Viewing Single Post From: 3.25 DIDN'T WE ALMOST HAVE IT ALL

Viewing Single Post From: 3.25 DIDN'T WE ALMOST HAVE IT ALL
oncetherewasaway	Apr 22 2007, 01:50 AM
McEditor Posts: 1,625 Group: .Grey Girls. Member #23 Joined: October 25, 2006	[size=7]PODCAST[/size] 05.18.07 - Executive Producers Shonda Rhimes and Betsy Beers recap the season finale "Didn't We Almost Have It All" (5/17/07). Burke runs out on Cristina, Meredith has a choice to make, and there is a new Grey in town. We’ll have analysis on all that and more in today’s official Grey’s Anatomy podcast, hosted by ABC. Wedding bells were ringing last night on Grey’s Anatomy. Unfortunately, the only person walking down the aisle was Burke, and he was going in the wrong direction. And that’s just the beginning of the shockers in last night’s episode. Probably the biggest one of all, the arrival of Meredith’s younger half-sister as an incoming intern. To get a good look at mini-Mer, aka Lexie, or to relive any of last night’s twists and turns, just go to abc.com. Now though, we turn it over one last time to executive producers Shonda Rhimes and Betsy Beers, for our exclusive post-finale wrap-up. Hi, this is Shonda Rhimes and Betsy Beers, and this is Grey’s Anatomy. We have reached the end of the season! We will be taking a bit of a break, but before we do that, we are really excited to talk to you about the last episode of the season. This was a huge episode in a lot of ways. We had all of our actors, we had the church, we had wedding dresses to pick out…..I really have to say, really one of my favorite moments of all time on this show was Burke’s vows. Yeah, for me too. I mean, that moment in surgery where he, first of all tries his vows out, which is the most beautiful, vulnerable thing you could ever do, with that little scrub cap and mask….The only way…I really wanted you guys to hear what Burke’s vows would have been, and the only way I could figure out how to do that, the only way he would tell his vows to someone else was under the cover and the protection of surgery. Something about sewing, and cutting, and doing all the stuff that he does in surgery, it sort of lends him a protective shell and privacy that allowed him to be really intimate, which I thought was really wonderful. And this incredible moment when Addison says "I think I speak for all of us when I say dump Yang. Dump Yang, and marry me." What is also great is that he, I don’t know why it struck me the last time I saw it, but he has memorized these vows, he is so proud of these vows, he has worked really hard on them, he has to say them with the words Cristina Yang and the whole ….and Cristina Yang washes hers, off her hand…you know, that the contrast between the two sets of vows ……she has barely written her vows, she has come up with something Izzie said. What I always thought was really telling for me was that at the beginning of the episode Cristina gives this whole speech about the heart, the heart is an organ, it pumps blood, it doesn't speak, it doesn’t have tiny little lips…..which all about the heart is this very unemotional thing. And then Burke says his vows, and he says ‘I am a heart man. I lay my heart in the palm of your hands.’ Like, the heart is this incredibly emotional thing, and they are at complete cross-purposes with each other. And I always felt, if you were really super crazy, and paying attention, that you would figure out at that moment that this is not going to work. There were hints all along, since 2 or 3 episodes ago that, you know, from the moment she says ‘Whatever happened to city hall?’ Well, I have to say there have been hints, I mean, from the moment he proposed, things were not good since he proposed simply to end their standoff. But yeah, they have been in a tough place, and what I love about this episode is just the…watching Cristina, who is our tough, surgical Cristina Yang at the beginning of the season, and by the end of the season she is standing there in her wedding dress with no eyebrows, and sort of looks like a painted doll. And she has become completely different to the person that we/she thought she was going to be. And I think by trying to make herself do something that she thinks is expected of her because she loves him, she tries to push herself through this incredible transformation which changes who she is. Well, I think it is, you know, some women get caught up in the idea of…you know, she has been shaving off little pieces of her personality all season to accommodate Burke, because she loves him. And it is what her former boyfriend says which is ‘You’re changing. You’re not the woman I knew.’ And I don’t think she realizes it until the moment when Mama takes her eyebrows. And I love the moment when she shows up and she says ‘they took my eyebrows and she called me a Burke.’ And then she is standing there with Bailey, and she says this incredibly emotional, heartfelt speech about why she has to be allowed to cut, because she has no dignity, and she doesn’t feel like herself, and she is realizing that. And I always feel that you think at that moment, maybe she’s not going to go through with this. Well, exactly. And also that feeling of the first time she puts the choker on, which is right before the eyebrows comment, she says ‘I don’t know. First of all it’s tight, and it’s what Burke’s have always worn, but I don’t think it’s me.’ And over and over again she says, in these different ways, for such a long time, I don’t think it’s me, I don’t think it’s me. But it is something we are all raised to believe, on some level…it is the fairytale. Part of this whole thing is the idea of happily ever after. I mean, Meredith talked about it right before she drowned…it’s the idea that they are all supposed to be living happily ever after, they have got the guy, it is the fairytale, it is the myth that we have all been given, and it doesn’t feel like happily ever after. It just feels like life. And in a weird way the only happily ever after is the happily ever after you tailor to yourself, and which comes specifically out of yourself. The hard thing for Cristina is that this wedding didn’t come out of herself. And that is what Meredith is struggling with. I mean, when she says ‘We need this, Cristina, we need you to get your happy ending, and ’the entire episode she has been saying‘ I need you to get married. I need this to happen. You can do this, right? You can do this, you can do this.’ And so, when it doesn’t happen, when Burke makes that long walk down the aisle and comes into the room and it doesn’t happen, for Meredith, that is the end of the fairytale, you don’t get your happy endings, and she kind of gives up when she walks up to the altar and says ‘It’s over. It is so over.’ She is not just talking about the wedding, she is talking about her ideas of happy endings, she’s talking about her and Derek……it’s over. And it is also for her, and with a lot of people, the idea of never having seen a happy relationship, or never having grown up in one, never having had one herself, of never having had any model for one, you look all around yourself, and she was hanging on Cristina’s marriage to work because it would be the first model of somebody doing it, somebody like her that she could identify with, with whom she was close, that she could see as a beacon for a way that it could get done, and when it doesn’t happen, it crushes her. And I love, I mean, I think that in a weird way, what Burke does is this incredibly romantic thing. The only thing he could do when he realized what had happened was to set her free. It is the most romantic….I mean, he could have married her and made her chattel, sure, that would have been fine…for him. But he realized that she was going to become less and less Cristina the more that they were together, so I thought that it was lovely that he lets her go. And it is, in a strange way the most momentous time, but the first time he actually understands and sees her. Yes, it is the first time he really sees her, and that is kind of amazing. I love the walk down the aisle, and you know he says ‘It’s Cristina. She just needs a little push.’ And it is this long, incredibly endless walk where you can see little by little by little him coming to the realization that in a relationship where you always need to give the push, it is not a push, it is a momentously gigantic ton-like shove. Well, and also, he has been saying all along that when he sees Cristina coming down that aisle he is going to know, he is just going to know that everything is right. And suddenly he realizes that he is not seeing Cristina coming down the aisle, he is walking back down the aisle to get her, and he is walking down the aisle to get her once again, which is not the way it is supposed to be. We were really proud of that. Also I think that as a moment, as a purely, not only visual but emotional moment, the idea of Meredith cutting her out of the wedding dress. The season began with Meredith helping Izzie out of the prom dress, and it ends with Meredith helping Cristina out of the wedding dress. And that was really important to me, because it is the whole…Izzie starts off the season sort of realizing that there are no fairytales, there are no happy endings, and it takes the rest of the season for the rest of the women to catch up, in a weird way. I just felt this was so the season in which the women, all of the women, Bailey, Cristina, all of them, realize that there is some sort of myth to the idea that you can have it all. Like, I love the idea that Bailey gets to have this great family life, but she is not where she wants in her career(when she is not named Chief Resident), and Callie gets to be Chief Resident, but her family life is incredibly shaky right now. I think there is something important about that, and interesting, and true. I don’t know anybody who has everything. No, and the expectation that you can is one of the most strangely crippling things…… Even with Bailey over the course of the season the fact that, yeah, she is trying to be a Mother, she is trying to be Chief Resident, she opens the clinic, and she still has to sing her baby to sleep over the phone. Yeah, and for each of them, I think for the men too, it is about getting to a particular point and realizing that your expectation of what you were going to have is not what you thought it be. Absolutely. For all of them. It is the same for the Chief where the Chief did everything right up to a point, yes, he had an obsession with Meredith’s Mom, yes, it affected his relationship, but you watch over the course of this episode, and at the end, the realization that no matter what he does, he still needs to be Chief because he has work to do as the Chief, but he needs to be Chief in a different way, with his wife. He needs to figure out a way to acknowledge both. I love the idea that he is sort of , you know, he has that lovely moment with Adele, and then he is standing there looking out over his hospital and you are not quite sure how he is going to do it, or what he is going to do, but you know that he wants to do it differently. And that is interesting to me. One of my other favorite moments is Derek coming to Meredith and saying, you know, ‘put me out of my misery.’ Which, I don’t know about you, but Patrick Dempsey has the ability to say things like ‘you are the love of my life,’ better than anybody I have ever seen. Yeah, and watching him form the word ‘love.’ It is funny though, because he says ‘you are the love of my life,’ and he asks her to put him out of his misery, because he’s in it, and if she is not in it enough…and one of my favorite things that Ellen Pompeo does is that she stands there for a moment, and then she kind of starts to smile in a panicked way, and says ‘Cristina’s getting married, and I have to go,’ and Derek looks at her and says ‘Meredith,’ and it’s like he is suddenly realizing that she is so supremely damaged that she might not be able to get through this. Like, she really might not make it here, in this relationship. And, you know, you really really think she wants to. She does want to, desperately, she just doesn’t know how. She doesn’t have the skills set, which is why she is looking to Cristina, to see if Cristina can teach her so that she can actually do it, which is why it is so important. Which brings me to Alex, because I have said time and again….and it was no accident that the Alex/Ava scene and the Meredith/Derek scene were right next to each other, I’ve said time and again that Alex and Meredith are nothing more than mirrors of one another. He is the male version of Meredith in a lot of ways. He is just as damaged, he is just as twisty, and when Ava (I mean, how great was Elizabeth Reaser…) asks him to give her a reason to stay, and he can’t, because he thinks that he is not good enough, because he is too damaged, because he doesn’t have it in him, and then Meredith sort of pushes off Derek, you are sort of like, god, these two people, like they are so close, like, Ava is amazing. Well, yeah, and Alex is so close that he sits down with Addison and tries his old garbage, Addison calls him on it, he leaves the church….yes, and that is what I love. Alex actually has the courage to go running back, and obviously too late, Ava is gone, but that is Alex. And that is his safety net, which is, he always shows up too late. That is what keeps him where he is, and in a way I think it is kind of purposeful. I mean, I love that he shows up at the church and starts to hit on Addison again, like, ‘I’ll just find someone to screw,’ basically, that is his attitude. One of the great things that happens at the church is that, other than Alex realizing that he is madly in love with Ava and should run back to her, is that Callie takes a stand for her man. Which is one of my favorite moments ever of Callie’s, because I love that she’s, and I recognize, and I think if you are over the age of 37, you have had it happen to you that one day you psychotically decide you want a baby, and you can’t do anything about it….and I think it is possible that many a woman has felt that way. But what I think is interesting is that I don’t think Callie believes that she is trying to have a baby to save her relationship, which I highly recommend that none of you at home do, because I don’t think that works…bad idea. But I do think that Callie, or anybody, can make themselves believe that they are not having a baby to save their relationship, they are having a baby to take their relationship to the next level. Which is the lie that many people tell themselves. And look, actually, I think that George, when he proposed to Callie, didn’t connect it necessarily with his Dad’s death, but in truth there is a certain amount of denial that goes on with each thing, and pushes you from one thing to the next. Absolutely, and if you look at Callie, and what has been going on from her perspective, everything that George has done, every action that he has taken, even though we as the audience know it’s for the wrong reasons, proposing, standing up to her Father, all those things…to her, all it does is prove to her that George is the man she thought he was. And it makes her love him more, each one of these things he does. Yeah, it is a terrible mistake, but it is an honest one on her part. She believes that George is a better man than he is, and he keeps proving her right in her mind. So, even with the thing that is going on with Izzie, he still chooses to go to Mercy West, he is still doing all the things that she feels are important. And so, when she goes to him and says she wants to have a baby, and she gives that great speech about how she is crazy and a freak, and he should run she was just being honest in the only way she can. But when she gets to the church, and Izzie is asking for George, and wondering where George is, it is like (and I don’t know if I am allowed to say this on the podcast) she peed a little bit on George, she marked her territory. Because not only does she tell Izzie that they are trying to have a baby, but she also says that ‘I was named Chief Resident today.’ So, basically what she is saying is ‘I am, in effect, your boss. And I’m trying to have a baby with my man, whom you want. Whom I’m sending to another hospital.’ She is sort of like, back off, and yes, Callie doesn’t have all the information, she doesn’t know that Izzie’s told George she was in love with him, she doesn’t know that George failed his intern exam, she doesn’t have all of the information, but neither does Izzie. It is kind of amazing….the only person who has as much information as possible is George, who is not talking, which I love. He doesn’t talk really, at all, in this episode. I love the moments at the end for him, because there is that wonderful scene that he has with Bailey where Bailey says ‘Did I fail you George?’ And he says ‘no, I failed you.’ The two of them are spectacular together. And Bailey, who is dealing with this massive crushing disappointment which you alluded to before, which is all the way through this entire season, I for one was absolutely certain that Bailey was going to get Chief Resident. She is the chosen one. I mean, and the Chief…there have been evidence to the contrary. The Chief has said to her time and time again, ‘you don’t want to let all this work get in the way of your family,’ he was trying to balance it for her, based on his own mistakes. And for her, I don’t think she saw this coming at all, she is certain she is going to get it, and so she is devastated, and George is devastated. And they have that wonderful scene together. And then for me, honestly, on of the most amazing scenes I have ever seen TR in, and maybe it is because it calls back the beginning of the show….it is the locker room scene. And Rob Corn, he directed this episode, and he did something really brilliant that I had honestly not thought of, which I thought was fantastic. In the pilot of Grey’s, George takes his stethoscope, puts it around his shoulders, and walks up to Meredith and says ‘I’m George O’Malley,’ and he gives that whole long, rambling speech. In this episode, George takes his stethoscope and hangs it back on the locker, as if to hang up his stethoscope, and leans forward to Lexie and says, ‘Just George. I’m George.’ No, ‘I’m Dr O’Malley,’ no nothing. And it is so simple, and so lovely, and there is that moment when she says ‘Do you have any wisdom?’ And he just says ‘no.’ and you feel for him, because you know that he doesn’t know what he is going to do, or where he is going to go, but that stethoscope moment is just incredibly elegant, and beautiful moment. And the truth is, in the original pilot we had a whole sequence where he keeps leaving his stethoscope in the car, and it would be wrapped around the stick-shift, so there is maybe even more of an emotional connection for us. But when you look at George in the pilot, and when you look at George’s face, he is so changed and grown, and in a weird way come full circle because he is back being 007, but much more mature about it, and taking it in a much different way. And you look at those kids who are coming into look at the bloody scrubs, and don’t they look so young, and so naïve, and so eager. They have no idea what they are in for. And then there is Lexie. I love the moment when she says ‘I’m Lexie Grey.’ TR Knight does what I consider to be the world’s most perfect double-take. Maybe the best double-take in the history of television and cinema. It is just a beautifully done double-take, not at all self-conscious…I mean, it was really beautiful. And she just sort of turns away and goes…I don’t know what to tell you about Lexie. Except that was Lexie. And she seemed to have had a little flirtation with Derek in the bar, and she also seems to be a new intern. Which is interesting. She’s a new intern, she flirts with Derek in the bar, and her name is Lexie Grey. Take from that what you will. Yeah, there is something in there, maybe. Put some pieces together for yourself. There are some pieces that need putting in their parts…we will let you think about that for the summer. And then I think, you know, the other thing really is, and we touched on this a little bit, is the Adele/Richard relationship. Which was really lovely. I mean, at the beginning of the season, Adele leaves him, and at the end of the season, basically, she comes back to him, and I really wanted to give the Chief his wife back. I’m not saying they are back together, but I really wanted to give the Chief his wife back. Because he has been so unsuccessful with the dying of his hair, and the trying to date, and the flirting and having no game, and McSteamy as a wingman, which is just a nasty idea right there for him. He just wasn’t good at it. Jim Pickens is so funny that he pulled all that off, but you just felt for the guy. It was painful. I wanted to see Adele back again. It is also this amazing moment where you realize that she was pregnant, and he’s been going through this entire time thinking she’s been dating someone else, and she wasn’t, it was his, and they lost it and they have no kids. Which also explains what we knew already, the connection he has with Meredith. Meredith firmly denies, but he does exactly what a good Dad would do, which is he just pushes through her ‘you’re not my Dad, you’re not my Dad,’ to a place of centered maturity. But what I really love about Adele and Richard really important for this episode is, this is an episode where we have said ‘there is no freaking fairytale.’ Richard and Adele come together in a way where, after the happy ending crap was supposed to take place, after they were supposed to ride off into the sunset, after they were supposed to be a fairytale ending…..way past that point, when all the crap has hit the fan and everything has gone really bad, you still can have somebody. And there is a mature place of love in there that is really interesting. But I sort of feel it is the real fairytale. I always loved that. And it is very much, going back to what we were talking about before, which is the point,which is you create your own fairytale out of the reality that is with you, not out of somebody else’s idea of what it is, because what are they looking at?[ They are looking at Joe and his partner, with the two babies, which is not the ideal scenario, Joe passed out with an ultrasound, you know, it is like ‘couldn’t handle it,’ but you look at these two men, and they love each other, and they are a family, and they are living their own fairytale. And Adele and Richard are sort of living their own little version of what might be a happy ending for the two of them. And I like it, and it is happy because it is realistic. Which is kind of nice, and I think what…you look at the interns and everybody trying to figure out where they are going, and the attending as well, and you hope they will get to a place where they are happy with what is real for them. That is the most you can hope for. The last thing I want to talk about is my favorite scene in the whole thing, which is the beautiful shot that follows Burke’s empty bedroom, into the living room and Cristina is standing there in that wedding dress, and then we pull back, and she looks like a painting, and she is just standing completely still and then the door opens, and you realize that she is hoping it is Burke. What you realize, more importantly, is that she has been standing there that entire time, figuring out the things that he took with him, like what is missing from the apartment. And you were saying how much you loved that Burke left her with everything. He left her with everything and he only took the things that really meant something special to him, that he needed. But just to him, and he left everything else for her, so she would be okay. I mean, he took his trumpet, and his Eugene Foot albums, his Grandmother’s picture, his scrub cap….and he left her everything else. Which was so lovely and so kind. And yet the fact that you could stand in the middle of the apartment and not realize your partner is gone, unless you knew him well enough to know which of those things were missing. Exactly, and Meredith walks in and says ‘No, he’s not gone. See, look around.’ But if you really look around with the eyes of someone who loves somebody, you see immediately what’s gone, and what’s missing. She sees exactly what’s missing, and it is heartbreaking. And then I love that she says, ‘He’s gone. I’m free. Damn it.’ It is sort of heartbreaking to watch her fall apart and get that dress off. It’s wonderful. And once again, as our season comes to every time, once again what the show comes around to is the love story between these two best friends, Meredith and Cristina. Exactly, and in a weird way, last season was so much about the relationships between the men and the women, and the season finale was about the friends coming together, but also that choice of Meredith’s, you where Burke and Cristina ends up, and this season does end up with these two women, both of whom stood for each other when Meredith drowned, all the way through this last portion where they are together, they are supporting each other and they are each other’s reality. I mean, I got to tell you, we spent a lot of time in the writer’s room using the phrase ‘burn it all down,’ for the end of the season, and I felt really strongly about it, I was like, ‘we have to burn it all down, in order to have somewhere to go that is going to feel fresh, and new, and also just to complete these stories that we started. And I felt really proud when I saw the directors cut of this episode, because we had done it. We had burnt it all to the ground. I also was heartbroken that we had burnt it all to the ground. And I’m sorry, to all of you, but I also felt we did exactly what these characters needed, and where we are going, and it takes us to an even more exciting place. And you know what, at the end of the day these characters are leaving their intern year, and going into the next step. Yeah, I mean, next year they are going to be residents, with interns of their own, and that’s going to be fascinating. And it’s baptism by fire, to a large degree, and very often a part of growing up, because growing up is going through some hideous experiences so you can come out the other end with a little more of a sense of what reality is. So, on that chipper, cheerful note, we are going to leave you for the summer. You take that burn it down theory and you live with it through the summer and enjoy yourselves. What you should do is have a nice summer and get some relaxing in. we are really excited to come back, though, because there is a lot of great stuff in store next season. We have a wonderful plan for season four, a really great plan, and endless podcasts. Which will be awesome. This is Shonda Rhimes, and Betsy Beers, and this is Grey’s Anatomy. Posted: May 19 2007, 04:10 AM - jenlou1986


3.25 DIDN'T WE ALMOST HAVE IT ALL · SEASON 3