Grey's Anatomy: Grey Matter

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!!!!

Joan Rater is "Wishin' and Hopin'"

Original Airdate: 2-1-07

So … Tony, my writing partner who also happens to be my husband had brain surgery last year.  He’s fine.  Totally fine.  But it was brain surgery and there was a chance that he wasn’t going to be fine.  And Tony has a good brain.  The kind of brain that remembers everything.  And I mean, everything – names, dates, entire casts of television shows from the 70’s.  His whole family is scary smart, trivia contest winning smart, and even they acknowledge the superiority of Tony’s Brain.  So, when Tony was about to have his head cut open we were all worried about Tony’s Brain.  What if it isn’t the same?  Who is he if he isn’t the guy who knows everything?

During this time, I discovered something about my brain.  Stress - especially the stress of having a husband about to have a craniotomy - makes me forgetful.  The name of my kid’s teacher would suddenly elude me.  The lyrics to a song.  I’d go upstairs to get something but forget what I was there for.  There was one day, a few days before his surgery, where I was standing at an ATM unable to remember my PIN number.  The PIN number I’ve had for 10 years, the one I punch in without thinking everyday.  I needed money for parking but my secret code eluded me.  So I had to call a friend to bring me money.  I knew it was just the stress of the surgery, but still, while I waited on a street corner for my friend, I felt frustrated and embarrassed. 

I tell you these things about Tony’s surgery and my stressed out brain because those scary, frustrated feelings were on my mind a lot when I was writing this episode. This episode was obviously about a lot of things, but for me, it was really about Alzheimer’s disease.  How devastating it is to families, how it turns spouses and children into caretakers, how it robs people of their memory, their identity.
 
The concept of someone with this disease having a lucid day is real.  The disease varies for everyone, but experts we talked to said that patients have bad days and good days and then sometimes they have great days where it seems like they are their old selves.  Maybe it’s a moment, maybe an hour, for some a whole afternoon, but we were fascinated with the idea of getting this time, this gift, and knowing that it’s only temporary.  What would you do with that one day?  And what would it mean for Meredith? 

The words “ELLIS HAS A LUCID DAY” have been up on the board in the writers’ room since last season.  We knew it was a cool idea - what it would mean for Mer and Ellis to be able to connect again – but we never really knew what to do with it.  I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve tried to put it in episodes but it never felt quite right.  If you’re going to give Meredith her mother back and then take her away again, you’d better have a pretty good reason.   Last season Meredith had her hands full with the Derek/Finn of it all.  The beginning of this season was so much about the aftermath of Denny.  But now it feels to me like the interns are entering a new period, a period that is really about identity.  Who are they as surgeons?  Can they have a life and a career?  Can they be happy?  Meredith is … or at least she should be. She and Derek are together and she finally has a chance at happiness.    Perfect time for her mother to show up. 

I really mean that.  Not because the writers love to torture poor Meredith, but seriously, if Meredith is ever going to be happy she’s got to deal with the fact that she had a really terrible childhood.   

On the set, when we were shooting the scene where Ellis Meredith what happened to her -- and tells her how disappointing it is that Meredith turned out so ordinary -- after the first take when the amazing Kate Burton really just went all Ellis Grey on Meredith, there was this silence. It was so awful and raw and ugly, these terrible things Ellis was saying.  And the silence was broken by someone on the crew who said, “Oh, now I get all the drinking and the sex with inappropriate men.” And it was cathartic to be on the set when Meredith finally stood up to her and said,  “You want to know why I’m so ordinary?  What happened to me?  You.  You happened to me.”  I think Ellen’s work in this episode, especially in that scene, is exceptional.

And then finally, Ellis and Richard.  With him she lets her guard down and we see her be vulnerable.  And when she tells Richard that she wishes she could do things differently, she made so many mistakes, if she could do it all over, she’d be fine with being happy, like Meredith says she’s happy, that she’d be satisfied to just be ordinary … Shonda took the final pass on that scene, and the actors did a remarkable job with it. It gets me everytime I watch it.

Because that’s really what it’s all about.  We have to cherish the time that we have here, and love the people who surround and support us, even if they make us crazy.  Because things happen.  Brain surgery, and Alzheimer’s and weddings.  And the worst thing is to come to the end of your life and realize, like Ellis, that you should have tried harder.

I know this isn’t an ordinary blog – there’s so much that happened in this episode that I didn’t talk about.  But this wasn’t an ordinary episode.  And I just wanted to give you a little window into what I was thinking about when I wrote it.

From Joan Rater, one of the writers of "Deterioration of the Fight or Flight Response" (hour 1 of the 2 hour finale)

Original Airdate: May 15, 2006 (Note: The second hour of the two hour finale, titled "Losing My Religion," was written by Shonda, and she will be sharing her thoughts on that one herself in a bit...)

I know, I know, I KNOW!!!!!!  Denny's dead and it sucks.  More than sucks.  Blows.  Feels awful and empty and seriously, why couldn't Denny have lived?

Well, if you'd been hanging around the Writer's Room in March you would have heard the writers asking that very question, day after day.  Does Denny really have to die?  There was one particular day when most of the writers had decided that Denny couldn't die.  He had to live. Seriously.  Why not?  And when Shonda came into the Writer's Room and Krista said, "Does Denny have to die?", I think Shonda's head almost exploded because it was about the 12th person that day who had asked the very same question.  And here's the thing.  The person who wanted Denny to live the MOST is Shonda.  We all love Denny because he's so charming and Denny-ish and the actor is even more charming and Jeffrey-ish, but let me tell you there was no one more tortured and torn up about it than Shonda.  So you say to yourself, okay, you're the writers, you could have saved him if you wanted to.  But we couldn't.  Denny had to die. And not for plot reasons or anything like that, it's just ... it's hard to explain.  As bad as it felt, it also felt right.  “Right” is so the wrong word, but it felt inevitable.  But since Denny didn't die until hour two, and Tony and I wrote hour one, I'll leave it to Shonda to talk more about Denny ...

What I really want to talk about is you guys.  The fans.  I mean, we all know it was one hell of an emotional roller coaster, these last three episodes.  And a lot of things are still up in the air … Mer/Der/Finn in particular.  I watched last night with my nieces and nephew who literally were begging me for something, anything about next season.  I so wanted to tell them that no matter what happens with Izzie, or who Meredith picks, it's all going to be alright (I'm a mother, I have 2 kids, so I'm inclined to want to make it all better and for there to be band-aids put on skinned knees and happy endings at the end of stories).  But before I became a mother, I was a single woman living in New York City through most of my twenties.  And I know from experience that before the happy ending there's a lot of bad choices, bad luck, one night stands and tequila.  Not to mention amazing, magical times that make all those bad choices and one night stands worth it.  Your twenties are when you figure out who you are, and what matters to you.  You're forming friendships that will sustain you.  You're making plans.  Looking for your soulmate.  Wondering if there is such a thing as a soulmate. These interns are struggling with all that while learning to be surgeons.  I started this paragraph saying I wanted to talk about you guys, the fans, and I ended up talking about myself (something Tony says I do a lot).  I guess it's because when I read your comments, I can relate.  I might not agree, but I usually get and appreciate how you feel and where you're coming from, even if it's an angry rant about how dare we kill Denny.  Seriously, you guys, we feel it too.  All we're trying to do is do right by these characters, and write stuff we'd want to watch.

So I’ll leave you with what I told my nieces and nephew last night about next season:  It’s gonna be great.  You’ll laugh … and cry … and hate our characters one minute … and love them the next.  And throw things at your TV. 

And we'll keep doing our best to bring you stories about the messiness of being human.

From Joan Rater, one of the writers of "Tell Me Sweet Little Lies..."

Original Airdate 1/22/06

Since the theme of last night's episode was lying, I'll start out with a little bit of truth here - writing this blog kind of terrifies me. It's clear from comments Kip got about his episode last week that some fans are getting frustrated/upset with the whole Derek/Meredith/Addison triangle. I mean, he said he was going to try to work it out with Addison, but he keeps being McDreamy with Meredith. What's that about? In last night's episode he told Cristina that he can be nice to Meredith without being McDreamy. Right. He gets near Meredith and he's dreamy as hell. So is he just a big liar? I'd like to offer my two cents on that question, but first, let me introduce myself ...

My name is Joan, and my writing partner, Tony also happens to be my husband of twelve years. We’re the new kids on the staff, having just started this season. We come from writing much more procedural type stuff, like Law and Order, so it was a big shift to move to a show where we get to explore the personal lives of our characters. And I must say we love it. This group of writers is so passionate and committed about staying true to these characters. Even if the truth isn't pretty. So when we started work on this episode, we obviously looked to our own relationship for inspiration. Now, I haven't had an affair with Tony's best friend, and as far as I know he hasn't slept with an intern on the show, but since Tony and I work together and have been married roughly the same amount of time Addison and Derek have, we have a little insight into their relationship. There isn't a conversation that Tony and I haven't had; a subject that hasn't been covered; a story that hasn't been told, retold and then told again. I'm just saying, the day to day of a marriage can get a little monotonous sometimes – especially if one or both partners don’t constantly work at keeping things fresh. So … Addison slipped, Derek bolted across the country to start over, and he met Meredith – the woman who is quite possibly his soulmate.

Derek and Meredith were still in the exciting “getting to know you” stage of their relationship when Addison showed up. And once Derek made his choice and decided to try to work it out with Addison, his break with Meredith was abrupt … almost violent. Almost as if, like Rick the guitarist who lost his fingers, Derek and Meredith were forced to go cold turkey. And for any of you who have tried to quit smoking, there’s always that little voice in your head telling you, “C’mon, just one more cigarette. You can quit whenever you want. What harm is one more gonna do???”

Derek is telling the truth when he says he wants to work it out with Addison. But let's face it, he's not over Meredith. So here he is torn between two competing desires and so he does what we all do in these situations - he lies. And not just to Addison and Meredith. He lies to himself. “I can be friends with Meredith. Help her get her mother into the Alzheimer's clinical trial. Take her dog. I mean, it's just a dog. It doesn’t mean anything.” And the tragedy of the situation is that Derek actually believes it.

We all lie. More than any of us is comfortable with. And the joy of working on a show like Grey’s Anatomy is to explore characters we love, people we all recognize, as they struggle and fight and win and lose and take three steps forward and two steps back.