This week's Grey's Anatomy was the first after a wee hiatus and it gives a glimpse into where the show is headed\u00a0down the trail and possibly to the end of its run.\u00a0 Ellen Pompeo (Meredith) hinted\u00a0this week that the show would last about 2 more years.\u00a0 If that's the case, it looks like Shonda Sunshine\u00a0is heading it back to where it started.\u00a0 After all,\u00a0Derek, on the heels of learning that his wife (Addison) had slept with his best friend (Mark), finally accepted Richard's invitation to come to his hospital where Derek would be groomed as Chief.\u00a0 Except, after Derek got there, Richard's life and marriage disintegrated leaving Richard nothing to hold onto except the power\u00a0for which he'd traded everything else.\u00a0<\/p>\n
After years of waiting in the wings, Derek staged a coup and got the job he'd come West to take.\u00a0 \u00a0Richard's fall off the wagon might have justified Derek's sneak attack if only McDreamy hadn't traded on inside information from\u00a0the love of his life\u00a0to pull it off.\u00a0 In this episode, Richard sat in a conference room for hours, torn between whether to sign one document that gave up his job and medical license permanently, and another that committed to going into rehab and coming out to resume power.\u00a0 What had Richard torn was the\u00a0rehab part - he didn't want to give up drinking b\/c it was all he had left.\u00a0 Finally though,\u00a0Richard signed and headed to rehab and Derek got ready to take charge.\u00a0 By the time Richard returns, there may be a battle, but I bet Derek will have learned that power ain't all it's cracked up to be.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What got\u00a0the little hamsters\u00a0running around the creaky wheel in my head was Derek's motivational speech to the employees.\u00a0 He said he was starting with a clean slate.\u00a0 The big, take charge types think they control the slate.\u00a0 I'm editing the new one that I'll post soon (when my edit and hubby's cover get finished), and it's called Griffin's Law<\/em>.\u00a0 (Think - Grey's Anatomy<\/em> meets The Paper Chase<\/em>) \u00a0There's a Professor in Griffin's named Grey who\u00a0like Derek,\u00a0thinks he runs his\u00a0slate.\u00a0\u00a0 They're both wrong of course.\u00a0 Worrying about the slate and the state of the slate runs them.\u00a0 There's no door in life\u00a0allowing Derek, Grey or any of us to sweep out the dirt.\u00a0<\/p>\n The dirt hangs around and the only way to get it off the slate is to sweep it under the rug.\u00a0 If you do that,\u00a0you create big bumps and bulges and eventually, no matter how careful you are, you're gonna trip over one of them.\u00a0 Dirt loses its power if you leave it out in the open\u00a0and\u00a0walk over it on your way to the future.\u00a0 No one's slate is clean because life is dirty.\u00a0 Women can deal with the dirt, acknowledge the dirt and move on.\u00a0 Men think they can rule the dirt, can control it by brute force or by fiat of will.\u00a0 Men think they can say the slate is clean and therefore it is.\u00a0\u00a0Men will be men and they will turn everything into a power play.\u00a0<\/p>\n In this episode, all the women let the men\u00a0hold the slates and think they controlled them.\u00a0 Take the mighty Christina Yang for example.\u00a0 Owen felt belittled by Christina \"giving\" him to Teddy.\u00a0 So in this epi, Christina let Owen\u00a0dictate terms and when Teddy paged Yang for a big surgery, Owen told her not to answer the page - and she didn't.\u00a0 Even the Nazi\u00a0surrendered\u00a0her slate.\u00a0 Bailey\u00a0set off on a Nazi rant at Dr. Feel Good, the anaesthesiologist, after a patient woke up mid surgery.\u00a0 But by the end of the epi, Bailey let Feel Good be in on surgery round two and she even explained herself to the man.\u00a0 On the Mark\/Lexi front,\u00a0McSteamy had moved in a previously unknown and pregnant\u00a0adult daughter and declared that he and Lexi would raise the girl.\u00a0 When Lexi rebelled against raising a girl who was about her\u00a0age and broke up with Mark, he reacted in typical McSteamy fashion by going off to have some rowdy sex with Addison.\u00a0 And that was just fine and dandy and a thing Lexi was to\u00a0forgive and forget, but when he found out that Lexi had done the same thing - sleeping with\u00a0Karev- he made Lexi pay for it for the whole epi.\u00a0 McSteamy gave Lexi the silent treatment and by the end had her running off an elevator in tears, ceding him the field and giving him his way.<\/p>\n How about the \"post it\" power couple, my favs, Mer\/Der?\u00a0 In this one, Mer quietly went along with the program, letting Derek play\u00a0Chief.\u00a0 She even surrendered her schedule to his, and at the end of the epi we saw the big man hard at work in his office.\u00a0 The faithful little woman sat across from his desk, reading a magazine.\u00a0<\/p>\n I think Shonda Sunshine was setting up a lesson for the men that power and control are\u00a0as empty and illusory as those clean slates.\u00a0 If the men want power and the women let them think they have it, then who is really in control?\u00a0 It's just like the dirt.\u00a0 The dirt of the past will always be there.\u00a0 You can sweep it under the rug to give yourself a clean slate and risk tripping over the bumps or bulges. Or you can\u00a0rearrange the dirt so it's not an obstacle between yourself and your future.<\/p>\n But Derek thinks he wants power and now, he thinks he's got it.\u00a0 Mer won't play the \"little woman\" for long because that's not who she is.\u00a0 Mer won't quietly go to dinners and banquets when she could be in surgery or having a\u00a0 drink with her friends.\u00a0 Mer won't stand by silently and let Der discipline her friends for a mistake that most of them have made but didn't get caught for.\u00a0 In short, Mer will call Der out and so will the board.\u00a0 Whether or not a \"post it\" marriage suits the two of them, it won't suit the suits.\u00a0 I can foresee an epi down the road where the suits\u00a0decide to overlook some act of Mer's because she's not really Der's wife.\u00a0 And I can see them putting the question to him, making him want to legalize the union.\u00a0 THEN I see Mer refusing, not b\/c she doesn't want to walk down the aisle with Der, but because she only wants to do it for the right reasons.<\/p>\n In Griffin's Law<\/em>, my soon to be pubbed book, Grey is a law school professor and Shea is his student.\u00a0 Grey thinks he has all the power and Shea lets him think so, until he goes too far.\u00a0 That's the problem with power.\u00a0 It's a potent cocktail that makes all the lines fuzzy.\u00a0 Drink too much of it and you become too full of yourself, too convinced that your rules are\u00a0THE rules.\u00a0<\/p>\n I think Derek is gonna drink too much of the me\/my juice and spend too much time running around worrying about the state of his slate.\u00a0 All that dirt under the rug will trip him up and leave him facing a choice that will decide his future, Mer's future and the fate of the hospital.\u00a0 He came West for power and found love instead.\u00a0\u00a0Power doesn't allow for a union of equals and true love won't allow for anything else.<\/p>\n I see a clash coming that even McDreamy's magic wand won't fix.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This week's Grey's Anatomy was the first after a wee hiatus and it gives a glimpse into where the show is headed\u00a0down the trail and possibly to the end of its run.\u00a0 Ellen Pompeo (Meredith) hinted\u00a0this week that the show would last about 2 more years.\u00a0 If that's the case, it looks like Shonda Sunshine\u00a0is ...continue reading \"Grey’s & Griffin’s — The Power Of Dirt\"<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835"}],"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=835"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":841,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835\/revisions\/841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}