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This week at Grey Sloan Memorial we got an unexpectedly quick resolve for Alex's legal troubles, without a trial or any jail time. However, Owen Hunt's story was only briefly unraveled in this week's visit to our favorite fictional Seattle hospital. When he wasn't treating a trauma case, while also trying to protect the residents from their own poor self-care, Owen was trying to figure out what was going on with Amelia's exit from their marriage and her retreat to Stephanie's apartment. Stephanie, meanwhile was caught trying to stand by her favorite boss Amelia while also not sinking herself too far in the hole with Owen.

Owen's medical anvil of the week involved a woman who, along with her now deceased husband, attempted to literally wall herself off from society. She turned up at the hospital unresponsive and hopelessly wrapped up in razor wire which had been attached to the wall around her home. In case you didn't catch that, this case was all about the thing that you wrap around yourself for protection becoming the thing that actually might kill you. And that case was assigned to Owen, a man whose wife ran away from home rather than talk to him in order to protect herself from facing her past traumas.

In this deeply symbolic medical case we got a return of Owen and Nathan working alongside each other in the operating room. And in that working together Owen showed us he's willing to do things a little differently. When Nathan referenced Amelia's absence from the hospital, rather than simply brush it off, even though he tried to initially, Owen let his friend into his personal concerns. As Owen took the big step of admitting Amelia had fled their marriage, he also expressed his inability to figure out what to do, saying that he couldn't imagine running after her and forcing Amelia to return home if she didn't want to be there with him.

As his patient woke up, Owen learned the reason for her injuries and got some insight into the way to approach things with Amelia. His patient explained that the the barriers from the world that she and her husband thought would protect them now just seemed like an empty cage without him. Initially, she said she couldn't work up the courage to break free of those barriers until one day she took the risk of literally tearing down her walls, an act for which she seemed grateful even though it cost her one of her legs and landed her in the hospital. As she patted Owen's arm and thanked him for helping her, viewers began to wonder if he could take this vulnerable approach to Amelia and apply it to their marriage.

By the end of the episode we saw Owen standing outside of Stephanie's apartment, appealing to Amelia to make a choice other than to barricade herself away from him in an attempt to protect herself. And here we saw Owen trying on some more new behavior. While he stated his intent to be there for her when she was ready to open the door, he also made it clear he wouldn't wait forever.

Elsewhere in the hospital: We learned that Andrew appealed to the courts on Alex's behalf; Jo continued to overwork to avoid her personal life; Meredith got suspended for being unwilling to work with Eliza; Catherine showed up to provide Bailey some back up with hiring Eliza while also grimacing at what she knows it will do to Richard, her husband; Maggie's mom showed up for an unexpected visit and a plastics consult, which turned up a breast cancer diagnosis and exposed a rift in their relationship; Ben brought hospital news to Bailey who realized how out of the loop she'd become; the surgeons bickered about how to fight Eliza's presence at the hospital in light of Meredith's suspension; April got herself into trouble with Catherine; Maggie, in typical Maggie style, babbled in the elevator to Nathan and in the lounge to her mom; Alex got his job back in a fairly anticlimactic way; Bailey continued to defend her actions without explaining them, not even to Eliza; Arizona bickered with Eliza about her abrasive style; Andrew outed his feelings for Jo while having it out with Alex; April was named interim chief of general surgery; Richard realized Catherine backed Miranda's decision to bring in Eliza; Jo reached out to Alex; the residents held a brief strategy session; and Eliza hit on Arizona who mostly seemed not interested.

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In this week's Grey's Anatomy we caught up with the storylines we left off with in the midseason finale. Here we got some answers and saw more of our favorite characters than in last week's series return which featured a self-contained story in which Miranda, Arizona, and Jo helped a female prisoner give birth.

Early in the hour we saw Owen show up frantic on Meredith's doorstep, certain Amelia would have gone back to Casa Grey in order to hide out after walking out and leaving him with nothing more to go on than a 'please don't try to find me' letter. Meredith, meanwhile, was intent on finding Alex who claimed he was taking the district attorney up on his plea deal rather than putting himself, Jo, and their friends through the turmoil of a trial. Owen took his nervous energy to work at Grey Sloan Memorial and tried to keep himself busy in that way that all Seattle surgeons seem to do when life gets to be too much.

As any fan of this show would expect, Owen's medical case of the day mirrored his personal struggles as he was tasked with the care and updating of a husband and father whose wife was injured when his car crashed into the taxi she was taking to the hospital in order to give birth to their first child. When both mother and baby faced serious surgical complications from the accident, Owen found himself face to face with a helpless man who blamed himself for a situation in which he stood to lose everything important to him. In typical Grey's style, it soon became clear that Owen was processing those very same questions for himself as he blamed himself for Amelia's disappearance.

Another piece of the puzzle began to present itself when Stephanie crossed paths with Owen while she was treating a patient with neurologic symptoms. Owen soon began to wonder at her shifty demeanor and halting explanations for her source of a consult in the treatment of her patient. We soon learned the truth as rather than heading upstairs for back up from the neurosurgery service, she instead went to her apartment where we saw Amelia was hiding out. She too was obscuring her pain in medicine by consulting on Stephanie's case while, at the same time, being unwilling to talk about what happened between her and Owen. Eventually, Stephanie took pity on Owen and answered him honestly when he asked if Amelia was all right. His pain was evident in his succinct message to Stephanie, 'tell her to come home.'

Elsewhere in the hospital: Eliza's first day was full of end runs by the attendings to halt her reorganization of the teaching program; Richard received the support of his fellow surgeons, except for Miranda; Jo resented Ben's concern for her welfare; Arizona struggled with missing Alex and sharing her home with Andrew; Ben covered the Emergency Room and, miraculously, didn't get involved in treating the severely injured pregnant woman at the heart of this week's big medical case; two hockey players developed serious injuries after a scuffle on the ice; and Meredith returned home exhausted after searching the court system for Alex, while he turned out to be sleeping in her bed all along.

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While everyone had high expectations for the winter return of Grey's Anatomy - considering that Alex's life and career hung in the balance if he followed through on taking the plea deal offered to him - I'd bet most fans didn't expect that this episode would give us an hour outside of the hospital in which most characters didn't appear. For those of you who read these recaps for news of Owen Hunt, you were out of luck as he was one of the many characters not in this episode. What we did see was the usual Grey's medical angst reflecting some personal angst for our Seattle surgeons.

At the outset of the hour we saw Bailey, Arizona, and Jo in a car on the way to a women's prison where they would be treating a pregnant teenager. The three women were a little squirrelly, a seeming reflection of their personal struggles around Alex's story since Bailey was his chief resident during his student days, Arizona acts as his current mentor in pediatric surgery, and Jo was / is his girlfriend. All three of these women have an immediate stake in Alex's success in life and all would be immensely impacted if he did, in fact, go to jail.

Not surprisingly, this was not a simple case and Arizona's usual cheerful bedside manner wasn't going to help her, especially with Bailey babbling and conspiracy-theorizing in the background. Just in case we forgot Grey's Anatomy is a drama, our first sighting of their teenage patient came as she attacked the prison doctor as her cell door was opened. In the process Bailey was out-Baileyed by the prison doctor who reset her own broken fingers before leaving them to deal with their now shackled patient.

This claustrophobic episode just getting more and more tense as we saw that the prison doctor's attitude stemmed from the extremely limited resources she had available to treat her patients. (Although one wondered how it was that we were shown the tight security rules when they got to the prison yet Bailey was able to wander the halls and open patient's cell doors to treat them without any difficulty.) Jo attempted to bond with their patient in light of her own troubled childhood and received mixed results. The biggest punch came from Arizona discovering their patient's mother was planning to adopt her daughter's baby and then never bring her to visit, followed by Jo telling their patient her mother was in the building but didn't want to see her.

Our three weary surgeons eventually made it through this tough day which, we learned at the end of the hour, had occurred immediately after Alex left the hospital, intending to take the plea deal that would send him to prison for a lesser term. When Bailey shared that news during their car ride away from the prison, we saw how shattered they all were at the possibility of losing Alex to such a place.

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It's midseason time again and Grey's Anatomy fans were dealt a few gut punches that we'll have to wait another two months to get more information about when the show is back on air. In the meantime, a lot of questions were left up in the air as fans saw several storylines collide, or at the very least, take a few left turns.

In typical Grey's fashion, an external disaster underscored the drama in this tense hour of television. An earthquake damaged apartment building collapsed - coincidentally right in front of Meredith, Alex, and Maggie as they drove to work. This put Grey Sloan Memorial on high alert and put Owen Hunt, trauma surgeon, right in the middle of all of it. It was clear from his first appearance that he had a lot on his mind, between the inbound trauma patients as well as the muddled state of his marriage. Owen put aside his personal feelings when it came to the medicine and enlisted the support of Nathan, whom he has relied upon in challenging trauma cases in the past. Surprisingly, over the course of the episode we saw these two men also talk to each other about personal concerns that moved away from their shared history with Owen's sister Megan, and into their current circumstances.

The anvillicious part of this trauma story for Owen and Nathan grew from finding out their patient had both a wife and a girlfriend, whom they took turns updating about his condition. This sledgehammer introduction of the topic of infidelity, the basis for the division in the two men's friendship, eventually got them to more subtle conversations than either has been capable of with each other since Nathan's arrival in Seattle. It also got us discussion of Owen's first wife - Cristina, my favorite missing in action character - and the 'same as it ever was' feeling Owen was having about marriage given his current situation with Amelia.

At the start of the hour, Owen and April - the one-two trauma team - were in full-on patient assessment mode with a side helping of personal crossover as we saw them discussing both medicine and Owen's inability to find Amelia. In the middle of this conversation we saw a woozy patient reach out to them. As this patient's symptoms grew more dire, Owen pulled in Nathan to help him. Next came the comedic sledgehammer as it turned out Owen had updated their patient's wife on his condition, though she wondered why he was injured at an apartment building in which they don't live. Next, Nathan announced the answer as we learned he'd just updated their patient's girlfriend who did live in the damaged building. Next came a conversation for the two doctors, during surgery of course, that was a long overdue confessional, of sorts, for each of them.

As Nathan asked Owen how they should approach their patient's domestic situation, it spurred a conversation which showed us a bit more about the complicated feelings each man held about themselves and their friendship. From Nathan, we heard how much he still carried with him the damage his cheating caused to his relationship with Megan and his friendship with Owen. Surprisingly, this lead Owen to connecting the dots on his side of things between his anger and blame toward Nathan having as much to do with his treatment of Megan, as to his own actions in his marriage with Cristina. While their conversation in the scrub room wasn't long, we heard more here from Owen than he's said in practically any other episode on the topic. Maybe he is remembering that long ago advice from his therapist to name his feelings in order to navigate through them.

While operating on their patient, we saw more fraternal bonding for these two friends over how much history they didn't know about each other since Megan's loss and the resulting rift in their friendship. And slowly, with each word, we saw that rift diminish as their manner grew easier around each other. Nathan's surprise over Owen having been married before and how much he'd missed in their friendship spurred Owen on to share more of his despair at finding himself again married to someone who doesn't want to have children. In this moment of reconvened friendship, Nathan was able to give Owen some good romantic advice - you're only in the same place if you react in the same way you did before.

In typical Shondaland fashion, Owen took Nathan's advice and returned home looking to talk things out with Amelia only to find a goodbye note waiting for him on the counter. In a brief voiceover, we heard Amelia tell Owen not to blame himself for her actions. Here's hoping Owen takes Nathan up on the raincheck offer of a beer sometime soon as he's clearly going to need the support of their friendship as he tries to figure out his future with or without Amelia.

Elsewhere in the hospital: Alex tied up some loose ends on what he envisioned to be his last day as a free man before the beginning of his trial; Meredith continued to back him up; Jo confessed the missing piece of her past to Alex which left their relationship up in the air; Andrew reached out to Jo regarding the start of the trial after finding out she was subpoenaed; Bailey and Ben threw their church and state approach to work and home out the window; Richard found out Eliza, the hospital consultant, was going to be running his residency program; Maggie found out too and took it to Jackson, the board, and their fellow surgeons to rally behind Richard; Arizona found out Eliza was definitely into her but maintained her allegiance to Richard, her favorite wingman; Bailey found herself on shaky ground with Richard; the hour's medical trauma put several patients in jeopardy; Ben acted as confessor to a tortured patient who felt responsible for the building collapse; and his hallway conversation with Stephanie on the topic was overheard by the parents of a pediatric patient with dire results.

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screencaps by @Caterina_Online

| promo | press release | photos | sneak peek 1 | sneak peek 2 | recap | screencaps |
screencaps by @Caterina_Online

Change - resistance to it and acceptance of it - was the theme of this week's episode of Grey's Anatomy. Naturally enough, the medical stories shored up the conflicts in the personal stories for our surgeons at Grey Sloan Memorial and showed us that some plot points are cyclical in the extreme.

Owen and Amelia continued bickering this week, though it took them a while to get to the topic at hand. As they stepped into work they argued about their different approaches to truck maintenance, the only benefit of which was that they quickly ran into Alex, who continued to be the only one who understood Amelia's verbal shorthand given her unexpected confession to him last week about her inner conflict about starting a family with Owen.

As usual on Grey's, Owen and Amelia's inability to communicate was exacerbated by both of them attempting to treat the same trauma patient. This time it wasn't just the patient who provided the anvil for these two surgeons, as their patient's wife also got in on that act. While the patient and his wife disagreed about a different topic - home maintenance - the message about different approaches and the bad results they can sometimes create underlined the un-discussed distance growing between Owen and Amelia.

Owen asserted he had to take the patient into surgery first while Amelia swore she needed to evaluate him for a potential spinal fracture before any surgery took place. They were so caught up in their need to argue that neither Stephanie's presence nor that of Bailey's new hospital consultant could get either of them to back down.

The fact that they hadn't talked about their central conflict - how each of them felt about Amelia's negative pregnancy test of two episodes ago - made them both prickly around each other. At the same time, they took turns trying to restart the clock with Owen going first and stopping by at day's end to offer her a ride home. Their argument ramped up quickly as Amelia loudly stated her intent to stay at work to watch over their patient, upon whom she would operate in the morning. Owen suggested Stephanie could monitor the patient overnight but when that attempt at reaching out to Amelia failed he chose to exit rather than belabor the point. Even as she seemed sad that he gave up so quickly, Amelia still didn't know how to say what she needed to say to Owen.

The next morning brought, you guessed it, more loud arguments between Owen and Amelia. This time, their difference of opinion over her surgical approach resolved with Owen conceding that her plan was innovative. The much-discussed consultant inserted herself into the conversation and amused Amelia and Stephanie in the process. After a successful surgery, Amelia shared her patient's prognosis with his wife and got her next anvil, when his wife asked if she could stay the night with her husband at the hospital because she's grown to rely on his presence in her life, even when they argue.

Next it was Amelia's turn to try to move forward as now we saw her sidling up to Owen and asking for a ride home. Even though he claimed to have let their conflict go, Owen was quick to express his concern about Amelia's approach, this time, to their marriage. Here we got another timeline hint from Grey's writers when Owen exasperatedly announced his frustration that Amelia acted like nothing was wrong, even when she'd been avoiding him for the last two weeks by sleeping at the hospital. We learned about one of Owen's key fears here - that her avoidance of him and their home meant she was leaving him out of her thought process all together.

Faced with a decision, Amelia worked past her discomfort and finally forced out the words she's needed to say to Owen - that she doesn't want to have a baby. The shock on Owen's face segued quickly into Amelia showing up at Meredith's looking for a place to
 stay, earning her another opportunity to bond with Alex.

Given the quick scene cut from Owen and Amelia's parking lot argument, we know nothing about what further discussion may have occurred between them. Many questions remain: Did Owen ask for more information? Did Amelia offer even part of the story of her first pregnancy which she shared with Alex last week? Did she decide on her own to stay at Meredith's house or did Owen walk away from her? It's disappointing, yet not surprising, that Owen and Amelia's conflict exploded in such a traumatic way considering we're only two episodes away from the mid-season finale.

Elsewhere in the hospital: a new surgical consultant, a la Season 9, turned the surgical service upside down; Richard felt blindsided by the consultant's arrival; the attendings began to freak out about what the residents were telling the consultant; Richard treated a patient along with Andrew, Maggie, and Leah; April started dating which made for humorous interactions with Jackson; Ben and Bailey continued to struggle with how to separate work from home; Maggie learned she'd like to be a better teacher and shared her revelation with Richard whose patient taught him to shift his own approach too; and it seemed the consultant might be super-interested in Arizona and looking to push Richard out of his job.

| press release | promo | photos | sneak peek 1 | sneak peek 2 | sneak peek 3 | recap |
screencaps by @Caterina_Online

| press release | promo |photos | sneak peek 1 | sneak peek 2 | sneak peek 3 |
below screencaps by @Caterina_Online

As any Grey's Anatomy fan knows, there's no more sure journey to romantic conflict on this show than marriage, and we certainly saw that to be the case for Owen and Amelia this week. We learned, in a rare timeline hint from Grey's writers, that this episode began the morning after the first bump in the road following their impetuous decision to start a family. As part of that reveal, we also got a synopsis of Amelia's Private Practice storyline for those fans who were previously not in the know and how it continued to impact her.

When Owen reached out to Amelia early in the hour, she swore she was fine, really fine, totally fine and on her way to evaluate a patient. Owen, meanwhile, remained painfully aware that his usually overly talkative bride had gone to work before he'd woken up and seemed to have no words for the elephant in the middle of their marriage - the negative result to the pregnancy test she'd taken the night before. Owen continued to approach Amelia and she continued to assert that she was absolutely fine, though the tension in her posture and demeanor made it clear she was anything but fine.

 It was heartening to see growth via Owen's behavior, given that he's traditionally had a tough time sharing his feelings out loud. It was also disappointing that he gave up relatively easily when Amelia quickly reversed her previous desire to start a family right away and put up walls in reaction to his requests to talk. He seemed to remember Dr. Wyatt's Season 5 advice about naming his feelings in order to navigate through them, but he wouldn't get much of an opening to do so from Amelia for the rest of the episode. While her request that they focus on what being married to each other would normally be a good plan for a couple who had only a two-week engagement and an up and down relationship leading up to their marriage, Owen's confusion about her seeming reversal on when to start a family was evident as he continued trying to reach out to her.

While this path might be frustrating for Owen fans, this hour of drama wasn't about quick growth so much as it was about getting Amelia twitchy enough that her words would flow again, even if those words were shared with an unexpected resource - Alex, who was facing his own demons via the potential impact of his legal situation both at work and in life. It seemed slightly ominous that Amelia believed Owen would be too disappointed to stand by her in her reluctance to start a family given the tragic outcome of her first pregnancy, even after his multiple attempts to reach out to her. It was also unfortunate that we learned little more about Owen in this episode even as we saw glimmers of his strengthened emotional intuition and that he's grown more willing to reach out and share how he's feeling. By the end of the hour it remained unclear whether these two are on a path that will eventually bring them through this conflict and back to each other or whether they are on their way to the internal combustion many marriages face on Grey's Anatomy.

Elsewhere in the hospital: Catherine Avery reappeared and got suddenly interested in how the resident program is run at Grey Sloan Memorial; Leah Murphy returned as a triumphant cardio resident intent on working with Maggie; Alex and Meredith bonded over his impending court date and how it might impact their lives; April and Jackson continued to maneuver themselves through parenthood; Arizona and Alex were both surprised over Leah's return while Stephanie and Jo talked trash about her too; Andrew kind of, sort of, declared his romantic interest in Jo; Alex met a woman at court whom later became his patient for whom he called in Bailey for a super-powered consult; and Maggie was conflicted over her new resident's stellar work alongside learning about her personal history at the hospital.