apropos of anything

I didn’t watch Grey’s Anatomy Sunday night because I got a phone call around nine that I didn’t want to cut short; I taped it instead as ABC hadn’t yet announced that they will be re-airing the episode on Thursday, and after last week’s cliffhanger episode that left Meredith’s hand in a bomb, I simply had to know what was going to happen.

	George helping Bailey through her labor was one of the best, most moving parts of the episode

I liked it. I really liked it, liked the tension, liked the pacing, liked the character development, liked all of it, right up until they (spoiler-tagged on the homepage, but not on the permalink or in the archives) blew up Kyle Chandler’s character Dylan. Actually, it’s not the explosion itself that bothers me so much as the complete lack of reaction to it. I can forgive Meredith because she had enough personal trauma going on, and her shell-shocked behavior was a reaction in itself; I can forgive Christina and Izzie and George somewhat because the only time we saw them, they were with Meredith and obviously focused on her and what she needed. But everyone else? How did the Chief not know a bomb went off on the OR floor? Why did nobody else care that a man died? I know they have more of a personal connection to Burke and McDreamy, but there was an explosion and a man died trying to save the lives of the men you care about. Surely, surely, that warrants more than disarrayed milling about in the lobby. Surely somebody would be going to see if anyone else were injured, and if they, as medical professionals, could do something to help.

In the writer’s blog, Shonda Rhimes goes on and on about the technical aspects of that plot decision. She doesn’t once touch on the emotional side of it. For her, the whole thing is a plot twist, a series of special effects, the part she wants to have over so she can “pay attention to the other stuff, the estrogen stuff, the fun stuff like Bailey and George giving birth and Derek describing that kiss to Meredith…” This part of the story is only important because filming the scene took so much effort.

Except that by not showing any of the characters react to the twist, Rhimes divides her characters into classes, the important ones and the disposable ones. And while I understand tertiary characters are by definition disposable, a story that treats them so shabbily and insignificantly is weak and lopsided. You cannot go around reinforcing the idea that some people are less important than others.

This type of creative decision happens in television and movies all the time. I spent almost the entire two hours of Air Force One yelling at the screen, not because the movie was bad (it really, really was), but because the movie didn’t care who died so long as it wasn’t the President or his family. Yes, the President is the protagonist of Air Force One, but it shouldn’t be too much to ask to show some empathy for the poor no-name who just got sucked into the left engine. Ignoring him is lazy storytelling.

I would be equally as irritated by the omission if it had been in a book. The problem here isn’t the medium or the acting. The problem is the sloppy writing, which is actually hard for me to say since overall, it was a very strong episode. I actually cared about McDreamy and Meredith for the first time in a long, long while. I loved the parallel shower scene, all of the George scenes, and the general portrayal of people reacting to a traumatic situation. My only gripe is that nobody seemed to care when something bad happened to someone who wasn’t of their ranks.