‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Season 16 Episode 19: It’s Time to Worry About Richard (RECAP)
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Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) is sick with the flu in this week’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy—which, frankly, is a triggering detail, given current conditions. But it’s Richard (James Pickens Jr.) we all need to worry about.
At the start of Season 16, Episode 19—March 26’s “Love of My Life”—Richard meets up with Maggie (Kelly McCreary) in a hotel lobby. He mistakenly calls her Meredith—which seems like a senior moment, right? Anyway, the docs plus Teddy (Kim Raver) and Hayes (Richard Flood) are all attending a surgical innovation conference—and Maggie mentions that Mer would be there, too, if she weren’t sick with the flu.
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Later, Catherine drops by Richard’s hotel room unannounced, and she finally offers him the sincere apology he’s been seeking from her. Richard assures her that nothing is going on between him and his old friend Gemma, though he finally tells her that Gemma kissed him at the diner. Now that they’re being civil to one another, Catherine confesses her spiteful acquisition of Pac-North was a terrible business decision since that failing hospital is hemorrhaging money. They share a laugh about their feud, agreeing that only Antony and Cleopatra had a more expensive lovers’ quarrel. And when Richard says, “Come here and kiss me, Cleopatra,” Catherine is happy to oblige.
Meanwhile, Hayes spends the conference flashing back to meeting his late wife, Abigail, when she was handing out pens advertising an erectile dysfunction drug at a medical conference. Hayes offers to take all the pens if it means he can buy her a drink. In the next flashback, we see Hayes reassuring Abigail before what he is certain will be a routine hysterectomy. And in the next flashback, Abigail is on their deathbed, giving Hayes advice on how to raise their sons.
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Back in the present, Hayes is having a drink with Teddy when a rep from an R&D company tries to pitch a partnership between his company and Grey Sloan. Hayes recognizes the name of the company: It’s the same company whose technology shredded Abigail’s fibroids in a way that metastasized her cancer throughout her body. Hayes illustrates his point by slamming his glass onto a “fibroid” ice cube, startling Teddy and scaring off the rep.
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Speaking of Teddy, she gets a blast from the past during the convention, as well. At the hotel bar, she’s approached by her old friend Claire. Back in the day, Teddy and Claire shared a New York City apartment with Allison, a.k.a. Teddy’s late best friend—and the namesake of her daughter—and Claire’s late girlfriend. But Teddy and Allison were also sleeping together behind Claire’s back… which, if memory serves, is the first we’ve heard that Teddy has ever had a same-sex relationship! (By the way, Allison is played by Sherri Saum of The Fosters and Good Trouble fame.)
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Late one night, after Claire was paged to an emergency at her hospital, Allison told Teddy that she was going to break up with Claire the following day. She also said she was sorry she couldn’t treat Teddy to breakfast at the Windows of the World restaurant. Yes, Allison worked in the World Trade Center, and the following day happened to be 9/11. In the present, Claire tells Teddy she knew about the affair, and she found out from Allison’s phone records that Allison had tried calling Teddy in her final moments.
The following day, Teddy approaches Claire over breakfast to apologize. Claire says there’s no need—she just drank too much last night, and bygones are bygones—but Teddy persists. She says she knows Allison loved Claire, and she suggests that perhaps Allison was in love with them both.
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Maggie also sees a familiar face at the conference: a hottie named Winston who was one of her residents at Tufts. He comes over and starts flirting with Maggie hardcore, telling her that he couldn’t help noticing she didn’t have a wedding ring. Teddy encourages her to go for it, especially since she had just compared the conference to an Olympic Village where super-talented people are just looking to get laid. “Olympic Village,” she reminds Maggie. “Find out if he’s single, and get yours.”
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So Maggie and Winston head to a hotel room for a little afternoon delight, and afterward, they get to know each other by the hotel pool. They establish that they both had mothers who recently died from cancer, and on a lighter note, they acknowledge that they held a torch for one another back at Tufts.
The next morning, after 12 romantic hours together, Winston asks Maggie to move to Boston to be with him or let him move to Seattle to be with her. He knows he’s moving fast, and when she says that she makes decisions with spreadsheets and lists of pros and cons, he says she can take all the time she needs to mull over the prospect.
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In his hotel room, meanwhile, Richard is poring over his presentation for the conference, with Catherine’s help. But then, as he talks to her, Catherine vanishes into thin air. Yes, he’s been having a conversation with an imaginary Catherine.
And when Richard gets on stage to start his presentation, he makes a bold claim: With his wife’s help that morning, he has figured out how to cure cancer. He starts babbling about cells with positive and negative charges, and he shows inscrutable and irrelevant doodles on the projector, including—embarrassingly—a heart with a crossed-out Catherine in the middle.
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Catherine, Bailey (Chandra Wilson), and Jackson (Jesse Williams) are watching a live feed of the presentation at the hospital, and Catherine is confused when Richard mentions that she helped him that morning. She suspects he’s drunk.
In the auditorium, Maggie rushes to the stage with Hayes and tells Richard that he’s not feeling well. She thinks he’s having a stroke.
And with that, the episode ends with a shot of Richard being wheeled out of the convention on a gurney.
Next week, the Grey Sloan team swings into action to help the elder statesman of the hospital. See you then, Grey’s fans! Stay safe!
Grey’s Anatomy, Thursdays, 8/7c, ABC
