{"id":1356,"date":"2010-11-14T12:31:56","date_gmt":"2010-11-14T16:31:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/?p=1356"},"modified":"2010-11-14T12:31:56","modified_gmt":"2010-11-14T16:31:56","slug":"greys-sunshines-scariest-circle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/2010\/11\/14\/greys-sunshines-scariest-circle\/","title":{"rendered":"Grey’s: Sunshine’s Scariest Circle?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lots of folks have been writing about how great Grey's is this season.\u00a0 Overall, I tend to agree that\u00a0the aftermath of Grey's \"9\/11\"<\/a> has given the writers lots of new directions to explore.\u00a0 But the ugly specter of one of those new directions reared its charming head in the last episode, \"Something's Gotta Give.\"<\/a>\u00a0 After watching the epi and connecting the\u00a0potential future dots of where it may lead, I'd prefer to rename it - Something's Gotta Go.<\/p>\n

What's gotta go?\u00a0 The specter of Sunshine's Scariest Circle that the writers left dangling in the deviant little brains of some of Grey's longtime fans, like yours truly.\u00a0\u00a0After all, all of the Grey's faithful know that Sunshine likes to draw circles.\u00a0 She'll show the characters (and us) the other side of some coin by completing an old circle (that viewers didn't realize was incomplete).\u00a0 Knowing Sunshine's obsession with circles is both a blessing and a curse for fans who get drawn into being armchair quarterbacks.\u00a0 Lots of those fans are people\u00a0like me - writers.\u00a0 It's\u00a0impossible to keep your mind from writing possible future epis based on what you know of the characters, the show and its creator.\u00a0\u00a0 The specter of the possible completion of the circle\u00a0Sunshine just dangled over our heads is definitely more curse than blessing.\u00a0 Or perhaps, it's all curse and no blessing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The first line of the circle looks innocuous enough.\u00a0 It even looks charming and natural.\u00a0 \u00a0Cristina saved Derek's life, didn't she?\u00a0 And saving him messed her up and\u00a0screwed up Meredith and Cristina's friendship.\u00a0 Now everyone is trying to push Cristina back to a place she's afraid to go.\u00a0 And Derek's having a case of convenient memory where he thinks he was once in that place and\u00a0pushing didn't get him back to the OR.\u00a0 (He remembers\u00a0that after\u00a0Mer pushed him once\u00a0he ended up batting away her ring.\u00a0 He's forgotten that she came back, pushed him again, and he\u00a0begged her to say she'd love him even if he wasn't a surgeon.\u00a0 She said she couldn't love him if he was able to save Izzie but just let her die.\u00a0 And then Derek went back to the OR.\u00a0 I'd say the pushing worked.)<\/p>\n

But Derek remembers it all differently and he feels a new bond with Cristina and he's decided he's gonna be her hero.\u00a0 She's pushing Meredith away and Owen is gonna handle it all wrong.\u00a0 Owen's letting the gang plan an intervention at the housewarming party.\u00a0\u00a0And Derek thinks it won't work and he believes he knows best.\u00a0 His intentions are good, but\u00a0we all know what the road to hell is paved with, now don't we?\u00a0<\/p>\n

So we end the episode with Derek the hero at his McDreamy finest.\u00a0 He's sitting on the roof at a table with Cristina after getting her out of the apartment before her hubby and friends could get there to \"intervene.\"\u00a0 And they're discussing decorating because Cristina has a new place to decorate and Der and Mer are building and decorating a house.\u00a0 Cristina wants to talk about flooring so they're discussing flooring.\u00a0 A little wine, a moonlit night, a man who likes to save women and a woman who needs to be saved.\u00a0 What could be wrong with that?\u00a0<\/p>\n

It's one of those new paths for our old friends, right?\u00a0 After all, that's why Sunshine tore everything down - so that she could start it all over in new directions that made sense because people had changed.\u00a0 The person who changed the most is surely Cristina.\u00a0 She's gone from a Superwoman surgeon to a savvy, smart, pretty little lady entering a brand\u00a0new world with a lot of old baggage.\u00a0 And good ole' McDreamy has a weakness for little ladies\u00a0just like her.\u00a0 Yep, the new Cristina looks a lot like the old Meredith.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Derek would never be unfaithful to Meredith - unless he stumbled into it by accident and justified it as part of the debt he owed to Cristina.\u00a0 Cristina might be unfaithful to Owen, since\u00a0her quickie marriage seemed to be more about giving her something\u00a0to be instead of a surgeon than about any real desire to build a life with him.\u00a0\u00a0The old Cristina would never hurt Meredith on purpose like this -\u00a0\u00a0but the new one might because misery really does love company.\u00a0 Meredith wouldn't be so okay then, would she?\u00a0 Even then, it's more of a thing that Cristina would fall into by accident, but she'd justify it to herself as a way that Meredith wouldn't be \"so okay\" anymore.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The scariest part of a potential Derek\/Cristina one night stand - or even\u00a0a brief fling - is that it would complete\u00a0the circle that started the show.\u00a0 Der never understood how his wife could betray him with his best friend Mark.\u00a0\u00a0 That fling set off the events that started the series with Der waking up in Mer's bed\u00a0the night after he picked her up at a bar.\u00a0\u00a0From the kernel of that fling between Addison and Mark grows all of Grey's Anatomy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It's got to be a mighty tempting prospect for a creator who loves a good circle.\u00a0 Completing this one as the clock ticks down to the end of Ellen Pompeo and\u00a0Patrick Dempsey's contracts has got to be a big\u00a0lure for Sunshine.\u00a0 And think about the symmetry.\u00a0 Addison said her affair with\u00a0Mark came to be because Derek was never there for her\u00a0because he was always at the hospital.\u00a0\u00a0Meredith hasn't been there for Cristina because Cristina pushed her away - but she's done that because it offends Cristina that Mer is okay and she's not.\u00a0 And why did Mark have the affair with Addison?\u00a0 Well, okay, Mark's a big old hound from way back.\u00a0 Other than his natural \"Mark-ness,\" want to bet it started with him comforting a friend?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mer's already shown signs of being too busy with the hospital \u00a0and too busy mothering everyone for Derek.\u00a0 That supply closet scene with Derek on the prowl and Meredith pushing him away set off real alarm bells for me.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Even a one night stand between Derek and Cristina would shake the hospital to its foundations.\u00a0 It would affect nearly every single character and put Derek in a position where he'd understand exactly how his best friend Mark came to sleep with his wife Addison.\u00a0 It would likely send Derek to cross over to Private Practice for a heart to heart with his ex and would lead to a lot of heart to hearts with Mark.\u00a0 It would put Derek back where he started at the beginning - having to win Meredith all over again.<\/p>\n

The affair would leave Cristina to confront her marriage and would put Owen and Teddy back in each other's lives.\u00a0\u00a0Could Cristina mend things with\u00a0Meredith - or might it put her in a position of having to make a new best friend?\u00a0 Why, there's Little Grey and that new friendship would be a foundation for a post Mer\/Der Grey's, now wouldn't it?\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u00a0can see Mer fighting to stay at the hospital, and being hot\/cold at Derek's efforts to win her back.\u00a0 We'd be almost back at the beginning again - with elevators and supply closets and frantic snatched moments that passed too quickly.\u00a0 You know what else I can see?\u00a0 That Mer would find that the only solution for her to get her life back would be to do it somewhere else.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I can see that the completion of the circle would fit nicely with the end of Pompeo and Dempsey's contracts.\u00a0\u00a0Mer might\u00a0pull a Derek and just walk away from it all, leaving him to pull an Addison and just show up, demanding his marriage back. \u00a0\u00a0Or Mer might say to Der that she was willing to try again but that she couldn't do it in Seattle.\u00a0\u00a0Then they'd fly away together for a new beginning.\u00a0 That scenario would work either as the absolute end of the show, or as a new beginning that left behind the Cristina\/Little Grey friendship and the Cristina\/Owen\/Teddy mess and the Little Grey\/Mark\/Alex mess as the foundation\u00a0for the show to build upon without the main characters.<\/p>\n

I can see the circle and I can see the symmetry of it all.\u00a0 I can even imagine that creating the new circle might have been the real reason Shonda staged the showdown to change it all up.\u00a0 It could've been Shonda setting the stage for the biggest circle of them all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Although it would doubtlessly be fine entertainment, emotionally I think it would be the wrong move for Grey's fans.\u00a0 We don't want to live through a McDreamy becoming a McBastard.\u00a0 We don't want to see Cristina lose herself so much that she'd betray a friend.\u00a0\u00a0Heck, most of us just want the old Cristina back as quickly as possible.\u00a0 Completing the circle with a Der\/Tina fling would be an ultimate act of betrayal to the Grey's fans.<\/p>\n

Yet I can imagine that to the creator of this world on the kernel of\u00a0Der fleeing the Addison\/Mark affair, that the prospect of this circle would be mighty, mighty tempting.\u00a0 That's\u00a0why I find the prospect of this circle to be the scariest of them all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Do you think we could interest Shonda Sunshine in squares or triangles?\u00a0 Circles are just too damned scary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lots of folks have been writing about how great Grey's is this season.\u00a0 Overall, I tend to agree that\u00a0the aftermath of Grey's \"9\/11\" has given the writers lots of new directions to explore.\u00a0 But the ugly specter of one of those new directions reared its charming head in the last episode, \"Something's Gotta Give.\"\u00a0 After ...continue reading \"Grey’s: Sunshine’s Scariest Circle?\"<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1356"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1356"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1358,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1356\/revisions\/1358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}