Let's start with my favorite storyline from tonight: Maggie (Kelly McCreary) and Jackson (Jesse Williams ). Jaggie? The show attempts to answer the question of what happens when you see the guy you have a crush on right after he says he has a crush on you too...when you're in 8th grade. Maggie wakes up, butters her napkin, puts her shirt on backward, and loses all of her coordination because of every cliche ever! Jackson is still into it, but she makes it awkward. We don't see him being demonstrably undone by her, as she puts it, and I wish we would because a crack in his perfect facade would be so hot. But, at least, they go on a dinner date.
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Bookending this awkward love story are an entire tapestry of love stories. Karev (Justin Chambers) and Wilson (Camilla Luddington) both remember their first loves while working with Maggie on a patient whose heart she plans to fix. The patient is a teenaged boy in the throes of his first love, and the plan changes to a heart transplant after his boyfriend breaks up with him and his heart loses all poetic meaning. But you can't stop poetry: when Maggie puts it in, she finds his donor's heart doesn't fit. The heart is an organ, but man they had to do a lot to get his heart to work again.
During all of this, Karev's flashbacks show us he was in gross anatomy with Maggie, and she was a little weird. They took a corpse's heart to bury it together (and she had a crush on him), and yet they have never remembered knowing each other before this, so that's a bit forced. As for Karev and Wilson's first love flashbacks, they end up showing us the couple's existential anxieties that kick off because of her desire to leave Seattle and explore some of the freedom she has now that her abusive ex is out of the picture. She starts applying for fellowships which trigger Karev to remember how his first love cruelly rejected him. For Wilson, the memories are of a first love which she couldn't stop herself from running from. Amid a sea of candles in their exposed brick loft, these two screw-ups get engaged. It's the perfect combo for the viewer: relationship and real estate jealousy.
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And Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) hears about another love story — one of female friendship. It turns out that Aunt Marie (Rachel Ticotin) and her mom Ellis (Kate Burton) had a falling out over the latter claiming credit for a procedure that they created together. Mer can only get that patent she owns, and advance her career if she makes a public announcement that the method is now the Grey-Cerone procedure, which is a massive deal. But, Aunt Marie has no proof of her claims. Ultimately Meredith sides with her mother, but this is not over. There's no way she is going to let Aunt Marie steal her technology and perfect it without raising a shitstorm of epic proportions.
Over at Kepner's (Sarah Drew) house, someone is finally recognising and helping her work through her crisis of faith. Surprisingly, it's Tom Koracick (Greg Germann), after a one night stand. He's a pretty damn great guy to have a religious debate about, and he makes a big reveal to her that his son died in a particularly unjust way. His loss of faith echoes a lot of people; he wasn't able to swallow the idea that the death of someone he loved is something to chalk up to the will of God.
Speaking of God, his blessings to Amelia (Caterina Scorsone) and Hunt (Owen Wilson) for their overabundance of ex-sex. Come and get your love.
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