Grey's Anatomy: Grey Matter

The Blog Between The Blogs:

I know, I know.  I said that I would say more.  Blog more. Tell you more stuff about the finale.  But a couple of things are going on.  Things I have to do before I can sit down and write properly.

One:  Private Practice begins shooting this week and I’ve got to make sure Addison is all taken care of.

Two:  The NATIONAL SPELLING BEE is this week!  NATIONAL!  SPELLING!  BEE!  Channel your inner speller or your non-inner speller and check it out on ESPN on Friday.  Why is this keeping me from talking to you about Izzie and Alex?  Because every year, I head over to my favorite website: http://throwingthings.blogspot.com/.  I head over there and I blog about the Bee.

Minute by minute. 

Now, if you don’t know what is super fun and crazy awesome about watching kids spell words, you have never seen the Scripps National Spelling Bee.  It rocks.  It rocks hard.

I’m not kidding.

I’m seriously not kidding.

The Bee rocks and I’m not saying that because it is on ESPN and ABC.  I’ve been a fan of the Bee for many years and this year, I’ll be at http://throwingthings.blogspot.com/ doing my best to write interesting commentary on the Bee along with the super smart and funny other bloggers over there.  Join us.

Come on…you know you want to…

And I’ll be back on Saturday to talk about the kissing.  When the Spelling Bee is over…

The End of the Beginning...

Original Airdate: 5-22-08

So that was Season Four.

Right after we finished filming the finale of Season Three, I sat down with the Grey’s writing staff and I pitched them the last scene of Season Four.  That’s how I do it.  I start at the end.  When Season Two concluded, I pitched the image of Cristina tearing off her wedding dress and crying in Meredith’s arms.  For this season, I knew immediately that I wanted more hope.  I knew I personally NEEDED more hope.  So I pitched Meredith standing on Derek’s land in a field of candles telling Derek where the living room could be, where the kitchen could be, where the kids could play.  Because I wanted them together.  I hated them being apart.  It made me sad.  It made me sad in a way that was bad for me and for everyone around me. 

But I also knew that, in order for Meredith to stand in that field of candles, she had to get there.  Inside.  Now I’m not an oogey inside person.  I don’t do warm and fuzzy and I certainly don’t believe in therapy.  For other people, it’s fine (yay, therapy!).  For me, not so much.  I write – that’s how I deal with my insides.  And Meredith, she performs surgery – that’s how she deals with hers.

But in order to get her to a place where she could stand in that field of candles, Mer needed a little help.   Professional help.  Which shocked my writers.  Cause they know how I feel about therapy.  But I knew something they did not.  Something I’d been keeping to myself for four seasons.  Which was the fact that Meredith sat on the kitchen floor in a pool of her mother’s blood after her mother attempted suicide.  See what I mean about me not being warm and fuzzy?  Nothing warm and fuzzy about pools of blood. Which is why I kept that detail to myself.  When you say things like that in a writers’ room, people tend to look at you funny.  People tend to suggest that YOU need therapy.  So I kept it to myself.  For four long seasons.  I didn’t even tell Debora Cahn, the writer of the episode in which Meredith CONFESSES her mother’s suicide to Dr. Wyatt.  Not until the last possible second.

We’d have these discussions about Deb Cahn’s episode in the writers’ room where everyone would ask “Shonda, what is Meredith going to TELL Dr. Wyatt in this last scene?  WHAT?”  And I’d be all, “I don’t know.  Stop talking about it.”  And they’d sigh and shoot each other these looks.  They love me but still, there were looks.

I’d like to point out that it is RUDE not to tell details like that to your writing staff.  It is cold and withholding, to use therapy-speak.  But I just couldn’t do it.  Because of two things: one, while I had pitched Meredith all whole and healed in a field of candles, I wasn’t sure I could get to a place where I BELIEVED that Meredith would ever go to the field.  And two, I love Ellis Grey.  Love her.  Even though she is dead.  I think she is fantastic.  And I couldn’t figure out, couldn’t fathom, what a mother says to her child when she is bleeding to death on the kitchen floor from self-inflicted wounds.  For a long time, I felt like anything she would have said to a five year old kid in that moment would make her a monster.  Because I have a five year old kid.  And I can’t imagine doing something so horrible and damaging to her.  What do you say to your child at a time like that?  Why is your child even there?  How do you redeem yourself in that horrifying moment?

And then I realized: be extraordinary.  Be an extraordinary woman, Meredith.  If you’ll remember, in Season Three when Ellis was lucid, she tells Meredith, “I raised you to be an extraordinary woman, Meredith and imagine my disappointment at realizing you are no more than ordinary.”  That’s what she says in the episode RIGHT BEFORE Meredith falls in the water and chooses to stop swimming.   To let herself go.   That was Meredith’s own pool of blood.

So suddenly, I had my answer.  Ellis would lie there in her blood and tell Meredith to be an extraordinary woman.  To not depend on anyone.  And she wouldn’t be talking about surgery.  But Meredith, at five years old, could not possibly know that.  And she’d become the surgeon in training who screws boys like a whore on tequila and then tries to drown herself.  Instead of realizing what Ellis actually meant -- don’t have ordinary love.  Have extraordinary love.  And that made it all possible.  It made it possible for Mer to stand in a field of candles because once she realizes that, her whole world opens up.  She can just stand there in her joy.

But like I said, I don’t do warm and fuzzy. So that last scene, it was hard for me.  To let her be oogey on the inside.  So instead, Meredith is screaming and pacing and cursing like a fishwife.  Because that’s how we do things at Grey’s.  She’s going to love Derek and be with Derek but she’s going to go in kicking and screaming.  And then I really didn’t want to just end with the two of them kissing.  Everyone said, “end with the kiss, end with the kiss, end with THE KISS.”  And I was all stubborn about it.  Because this episode, it’s not about the kiss.  It’s about the moment AFTER the kiss.  It’s about the moment when she’s standing in the field of candles alone having just DONE the thing she was most scared of doing.  She is free.  She is free.  And you’ll notice, there’s no voice over there, no Meredith telling us anything.  Because, for once, my girl Meredith is speechless. 

There were other kisses in the episode.  Maybe you noticed?  Callie and Erica.  Callie and Erica!!  My god, did we discuss this a lot around here.  Because Callie kisses a girl.   We had this really cool meeting with GLAAD where we talked about the idea that a woman could decide she had feelings for another woman after being perfectly happy with men and we all got joyous because the chemistry between Callie and Erica and Mark is hot and interesting and fresh and like nothing any of us had seen on TV before.  And we wanted it to be real – not some stunt to get people talking.  We wanted to see what would happen if a woman suddenly had feelings for another woman.  Because that has got to be surprising.  And it is for Callie who so likes men.  Who so likes sleeping with men.  You’ll be very surprised when you find out where this story is heading next season.  Because we don’t do things the easy way.  And none of this will be easy.  Not for Callie.  Not for Erica.  And not for Mark Sloan…

How much do I love Mark Sloan?  He’s a dirty pretty manwhore who ends up being a hero.  And I love him for it.   Not that he’s going to become a good guy.  He’s no white hat.  But for one moment, he did what he thought was the right thing.  Because if there’s one thing he understands, it’s getting turned on by someone.  And who is he to deny that?

Okay, there is more to say.  I have more to say.  About George and Lexie.  About Alex and Ava/Rebecca and Izzie.  About Bailey.  About the Chief.  About Rose.  And about Cristina.  Oh, do I have more to say.

But my fingers are tired.  From writing all the kissing.  So I’m going to end this now and post it.  But I will write more tomorrow.  I’ll finish what I started.  But right now, I’ve got to head into the writers’ room and pitch them the end of Season Five…

Thank you so much for watching the show.   Every single time you watch an episode, we are grateful.  You are all extraordinary.

Debora Cahn on "Losing My Mind"...

Original Airdate: 5-15-08

Why aren’t you crazy?  It’s a question that’s posed in the voice-over at the end of the episode, but at that point you’re (hopefully) so wrecked over the fact that Andre showed up and this poor woman’s in a coma and she’s never going to wake up and he was the love of her life and she was someone who thought she’d never have love, and then it happened and they were happy and on a boat, but she had a brain tumor, which is a good way to ruin a cruise for anyone, but he stayed with her, stayed, because he loved her, and he came home from his snazzy business trip to Singapore early to be with her in the hospital, but he’s just a little too late, because when he shows up, she’s already in a persistent vegetative state – YOU’RE WRECKED, so you don’t know that the voice-over says, “Don’t wonder why people go crazy.  Wonder why they don’t.  In the face of all we can lose in a day, in an instant, wonder what the hell it is that makes us hold it together.”

Why aren’t you crazy?

I thought I had it pretty bad in high school.  I thought things were pretty wild in my world.  There were parents, with a divorce, and my dad moved into an apartment next to a graveyard, and it was HIGH DRAMA and I couldn’t believe I was making it through.  Just getting from one day to the next.  Didn’t know how I did it.  And then I… I don’t know, read the paper, or a book or something, took my head out of my 16 year old butt, and realized my drama was sort of piddly and pathetic next to just about everyone in the universe, which momentarily made me feel better, and then made me just overwhelmed with the sheer volume of insanity in the universe.  I used to imagine these big thought bubbles around people’s heads that contained their stories.  Their life stories.  And everyone’s was so big, there wasn’t enough room for all of them along the cartoon horizon in my mind.  Especially in New York, where everyone was stacked on top of each other – the story bubbles over everyone’s heads just couldn’t be contained in the atmosphere over Manhattan.  I’d think about it and my chest would get tight and I’d worry the stories would eat up all the oxygen and we’d all suffocate. 

High drama.

Point being, isn’t it amazing that we hold it together?  I want to congratulate you all for acting like civilized members of an orderly society, given what you have seen in your lives.  We sit around every day coming up with stories for the show, and the craziest, most outlandish, you-can’t-put-that-on-tv-cause-it-sounds-fake-it’s-so-crazy stories come from the newspaper. 

Moving on…

I had fun with this episode.  The Bailey and Tucker fight was fun.  It was satisfying.  It was satisfying to write a fight where there’s no good guy and no bad guy and no mistake, just two people who love each other and want to make it work and can’t.  Because it’s really friggin hard to make it work.  And love and good intentions and good actions don’t always help.  It’s just hard.

The Andre thing was really fun.  We were putting together this story about a woman who was lonely and sad, and because of her tumor, crazy, and the crazy manifested itself in her fabricating a man to be in love with.  And she’d have this whole big happy love affair with a man who didn’t exist.  And then Shonda walked in the writer’s room and said, “Okay, fine, she can be in love with a guy who doesn’t exist, as long as he shows up at the hospital after she falls into an irreversible coma.”  That’s when I become filled with self-loathing, because I didn’t think of him showing up and being real the whole time, and then I decide I’ll leave writing and become an organic goat’s milk farmer, but I’ll stay long enough to write the Andre story because it’ll be fun.  And it was fun.  And I don’t really like goat’s milk, it has a weird smell.

And Mark’s new leaf was really fun, because I think Mark’s the most satisfying character ever.  He is who he is, and no matter how badly he wants to change, he can’t, because he doesn’t make choices, his behavior is written into his DNA, it’s as honest as rain.  I enjoy him so much.  I’m a big fan of Mark’s.  I think he takes a lot of crap from a lot of people – all that “he’s a manwhore” business.  He’s honest.  And he’s a fan of a good doink at a nice hotel.  He never claims otherwise.  But he seems so sweet and lost when he’s trying to be all romantic and sensitive man-ish.  It just warms my heart.

It was all fun.  For me, anyhow.  I like my job.  I told my husband yesterday that I get much happier as I get older.  I hated high school.  College was better, but not as good as after college, and my 30s are better than my 20s were – it just gets much better as I go.  I don’t feel crazy like I did in high school.  I still have stuff … you know, real life stuff, that in large piles makes people run screaming down the hallways throwing mashed potatoes at the walls.  I have it in small enough piles that I don’t really ever end up throwing mashed potatoes, but I have it.  But it never seems as bad as it did then.  I guess I learned to handle it.  Break it down.  Process it.  That’s what we learn, I suppose.  To handle things that seem like they’ll destroy us.  It’s sad, in a way, what we teach ourselves to accept.  What used to seem crazy, and now just seems… like what people go through.  I guess my point is, if you feel like you’re crazy, you’re in good company.  Because, take a look a around.  Why would sanity make sense?

Joan Rater On "The Becoming"...

Original Airdate: 5-8-08

Hi everyone, this is Joan.  Tony and I wrote this episode, "The Becoming" and I'd like to share some of my thoughts about it with you, but first I'd like to say ... OH MY GOD!!!!  I just saw some stuff that was shot for the Season Four Finale (that Shonda wrote) and it's soooooo good.  I don't mean to torment you and I really wish I could tell you all the cool things that are going to happen, and you should know the great restraint it's taking me not to give you even the tiniest little hint of what's to come (keep an eye on that champagne bottle from tonight's episode) because I have a big mouth and am really bad at keeping secrets so I can really relate to Izzie in this episode.

But enough about me and the Finale because first we have to get there and getting there is really what "The Becoming" is about.  Becoming who you want to be, who you know you could be if you weren't quite so screwed up or preoccupied with kissing when you need to be thinking about surgery.  All of our doctors are trying, really trying, to become these people they see in their head, the versions of themselves who are strong and successful and happy, their best selves.  Izzie wants to be a good doctor and keep the news of Ava confidential.  But how does she do that and be a good friend to Alex who is changing his life for this baby that doesn't exist?  Alex wants to be a good parent, but he himself didn't have very good role models so he's scared that he won't be able to do it.   George is trying to be okay with the fact that he has to repeat his intern year, and Cristina is really trying to make the best of a bad situation with Hahn.  And then there's Meredith.

Meredith wants to be a great surgeon.  She wants to succeed at this clinical trial.  But she keeps thinking about Derek.  Particularly his tongue.  Thoughts of kissing him keep interfering with the surgeries she loves.  So can Dr. Wyatt please give her some tools to make the thoughts stop?  Because Meredith feels like she has to choose.  Career or love.  She can't have both. 

I went to see my first therapist in my twenties.  She was this nice woman on the Upper East Side of Manhattan who told me, when I started whining about my lack of career, that most people she sees in their twenties are either good at career or good at love.  Not both.   And it makes sense, both things compete for your attention.  You want to spend time with your boyfriend but your boss asks if you can do some overtime.   How to negotiate both successfully is hard.  And I think when my therapist said it, she was trying to make me feel better, sort of like, "Yeah, you have no career but at least your boyfriend sounds very nice."  But it didn't make me feel better.  It made me feel competitive.  Because when I said, "Really?  You never see people with a good career AND a good relationship?", she said, "only a few."  Only a few.  That's all I could think about after the session.  Who were these FEW and how could I become one of THEM?  It was a subtle shift in my thinking, but I began to think less about my problems and more about how to fix them.  I started to imagine the new me in my head - she was a woman of action!  She didn't sit around all day waiting for things to happen!  She made them happen!  I'm making it all sound very purposeful and dramatic when actually it was ten more years of therapy that included much whining and many more hours of inaction before I had what could even be called a career .... but .... I think that Dr. Wyatt knows that Meredith needs to be pushed into action.  So Dr. Wyatt basically tells Meredith she's being a coward.  Derek's with Rose and it's not heroic to let the love of your life go.  It's cowardly.  How's she gonna handle it?  Because no one can fix this for Meredith but Meredith.  What's she gonna do?  I wish I could tell you --

And what about Mark?  When Bailey defends him to the assembly of nurses by saying, "You knew he was a whore when you slept with him, now you can't act all shocked when he behaves like a whore."  As everyone walks away, did you see the look on Mark's face?  It's like he's realizing what a whore he is for the first time and he's so sad.  A sad, sad whore.  What's he gonna do about that?  I soooo wish I could tell you --

I will tell you though that the Mark Sloan story was originally much smaller and much more a comedic runner until we had the read thru and Eric Dane brought such vulnerability and depth to his scenes.  We just had to expand that storyline.

And Cristina. Singing "Like a Virgin" while carving corpses. She just found out that Burke won the Harper Avery and she needs to not think. About how he's thriving while she's barely getting to do any cardio. And fo course, the girl who told depressed Meredith to 'dance it out' would sing in the morgue. And it works, she manages to get through the day without thinking about Burke until Richard calls her in front of the sexual harassment committee. She can't seem to escape Burke. And she lets loose. She's been so controlled, managed to stuff all her feelings about the Burke thing for so long but she can't anymore. She lets loose with her feelings and goes home and crawls into bed. This is a sadness that can't be danced off and I'd love to tell you what happens...

Also... for a while we had "American Pie" be the song Cristina sang, but it was weird, it's already sort of a mournful sad song we wanted something that really played against the corpses in the morgue thing...

So ... "The Becoming."

Season Four is about change.  Letting go of the old and embracing the new.  Redefining who you are and struggling like crazy to be that better version of yourself that you see in your head.  Becoming is hard -- it hurts like hell and can cost you friends and lovers and career advancement.  And some of our characters will succeed, and others will fail.  But all of them will try.  Because the alternative -- standing still -- just isn't an option. 

Like I said at the beginning of the blog, there's such good stuff coming in the next three episodes, and I'd love to tell you what's gonna happen, but I've taken an oath and must observe doctor/patient confidentiality, so I gotta go all Izzie on you.  You're just gonna have to WATCH!!!!

Stacy McKee on "Piece of My Heart"...

Original Airdate: 5-1-08

I have a confession to make. About the character of Addison: I love her. Not vagina monologue kind of love – but love none the less.

I love her sense of humor. I love her friendships with Callie and Bailey. I love how she’s always known exactly how to call Derek out on exactly whatever it is he needs to be called out on. I love how good she is at her job. I love that she’s basically Sloan’s McDreamy – even if his feelings aren’t reciprocated. I love that she loves potato chips. I love that she walks the hospital halls in heels that any normal woman would twist her ankle in… I love Addison. And I love that this was her episode to come back to Seattle for a visit.

The nice thing about bringing Addison back right now is that – she’s been gone a while. She hasn’t been privy to most of the Seattle Grace shenanigans since her departure. So she’s uniquely qualified to walk back through the doors at SGH and call things like she sees them. She can react the way we’re all secretly reacting to Derek Christopher Shepherd pining away for someone OTHER than Meredith Grey. She can notice just how much her good friend Callie seems to jive with newbie Erica Hahn… and Addison can get Bailey to admit (the way Bailey would NEVER admit to someone she saw and  worked with everyday) that she is really struggling right now, just to keep it together.

Addison is a perfect sounding board because a lot of our characters don’t have sounding boards of their own right now. Addison is a safe confidant. She can take in everyone’s uncertainty, their panic, their pain… and take it right back to LA with her when she leaves. No one needs to worry about their friends and colleagues at SGH seeing the cracks in their armor. Which is good. Because right now – there are a lot of cracks.

For instance, Izzie.  She’s floundering right now. She’s all on her own and trying to figure things out for herself – but “on her own” is not exactly a comfortable place for Izzie to be… She doesn’t have the same kind of connection with George that she used to have; he’s got Lexie now, and all of his other intern friends. Izzie’s not at the top of her game professionally – she’s not finding her medical stride like Meredith or Cristina. Izzie’s doing the opposite; she’s hiding out in the clinic where even there her patients are requesting different doctors. Then there’s Ava/Rebecca/Jane Doe. Izzie learns Rebecca isn’t actually pregnant, but what can she do with that information? As George and Lexie would say – she’s coded. Hard.   

Cristina’s also starting to crack as Erica continues to shut her down over and over and over. The moment in surgery when Erica gives Alex props, and not Cristina – after Cristina is the one who massaged the baby’s heart back to life – for me, that has always been a turning point for Cristina. In that moment, I’ve always imagined that Cristina’s world probably flashes before her eyes– Cristina can’t help but compare her relationship with Erica Hahn to how trusted and encouraged she always was with Burke. The moment leaves Cristina a little raw, which is why she’s able to confront Hahn later at the bar.  But even when confronted, Erica’s explanation to Cristina isn’t exactly something Cristina can take a lot of comfort in…

Then there’s Callie – and Erica. And the vagina monologues, which – actually – I’m choosing not to blog about. This is one story you should just watch and enjoy. Anything I might say about it now will simply step on your enjoyment of what’s to come, so…

On to Derek.  Who is all sorts of conflicted over working with Meredith on this clinical trial. On one hand, Meredith is finally shining professionally – and Derek doesn’t want to let her down. He wants her to shine, he wants to help her if he can… but on the other hand, he knows the reality of this clinical trial; he knows there are ridiculous risks. He also knows that the closer he and Meredith work together, the harder it will be for him if he can’t help her make medical history. She’s expecting greatness, and he isn’t sure he can deliver on that, which only feeds his anxiety about performing this first clinical trial surgery.

By the way, I would just like to point out that I’ve been writing on Grey’s since Season One, and Phillip, the clinical trial patient, is the first patient I’ve ever killed in one of my episodes. I made the mistake of mentioning this fact in the writer’s room one day, and I’m pretty sure that had something to do with Shonda’s insistence that Phillip must die (never mind that the story really doesn’t work if he lives. This is all about me. Obviously.) At any rate, I am no longer a patient killing virgin. Just wanted to point that out.

Finally, there’s Alex. And Ava. Or Rebecca. Or whatever you want to call her… Here’s something you should know about this story – we debated a long long time as to whether or not we should reveal in this episode – or a few episodes down the line – that Rebecca isn’t actually pregnant. In fact, even at our table read for this episode, it ended with Izzie looking at lab results, and uttering a little “Oh my god” – but nothing else. And you should have heard the reaction – WHAT DO THE LAB RESULTS SAY?!?!? – which, ultimately, is part of why we decided to at least answer that part of the question in the same episode we introduce it.

This is a story about Alex. Not about an unwanted pregnancy. Not about some unborn baby. It’s about Alex and what he’s getting ready to go through emotionally. What he’s willing and not willing to do. This is about his journey through the rest of the season – so we didn’t want to tease you guys with some faux pregnancy story that ultimately just felt like a stunt. By letting you know now that Rebecca isn’t actually pregnant – then letting you watch Alex take his next few steps forward from this point on… Suddenly the entire arc has a much darker, more interesting underbelly. For instance – think about that last image of Alex reaching over and touching Rebecca’s belly… SO much more weird and creepy when you know what Alex doesn’t. It’s a moment that, for Alex, is filled with something tender and sweet and maybe even a little bit hopeful… only… for us, so not.

Before I sign off, I just wanted to draw your attention to something addressed in this episode - the fact that an HIV positive pregnant woman, with proper prenatal care, has less than a 2% chance of passing HIV on to her unborn baby. It's a piece of medical information most people don't fully understand or realize (I know I didn't) -- including a few doctors. Which is pretty remarkable, really. If you're interested in learning more, you can click here: http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/perinatal/index.htm

And that’s that. Addison has come and gone. Ava’s pregnant, but not. Mer and Der are (sort of) killing terminal patients for sport. Callie may or may not be speaking vagina monologues. And – I just realized – if you’re reading this before watching tonight’s episode then… well… I just spoiled a bunch of stuff for you – which is your fault for reading the blogs before watching the episodes anyway! Two words: Ya Coded.