen, Jackson (Jesse Williams), and Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) to join her in a conference-room intervention. The five docs tell him they’re all willing to quit unless he agrees to their terms, and they represent some of the hospital’s best surgeons. Losing them would probably cost Koracick his standing with Catherine and his job as “chief of chiefs.” Their terms: Owen, Richard, and Alex get jobs at Grey Sloan, Maggie and Teddy become cardio co-chiefs, and Alex and Hayes (Richard Flood) become pediatrics co-chiefs. Koracick agrees.
Ali Goldstein/ABC
Meanwhile, DeLuca (Giacomo Gianniotti) and his team of residents are still struggling to figure out Suzanne’s (Suits alum Sarah Rafferty) mystery ailment. DeLuca brings in Dr. Riley (guest star Shoshannah Stern) a brilliant diagnostician who is deaf and has an interpreter on video chat. Riley is eager to discuss Suzanne’s case with Meredith, who is perfectly happy to meet her but a bit confused. Riley realizes that DeLuca lied about Meredith being the one who invited her. She threatens to leave, but DeLuca gets her to stay.
Riley’s plan to diagnose Suzanne is unconventional, to the least: Against Maggie’s judgment, Riley wants to stop all of Suzanne’s treatment—the antibiotics, antifungals, steroids, everything. Riley tells Suzanne that, being deaf, she has learned to listen with her whole body. When the medications are gone, she says, the disease can start talking. She even tells a story about her sisters to win the approval of Suzanne’s sister, Hadley. Suzanne eventually consents to the medication withdrawal, and only later does Riley tell DeLuca that she’s an only child.
Another patient-of-the-week storyline is that of Irene, an older woman (and ballroom champion) with stage IV colorectal cancer and abdominal pain. Schmitt (Jake Borelli), who’s back at work, discovers with Meredith’s help that the cancer has metastasized to Irene’s liver and lungs. Her doting husband (and dance partner) asks Schmitt for a favor, and Schmitt helps transform the hospital cafeteria into a dance floor so that Norman and Irene can share one last dance. The couple waltzes around the cafeteria as Schmitt and Meredith watch on, beaming.
Ali Goldstein/ABC
Mer later tells Bailey that she used to be the romantic one, the one who would set up a dance floor in the cafeteria. She says that she and DeLuca broke up the same day as her medical board judgment, and she woke up the following day only feeling glad that she could get back to work. Bailey’s take: Meredith didn’t lose her romance. She just did some growing up.
Schmitt later tells Nico (Alex Landi) that he wants a “dance partner” in life… and Nico doesn’t really get it. Nico also made a discomfiting remark earlier in the episode about him and Schmitt not being at the cohabitation stage of their relationship. Not good.
And the third patient of the week is a foster kid named Joey, a character from this week’s Station 19 episode. His arm is in bad shape, but he’s more worried about his siblings, whom social workers took away after Bailey called in a report. Bailey tries telling him that social workers often keep families together, but Joey reveals that his siblings aren’t biological kin: They’re just kids who survived a terrible foster situation together. Jo (Camilla Luddington) reassures him from personal experience, explaining the one-ring-phone-call system she and her foster siblings used to check in with one another from separate households. Jo also tells Bailey that Joey might end up thriving, especially since Jo and Alex came from tough childhoods. “It’s not hopeless,” she says. “It’s just not easy.”
Rick Rowell/ABC
Speaking of Jo, she’s freaking out this week because Alex hasn’t been returning her calls. And at the end of the episode, she’s disappointed to come home to an empty apartment. (Still no indication about how/if the writers are going to give Alex and Jo’s storyline proper closure.)
And finally, Amelia is nervous about finding out the paternity of her incoming baby, and she’s anxious for Link (Chris Carmack) to tell her how he’ll react to the news. But he won’t know until he knows. He also reminds her that she urged Owen to be with Teddy when Owen found out that Teddy was carrying his child, and so he’s worried about history repeating. At the end of the episode, Amelia texts him to tell him that she didn’t take the test and that she needs more time. Also not good. Here’s hoping she and Link won’t unlink.
Rick Rowell/ABC
Grey’s Anatomy, Thursdays, 8/7c, ABC
