Grey's Anatomy: Where The Boys Are

(S03E07) You ever watch an episode of Murder, She Wrote and say to yourself, "I have no idea why that guest is there. His character really doesn't add to the story?" Chances are, that person is the murderer.

Well, in this episode of Grey's, Joe's boyfriend Walter is the murderer. Of course, he really doesn't murder anyone. But he's doesn't serve a purpose in the episode until he takes a header onto a log during a camping trip and the entire male surgical staff of Seattle Grace (except Sloan... he doesn't like camping, I guess) is there to stitch up the gash in his head. What he does is slaughter three storylines at once, changing their direction and foreshadowing future events.

And all this happens when he gets in the way of a slap fight between George and Alex. Uh... yeeeaahh.... I'll explain that tidbit after the jump.

Let's get the camping trip out of the way, shall we? It was a bit fluffy, a bit of a contrivance (all of a sudden Burke and Shepherd are friendly enough to go camping together? And doesn't Derek already live by himself in the middle of the woods? Did we ever see Walter before?), but entertaining. I guess when there's no patient there to spell out life lessons for the doctors, things seem to move a little slower.

Anyway, what we find out during the camping trip is that Webber is ill-suited for the woods -- he brings pate, brie, and silverware, but no tent -- and is somewhat uncomfortable with "man love". But he also likes how Joe has made time for Walter even though his job keeps him busy, a parallel if there ever was one. We learn that Derek has no male friends, especially now that Mark is asshola non grata to him. We learn that George is on to Burke's "I'll just cover up this little tremor and no one will notice" charade. He also thinks he and Callie are going to get back together. Alex just wanted to go camping, since his dad lived in a bar when he was a kid. And he and George still don't get along.

Which brings us to the slap fight, or as Webber called it, "open-handed combat." If Geroge and Alex were going to fight anyway -- Alex tells a deluded George that Callie slept with Sloan -- they might as well save their hands. Of course, Burke never got a chance to do that, because you can't slap a bullet, but oh, well. It really was an odd scene, because it's as if the entire world of SGH had been taken to a freaky, Deliverance-like level. I was almost waiting for Alex to tell George to squeal like a pig. But maybe it was to set up the "your standards are too high" and "Cristina and I are a team, and if you're not part of a team you're going to play alone for the rest of your life" talk Burke had with George. Little does George know, though, that Burke's saying that more to himself than to George.

The other half of "the team" was back at Grace being eyeballed by Bailey. Strong Bailey's back! Hurrah! She knows Cristina took her off the Humpty Dumpty operation, and won't let her scrub in on anything until she says why. So, in the meantime, Cristina's picking Monopoly pieces out of a kid's turds and can't even scrub in when a piece perforates his colon (I bet it was the iron. Sharp points on that thing). Izzie would "rather sift through feces" than talk to her peer counselor, Syndey the Chipper Resident. Denny's still a sensitive topic, of course, but at least we find out why Chipper Resident is so damn sunny; she killed a kid when she was an intern and had a breakdown. Really, until Izzie stops worrying about Denny (which the highlights for next week indicate), we're not going to get back to full-time Grey's silliness...

...Though the "transsexual and her wife" story came close. It put Mark and Meredith together on a case, which led him to call it the "dirty mistresses club." He tries to get Meredith to drop trou with him, telling her that Derek has too much baggage (or "water under the.. thing," as Meredith calls it) for her to deal with. But the wife of the transsexual, who does the sexual-reassignment surgery despite the fact that the hormones he/she needs are giving him/her breast cancer, teaches Mer that she wants to be with Derek, "someone to talk to" when things happen. So, when the boys come back from their aborted camping trip and Derek swoops in at the bar and says he wants to start over, Mer comes close, but agrees, knowing the alternative is McSkankville, who was in the bathroom.

(By the way, the transsexual's wife looked familiar... wasn't she played by Clare Carey from Jericho?)

Oh, and Addie and Callie bond over a) a pregnant woman who fell in the shower -- thus the need for Callie -- but ended up having to push out a stillborn baby, and b) their mutual disgust with -- and attraction to -- Mark Sloan. It was much ado about nothing, since the end result was the bonding itself, but it was interesting to see different combinations of doctors together.

A nice, light episode tonight (except for the stillbirth, of course), which means it fits right in with classic Grey's. Not that the episode itself was a classic, but it's close to the tone that we all loved before the whole Denny mess started. Even the Izzie story didn't get me down. Well, maybe it did a little, but it's like bronchitis; it's a pain in the ass, after a while you get used to it.