Season 4, Episode 5
Original Air Date: October 25, 2007
So after mostly reviewing shows I was familiar with for this year’s slate of Halloween episodes, I decided to take a less familiar swing with a show that I have barely any familiarity with, despite being probably the second most iconic TV show set in Seattle. Grey’s Anatomy is the show that started the whole Shondaland empire and is somehow, miraculously, still airing new episodes despite starting its run during my first year of high school. Yet despite its popularity and longevity, it’s a pretty easy show to avoid if you’re a snob like myself, and watching this episode out of the context of all the show’s various romantic drama, it’s easy to see both why it has its fans as well as why it never racked up tons of Emmys or anything.
The episode begins with a dream sequence, where Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) has both visions of her mother and herself in the morgue, which has to do with her overbearing mother recently dying. We then see that it’s Halloween morning, when Meredith wakes up and heads downstairs to see her co-workers (and I guess roommates?) Izzie (Katherine Heigl) and Alex (Justin Chambers) carving pumpkins. Meredith then dumps her mother’s ashes in a plastic bag and spends the rest of the episode trying to decide what to do with the ashes.
Seeing as this is an ensemble show, there were a lot of interweaving storylines going on in this episode, many of which seemed to be overarching plots that I had a little trouble following, while some felt more specific to this episode. Namely, there’s an annual pumpkin chainsaw carving competition going on in Seattle on Halloween, which has the residents of Seattle Grace Hospital on high alert. There’s also a man who has shown up at the hospital whose foot keeps convulsing, which makes him claim that his foot is being possessed by a force outside of himself. We then get a shockingly violent scene where a man who has had a chainsaw incident involving some severed fingers leaves his chainsaw around only to find the man with the possessed foot using it to chop off his foot.
There’s another somewhat bizarre storyline involving a man who has been in the hospital for a while now who needs a heart transplant. However, fate intervenes when his daughter (who we see in an earlier scene) dies in a fatal car crash, so the doctors end up using her heart on her dad. There’s also a little kid who has a disfigured ear and is awaiting a surgery to help him hear again, who goes around the hospital trick-or-treating (or possibly trick-ear-treating?). There’s also a conclusion to an arch revolving around an older resident, Norman (Edward Herrmann), who wants to become a surgeon, but is a little squeamish about the prospect. There are also a bunch of other storylines involving budding romances between the characters, but it seemed like a lot of them had been developed in prior episodes, so they left me a little lost.
I was happy to watch an episode of Grey’s Anatomy from this particular period, since it had all of the actors we equate with this show (Heigl, Patrick Dempsey, Sandra Oh), though it also seems apparent that the show has plenty of fun side characters as well. The storyline about the man having his foot possessed was probably the most memorable, even though it felt like a less quirky version of a Scrubs storyline. There was a decent amount of schmaltz featured in the episode, but I also find the tone of this show to also be pretty light and breezy at times, even though it can also veer into morbid territory at a moment’s notice, which I guess is often the case with doctor shows.
So while watching this episode, I was able to find things that were appealing about the show, particularly the cast and the dialogue when it was more on the playful side rather than the heartfelt side. The storyline about the heart transplant felt way too convenient, but I suppose when you’re juggling this many storylines over the course of an hour of television, one of them’s bound to be a little questionable. I’m not sure the Halloween aspect of the episode played too pivotal of a part, but I did like the way they leaned into Meredith’s mother feeling like a literal ghost haunting the episode, which seemed both true to their relationship and to the holiday this episode takes place on.
Anyways, that’s all I got for this year’s Shocktober. I feel like Election anxiety has been a spectre haunting this year’s spooky season in a way that has made it sometimes hard to enjoy, but it was still nice to distract myself by watching these episodes and reviewing them. Happy haunting, my friends.