Ah, there’s nothing like a large-scale disaster to get the doctors of Grey Sloan Memorial feeling the love. And by that, I mean every facet of love — the joy, the angst, the heartbreak. All of that is front and center in Grey’s Anatomy’s final bow of season 22. When the Royer Bridge collapses (due to cuts to funding, of course), it ups the stakes and forces some introspection that leads to a few happily ever afters, some career changes, and some awkward situations for more than one couple. You know Grey’s Anatomy loves to deliver emotional roller coaster finales, and that’s exactly what we get in “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” For the last time this season, let’s get into it.
Au revoir, Seattle
Oh, come on. You knew that Grey’s would give its stalwart trauma surgeon one last juicy trauma before he hits the road. And just to up the ante, Owen Hunt is put right in the middle of that trauma. Like, right in the middle. He’s on that bridge when it collapses, and when he comes to, his car is quickly filling up with water. The show doesn’t torture us, though: He gets himself out of there and back to relative safety pretty quickly. But Teddy is certainly tortured. She’s back at the hospital attempting to handle this crisis — more than 60 cars were on the bridge when it went down — and trying not to completely spiral, knowing, thanks to a well-timed voicemail, that Owen was on the bridge too. She can’t reach him, and when Ben’s contacts report back that they’ve found Owen’s truck in the water but no Owen, she barely holds it together. The operative word is barely, because Teddy has an ER full of patients, and that woman is a professional, okay?
What Teddy doesn’t know is that, head lac aside, Owen is doing just fine, and he’s on the scene trying to help anyone he can. He hears someone calling out: The man, Josh, is pinned to the driver’s seat of his car by the steering wheel; his wife, Sam, is next to him unconscious; and his two kids, Hank and Lainey, are trapped in the back seat — Lainey’s leg is stuck between the seat and metal, and she’s not doing well. So … things aren’t great. We might even call them dire.
Thanks to a handy cric (airway) device Owen has on his key chain (side note: He totally would have that!), he’s able to perform a trach right there in the car and get Sam breathing again. They ship her off to Grey Sloan, and the moment Teddy gets a look at the trach when Sam comes through the ER, she knows Owen performed it. She has the same device on her key chain. Owen is alive and well enough to be performing medicine in the field. The whole thing feels very full circle, doesn’t it? Those of us dinosaurs who are old enough to remember Owen’s first episode of Grey’s Anatomy back in season five might recall that he came on the scene after performing an emergency trach in the field with a pen. Isn’t that nice? I mean, people are dying, and lives are on the line, but still, what a sweet way to tie it all together.
Back at the bridge, Owen turns his attention to Lainey, who is bleeding internally and fading fast. If they wait for the jaws of life to help them move her trapped leg, she’ll die. Owen needs to amputate now. He tries to distract Hank as much as possible, but honestly, there’s no way to cover up this horrorshow. Afterward, with Lainey and Hank on their way to the hospital, Owen can work on Josh. Josh knows — he’s known this entire time — that removing the steering wheel pressed up against his chest could kill him instantly. He wants Owen to take his ring, to tell his family that he loves them. Owen begs him to hold on, and they’ll do everything they can, but I’m not a doctor, and even I know this looks bad.
Owen accompanies Josh to Grey Sloan. Owen’s head may still be actively bleeding, but he isn’t leaving Josh’s side — he’s operating on him. When Teddy runs in to assist, the relief of finally putting eyes on Owen is palpable. Our two soldier doctors get to operate together one last time. Josh and his entire family survive, and honestly, that’s a really thoughtful parting gift they’re giving to ol’ Owen Hunt.
After Josh’s surgery, in the scrub room Teddy and Owen finally say the things they’ve been dancing around for weeks. Teddy loves Owen and their kids and their life, and yes, she needed to figure out what she wanted, and it turns out what she wants is him. She isn’t taking the job in Paris. But Owen tells her she has to. Not because he doesn’t love her or doesn’t want to be with her, but because he does. It’s his turn to go with her on this adventure. He would do anything for her and their kids. “You’re my life,” he tells her, holding back tears. And then, those two fools make out right then and there at the sink, and although it is incredibly romantic, it cannot be very hygienic.
Both Teddy and Owen get their own parting montages — these two have been on this show for so long! — as they prepare to leave Grey Sloan and head for Paris. Together, they take one last look at the place before heading home and setting off on their next adventure. Au revoir, Towen? Oweddy? Haltman? Did we ever nail down a portmanteau for these two?
Pick me. Choose me. Marry me?
Owen is not the only familiar face caught up in the bridge collapse: Simone, Jules, and Cass Beckman — who, unable to get to Seattle Pres, is assisting at Grey Sloan (just give her a job already!) — open the ambulance doors and find Nick Marsh on a gurney. He has some critical abdominal injuries, which isn’t great for a guy who had a kidney transplant a few years back. Obviously, Meredith learning that the man she loves was in a car-related accident and has been rushed to the hospital brings back a lot of terrible memories for this woman … and for all of us. When she rushes over to him in the ER and Cass asks if this is her husband and she says yes, Nick, Amelia, and — most importantly — I turn our heads askew. She said what now? Unfortunately, there’s no time to figure out if one of us had a lobotomy and forgot that Meredith and Nick got married, because the guy’s stats tank.
Nick’s liver and spleen are both bleeding. Cass can repair that, no problem, but she wants another doctor to come and monitor his kidney graft. Meredith is adamant that she’ll be the one to do it, but everyone agrees that’s a terrible idea, so Meredith decides that if she can’t be in the OR, she’s getting the person who taught her most of her general surgery skills: Miranda Bailey. Yes, Bailey has been benched from surgery by Webber as they await news from the IRB, but once Mer informs her that the patient is Nick, Bailey’s up for breaking some rules.
The surgical team get to work on Nick, and Meredith paces up in the OR gallery. Amelia attempts to distract her with her current romantic drama: Toni is still trying to figure out what to do about her ex-wife wanting her back, and Amelia is pretty positive that things are trending poorly for her. They were married, and she knows that marriage means you make a choice to really commit to each other. I mean, Amelia also made a choice to uncommit to the person she married, but Meredith doesn’t mention this; instead, you can see her thinking about her own commitment issues.
Meredith may not be scrubbed in to operate on Nick, but she ends up saving his life anyway. Cass has stopped all the bleeding, but Bailey realizes there’s been no urine output — something’s wrong with Nick’s kidneys. It’s Meredith who tells them to check for a clot in one of the veins — he had one a few weeks after his transplant surgery. It was their meet-cute! And that’s the answer. Winston comes in to remove the clot, and that kidney pinks right up. Nick is going to be just fine.
As soon as he wakes up, Meredith asks him to marry her. Every part of me wishes that Nick had pretended to fall asleep just to get her back one last time for when she pretended she couldn’t hear him say, “I love you,” on the phone. He’s very fresh out of a major surgery, though, so I guess I’ll forgive him for missing out on that opportunity. Instead, Meredith tells him that the only reason she didn’t want to get married was because of this fear of losing him, but not being married isn’t protecting her from that now, is it? She loves him and their life, and she wants to get hitched. But she does not want a frilly dress or flowers or poems. Does he still want to marry her? she asks. “I’ve wanted to marry you since the last time I was in this bed,” he replies. Damn, this man is crushing the romance this hard, like, 30 minutes post-op? Nick can get it even in a hospital gown, and I won’t apologize for that.
Nick’s near-death experience was inspiring to more people than just Nick and Mer. Jules, who is rocked when she has to work on her former mentor, pulls Winston aside to tell him that right now, if something were to happen to either of them, no one would know what they mean to each other, and she hates that. Does this mean they’re going public? Meanwhile, knowing that Simone, who kept him updated on Nick, once again helped someone he cares about finally prompts Lucas to apologize for how he treated her after Katie died. But then, he goes beyond an apology to an all-out “I still have feelings for you talk” when he tells Simone that he doesn’t think them drunkenly hopping into bed together was a mistake … just as Wes shows up. Earlier in the episode, Wes had also made a Big Feelings declaration to Simone, telling her she’s the only thing getting him through intern year, and that he’d like to make this thing between them a real relationship. Simone has little choice but to go with Wes even with Lucas there, but was anyone else getting season two finale vibes watching Simone stand there between the two men vying for her heart? Grey’s Anatomy’s kink is creating visual representations of love triangles on-screen.
Bailey walks out of the season inspired too — though her inspiration is more career-related. Yes, she gets in trouble for defying her suspension from the OR, but this double whammy of what happened to Katie and what’s going on with the hydrogel and the IRB has helped Bailey realize that if she wants to really facilitate changes in health care, she’s going to need a public health degree. Bailey’s going back to school.
Someone check on Scout’s parents, please
Not everyone gets out of season 22 with a relatively happy ending. And I’m not even talking about Kwan, who, despite his best efforts to show why he deserves to stay in the residency program, is still fired when the credits roll. (Webber is not budging on this one at the moment.) No, I’m talking about all of Scout’s parents.
Take Amelia. She is sure that Toni is going to get back together with her wife, and as far as Amelia goes, she’s pretty much at peace with it. But then, at the end of a long day, she opens her door to find Toni there, declaring that she is in love with her. It’s everything Amelia has been wanting to hear. Unfortunately, Amelia jumped the gun, as she so often does when she lets her spirals get the better of her, and Toni sees Cass Beckman naked on Amelia’s couch. Not exactly the happy ending either Amelia or Toni was hoping for.
But honestly, I’m more worried about Jo and Link. Jo, as we know, hasn’t been the same since almost dying while giving birth to the twins, and having to work on patients in similar situations is not helping her process or move on from what happened to her. In this episode, she’s called in when Link, Lucas, and Wes discover that the woman with broken pelvic bones they’re working on from the bridge collapse is 32 weeks pregnant. Jo is able to save the baby and mom, but you can see how much this line of work is killing her. She admits to Link that she didn’t take her OB exam and doesn’t even know if she wants to keep practicing medicine anymore. Ever the dutiful husband, Link takes her in his arms and tells her he will support her in whatever decision she makes — he’ll take care of their family no matter what. It’s a nice sentiment — the only problem is that during that save with the mother and baby, Link clearly tweaks his shoulder again, and to deal with the pain, he pops pain pills, more than once. Is the pressure of having to be the sole provider for his family going to push Link into a painkiller addiction? This is Grey’s Anatomy, after all, so I fear the worst.
And with that, season 22 is officially over. We cannot wait to reconvene for season 23 right here, and in the meantime, watch this space for your exclusive Grey’s Anatomy updates!