Afterthought 2: Electric Boogaloo

I just spent an hour analyzing a fake wedding. Even I’m disappointed in myself.

Spoilers...

Grey’s Anatomy – “White Wedding” (B)

Things are just rolling along on Grey’s Anatomy these days. It was only two episodes ago that Arizona proposed to Callie, and since then Callie’s recovered from her injuries and apparently planned an elaborate wedding, all while taking care of their newborn child. It’s really only been a handful of episodes since we even found out she was pregnant. They don’t waste time on this show.

So how did they do with the big wedding? Well as expected there was some good and there was some bad. Callie’s wedding build up was probably given the most screen time, and I liked how they handled her mother’s negative reaction to her daughter marrying another woman. I thought Bailey’s speech especially was fairly well handled.

But at the same time I couldn’t help but think they already covered this exact same storyline with her father. Don’t get me wrong, it was nice to see that he’d finally accepted her for who she is, but the subject matter didn’t necessarily need to be repeated in this one. I can see why the writers wanted to inject a little conflict into the storyline, I just wish they’d approached it from a different angle (focusing more on Arizona for example).

I also thought that while it was a nice scene to see Callie’s father come back to dance with her, it didn’t really make a ton of sense why she sent him away in the first place. As devastating as her mother’s reaction was, her father was the only in either of the families making a concerted effort to get along. She told him to leave for the sake of his marriage but we were never privy to that relationship before this episode and because of that Callie’s motivation didn’t really connect with me.

So Callie’s story ended up taking up a lot of screen time and I think the writers struggled to fully develop Arizona’s subplot because of that. I really liked the scene where Arizona cried over not having her brother there to see her get married. It was sweet, it was heartfelt, and it was the kind of moment you don’t often get to see in wedding storylines such as this one. It just seemed like it came a little out of nowhere though. I mean she had a nice talk with the brother of one of the children in Karev’s program, and she did mention something to her father about a moment of silence for her brother, but for the most part her feelings were ignored in this episode in favour of Callie’s storyline and I think that’s a shame.

The big surprise in this episode though, is that there were not one, but two weddings, with Derek and Meredith getting caught up in the whirlwind of adopting a child and heading down to courthouse on a whim. Grey’s Anatomy really got a second wind when they put the Meredith and Derek drama to rest, so I was happy to see them finally make their marriage official, especially with trouble looming on this FDA trial.

Apparently I was wrong last week when I said that there was no one at Seattle Grace who would turn Meredith in for altering the trial, as Karev threatened to do just that in this one. I’m still not entirely clear where they’re taking this storyline yet and with season finale just a couple of episodes away I kind of wonder if it’ll end being more serious than previously anticipated. Grey’s has been the master of the season finale over the past couple of seasons, so it’s entirely possible that this trial could end up having dire consequences for Meredith or Derek.

But back to the episode at hand, I do want to commend the writers for some of the side stories in this episode. Considering the magnitude of the main storylines, they were really quite strong. Kepner and Stark had a particularly great week together and Avery and the Chief’s mouse plotline was pretty hilarious as well, especially the fact that Avery did $8000 worth of scans just to figure out what was wrong with one of his rodent test subjects. This may not have been the strongest offering from the series this season, but at least they kept things enjoyable with these little subplots.