‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Season 16 Episode 17: Who’s Bribin’ Who? (RECAP)

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[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Season 16, Episode 17 of Grey’s Anatomy, “Life on Mars?”]

The One Percent strikes again! In Grey’s Anatomy Season 16, Episode 17—a.k.a. March 12’s “Life on Mars?”—a billionaire makes Koracick (Greg Germann) an offer he can’t refuse, and something tells us either Koracick or the hospital will pay a steep price for the windfall.

More on that in a moment, but first, let’s check in with those two spurned lovers. The episode starts with Jo (Camilla Luddington) and Link (Chris Carmack) waiting for the monorail, feeling jaded about love, and watching in disgust as two college students suck face on the train platform. Later, though, they’re surprised those lovebirds arrive in an ambulance: One of them, Brad, accidentally fell onto the train tracks. His guitar broke his fall, but he’s in dire shape, suffering from electrical burns and his compartment syndrome. The surgeons save him, but he’s facing weeks or months of recovery, and his girlfriend, Paula, isn’t sure she wants to give up her Rhodes scholarship to wait around. And now Jo and Link have even more reason to be cynical.

Ali Goldstein/ABC

Jo, of course, is upset that Alex left her for his first wife, Izzie, and their two kids. But she’s philosophical about the heartbreak—she’s grateful to Alex for loving her and believing in her. She says she can’t even bring herself to hate him. “I’m so mad, I’m so hurt, but I also know he’s the reason I’ll rise again,” she tells Link. (Alexa, play “Thank U, Next” by Ariana Grande.)

For his part, Link is upset that Amelia (Caterina Scorsone) broke up with him for being ambivalent about the idea of raising Owen’s (Kevin McKidd) baby. But Jo reminds him that he still has a shot at a happily-ever-after. “She didn’t push you away,” she says of Amelia. “She gave you a choice. I never had that.”

And at the very end of the episode, Link shows up to Chez Grey with a guitar in hand. He tried pulling a Brad and writing a love song for Amelia, but he’s not a songwriter. He is, though, a guy who can’t live without Amelia, and he tells her so. He says he doesn’t care if her baby is Owen’s, and she reveals it’s his baby anyway!

Too bad Teddy (Kim Raver) never got that memo. She was so sure that the baby was Owen’s that she made out with Koracick in last week’s episode, and now she’s being so awkward whenever she’s around both him and Owen. She confesses her misdeed to Maggie (Kelly McCreary), who would really rather not know the seedy details. “I acted impulsively because I acted on something that might not even be true,” Teddy moans.

Ali Goldstein/ABC

In a fit of anxiety, Teddy tells Owen that Amelia’s baby might be his, and he’s taken aback, naturally. She asks him what will happen to their relationship if he is the father, and he hems and haws. She thinks his speechlessness is all she needs to know. And when she vents about the whole situation to Koracick, they end up kissing again. Oy vey.

And then, when Teddy gets home that night, Owen is in the kitchen, preparing an intimate dinner for the two of them. He assures her that he’s with her for good, and that they’ll deal with whatever twist of fate comes their way together. “That’s my answer now,” he says. “That’s my answer tomorrow. And that’s my answer always.”

So in short, Amelia and Link are happily together again, and Owen and Teddy might be, too… as long as he never finds out about her hookups with Koracick.

Gilles Mingasson/ABC

Speaking of Koracick, he’s hosting a VIP patient, an Elon Musk-type billionaire inventor named Griffin Ford who’s in good graces with the Catherine Fox Foundation. His latest rocket stunt went horribly awry, and he’s hoping there’s a medical explanation for his lapse in judgment. His tests come back clean and clear, meaning the misfire was just human error. He bribes Koracick, though, telling him that he can expect a sizable donation to the hospital if he checks the brain scan again and finds something that could explain the accident.

Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) is irritated about the whole situation, especially because this Ford guy gets to have his own private floor of the hospital and her patient can’t even afford her insulin. (That patient suffers a retroperitoneal hematoma and dies on the table, by the way.)

Koracick asks Mer how to know which rules to break, hinting that he might be able to get the hospital a boatload of money to do a boatload of good. She tells him to trust his gut. So Koracick ends up telling Ford that he checked the brain scans again and found a possible aneurysm. “When will we know?” Ford asks. “When we see the size of the check,” Koracick responds.

Christopher Willard/ABC

Speaking of boatloads, Vic (Barrett Doss) tells Jackson (Jesse Williams) that she moved in with Dean on his houseboat. He’s frustrated with her, since he still thinks Dean was wrong to hit on Maggie at that dinner party earlier this season, and now Vic is living with him. Vic argues that Dean’s just a friend and that it’s no big deal, but he tells her that he’s too old to be dating someone who acts impulsively. (Um, buddy, check yourself.) He suggests that they just spend some time as friends, and Vic shows him the door, so to speak. “I have friends,” she says, curtly. “Bye, Jackson.”

And in other news, Richard (James Pickens Jr.) is flummoxed to see his old Pac-North office furniture being moved to Grey Sloan. Bailey (Chandra Wilson) tries to placate him by restoring his old Grey Sloan office to how it looked when he left, but that just sends him into a tantrum. Once Richard is done with his little hissy fit, he admits to her that he’s retiring from surgery, claiming he wants to step away “at the top of my game.” He conveniently neglects to mention his hand tremors.

Gilles Mingasson/ABC

Bailey and Meredith commiserate about losing their longtime friends, Mer saying she doesn’t know if she even wants to continue her career without Alex, and Bailey noting that she once wanted to outlast everyone in her intern class, Callie included. And now that Callie is gone and her mentor is leaving, she’s having a change of heart. “At some point, it stops feeling like victory and feels lonely,” she tells Mer.

Oh, and the maybe-manic DeLuca (Giacomo Gianniotti) is getting Bailey-mandated therapy, which seems like a step in the right direction… until he tries hitting on Jo at the bar and gets her drink splashed in his face. What a mess!

Grey’s Anatomy, Thursdays, 8/7c, ABC