(S03E16)

Come on, people! You know and I know that Meredith isn't really going to die. Sure, she's all blue, her temperature isn't coming up, and she's seeing visions of Denny Duquette and Dylan the Bomb Squad guy. Clinically, she may even be dead, in that "you were dead for two minutes!" kind of dead.

But we know Ol' Mer isn't quite all the way gone yet. She's just in "Limbo."

Remember that episode of Magnum? The producers weren't quite sure the show was going to be cancelled at the end of the seventh season, so they have Magnum get shot and spend an episode in "limbo," seeing dead people and trying to help the living from afar. The episode shows Magnum walking off into the clouds; when CBS brought the show back, ol' Tom was called back from the clouds and miraculously brought back to life.

Putting characters in limbo is a device as old as TV itself; heck, it's even older, as we see every Christmas when we watch It's A Wonderful Life. So, even though Rhimes has said in the past that she intends to turn the usual TV conventions on their ear, it really doesn't look that way to me. I mean, what's next week going to be? The entire SGH staff gnashing teeth and rending garments while Meredith gets taught Life's Big Lessons by Denny and Dylan? Then at 9:59:30, Meredith comes back amongst us, worse for wear and more aware of the big picture. Oh, and I'm sure Derek will ask her to marry him.

None of this episode surprised me, to be honest. I mean, it was cool that Izzie got to drill burr holes into the mechanic's head with an ordinary drill, but we also knew that it meant she was going to get her full status back. We also knew that, once the little girl pointed out to the water when Derek asked her about where Meredith was, Derek was going to do whatever he could to rescue the love of his life. We also knew that Izzie rocking her new status and Burke and Yang arguing over who told who about their engagement first was going to look extremely petty compared to what those waiting families in that clinic were going through. And we also knew Syndey the annoyingly chipper resident was going to be annoyingly chipper.

Most of the interpersonal stuff took a back seat this week, which was actually kind of refreshing. But as I said, once that stuff came up, it felt out of place in the grand scheme of things. For instance, I was all ready to buy into Izzie's speech about believing in Meredith and knowing she was going to pull through, until she decided that it was the perfect time to tell George that he made a horrible mistake in marrying Callie. Nice. Only in the world of SGH do people's brains work this way. Izzie just saved a life and got her career back, her friend is hovering near death, and her mind goes right to what she thinks is George's "sham" marriage. Yikes. Does Shonda have that dim a view of humanity?

Some mildly interesting things happened tonight: we saw more of a connection between Alex and Addison -- "I would have noticed you were missing." I liked Yang's description of how Meredith is her "person": "If I murdered someone, I'd call her to help me drag the corpse across the room." That Cristina can get so mushy sometimes. I liked the nice "there are more important things going on" bonding between Mark, Addison, and Derek while Meredith was being worked on. And, it's too bad Alex and George didn't find the body of Joe the bartender or something when they were looking in the morgue. That would have been a lot more of a surprise than what we got.

I'm really sorry I'm being so cynical this week, folks, but this episode was a big disappointment for me. The way the season had been building, I was expecting a whole lot more than what I got. Maybe it's the bad feeling that I've seen all this before, or maybe it is just the fact that saying someone's going to "die" and then have it be your title character -- a character you know isn't going anywhere -- just makes this feel like one of those ol' switcheroos that TV dramas pull on their viewers all the time. It's too bad Shonda didn't have the cajones to really kill someone off. I would have had a lot more respect for her if she did.