Grey's Anatomy 7x18: "Song Beneath the Song" aka The Musical Episode

Oh my gosh! How great was Grey's Anatomy last night? It was a million times better than the shooter episode. April Fools!

Hey, maybe this episode was just a great big April Fools day joke on all of us. Credit: An original graphic by me. Can't you tell by how professional it looks?

Last night, the long-awaited musical episode of Grey's Anatomy aired, and to be honest, it was pretty terrible. I took notes during the episode because I knew that I'd probably want to write a review, and many most of my comment are of the "what the crap" variety. I'm going to warn you now, this review will probably be quite ranty and will most definitely be critical. Okay, you've been warned.

Here's an analogy to describe how I felt about last night's episode: Think of the tv show plot that consists of a dorky, awkward girl wanting to perform in the school talent show. (See the Little Seal Girl episode of As Told By Ginger for reference.) She has some friends, but she's made fun of by a lot of the school. Her friends are worried about her making an embarrassment of herself and don't want her to do it. She ignores this and performs in front of the school. Only unlike the classic plot, she makes a complete embarrassment of herself. You can probably figure this out on your own, but if you're having trouble, here's a key to the analogy: Grey's Anatomy is the awkward girl in this analogy, the "friends" are fans of the show (myself included), the rest of the school are non-fans of Grey's Anatomy, and obviously, this episode is the talent show performance. You may be thinking that's kind of a harsh analogy, but then you probably didn't watch the episode.

I have so many thoughts about this episode, that I'm not sure where to start with my review. I guess I'll start with the setup of the episode. The basic idea behind the episode was the Callie was severely injured in last week's car crash because she wasn't wearing her seat belt. And, may I add (this means a rant is coming on), because Arizona took her eyes off the road for like a million hours while she was proposing to Callie. She kept saying that "a truck came out of nowhere." Maybe if she had just kept her eyes on the road, they wouldn't be in this mess. I was just looking at her (which I guess is kind of creepy because she's not able to see me and doesn't exist) like "Guuuuurl, please" throughout the whole episode (see one of the most amazing videos on youtube). Okay, this specific rant is over.

Forget click it or ticket. How about click it, or you will suffer massive injuries and hallucinate people singing?  Actually, that second part sounds kind of fun. Also, sorry this is uglily placed. I fail forever at formatting.

Credit:  Under: Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License      Wikipedia/ PMcM, Liftarn

Anyway, Callie somehow becomes disembodied as a result of this and sees everything as a musical. I appreciate that Grey's (yeah, we're on a first-name basis) tried to incorporate the musical into the story. However, they did a sucky job of it because it was nonsensical. People were singing even while Callie was not in the room. Does this mean that what we saw of people singing who were not in the room with Callie didn't happen? Or I guess it could mean that she was literally a disembodied spirit roaming the hospital? I wouldn't put it past them after Meredith's non-dying death and ghost Denny (who was a hallucination, but whatever). Plus, ghost-Callie was just weird. She did a bunch of strange things like singing while sitting on actual-Callie and stroking actual-Callie's face. She also sang to her premie baby which I guess was sweet in a totally creepy and bizarre way.

Let's all hope that marks the last of the Grey's Anatomy ghosts. Although, I wouldn't necessarily mind if a ghost George haunted the hospital because I miss him. Also, that was a joke. If the people of Grey's are reading this, don't get any ideas.         Credit: ABC/Ron Tom

It's not that I'm not completely against the idea of people hallucinating musical numbers. In fact, this episode of Grey's Anatomy reminded me a lot of Eli Stone, a show about a lawyer whose brain aneurysm gives him prophetic hallucinations in the form of musical numbers. Well, that is if Eli Stone has completely sucked (which it didn't, despite it's odd description). Grey's setup was just not good enough to support the musical numbers.

That brings us to the actual musical numbers of the show. All of the songs were songs that have been featured on the show before now. This was actually kind of a cool idea, but it just didn't work for me because the song choices seemed rather random. While "Running on Sunshine," kind of went along with the action on the screen, it seemed kind of out of place for everyone to be hooking up while Callie and her baby were so much in peril. Although, I must say that I kind of enjoyed seeing the scene between hotter-Jason-Priestly and Teddy. What? I like hotter-Jason-Priestly (no offense to any Jason fans; I can't look at him the same after his role as Jack on Tru Calling). If their only chance to be romantic is through song, then so be it. In fact, the only one that I can remember going along with the story was "How to Save a Life." (Side note: I'll make an exception for "The Story" just because Sara Ramirez sounded so amazing singing it.) This made the songs, despite the humor in/second-hand embarrassment at the fact that they were singing, kind of boring. This episode turned out so campy that I probably would have just preferred original songs, so that it would have been more entertaining, even if it just meant that I was laughing at them more.

"How to Save a Life" was totally their version of "Whistle While You Work."    Credit: ABC/Danny Feld

I'm not sure how everyone else feels about Lucy, but I kind of liked her until this episode. She really pissed me off in this one, though. First, she has no plan to save Callie's baby and says to the chief verbatim, "I may be a little out of my depth here, sir." So, she really shouldn't have been upset when Addison showed up. Did she expect him to just let the baby die because she's not capable? Or did she want him to stroke her ego? I don't know, and I don't care. She pissed me off and is going to have to be extremely likable in future episodes to gain back my good opinion of her. Although, I heard that she's probably going to leave the show, because she's booked the Charlie's Angel pilot, so that might not be a problem. Plus, I think her character might have gotten fired in this episode, but I wasn't sure because the music completely distracted me from the plot.

Speaking about the music being distracting, I think I'll, well, speak about the music being distracting. Because the music was mostly not that related to what was going on, it almost become more like background music--very loud background music. I found it extremely hard to pay attention to what was happening, while all the pointless singing was taking place. I tuned out for a second during some kind of surgery on Callie or something, and I looked up to see that suddenly her baby had been delivered. Also, I was so distracted by Lexie's singing of "Breathe" that when she comforted Mark, I completely forgot about all of their history together. I didn't remember that they had been a couple until Avery said something about it. This is coming from someone who's seen every episode of Grey's Anatomy (except for the second half of the boring documentary episode). That tells you how much the singing distracted me (and how forgetful I am). I will give Grey's a little credit here. Since we kind of saw the episode through Callie's point of view, perhaps they were trying to show us the sense of disconnect from what was happening that she felt. Still, even if that is what they were going for, I didn't like it.

The singing also kept me from being sad about the episode. I'll be honest, I kind of like it when Grey's makes me cry. I revel in the drama, and I like when they have dramatic episodes. The Callie storyline could have been really sad, had I not been laughing at the singing. The scene where Mark was upset and sitting on the steps was really quite heartbreaking--except for the fact that Lexie was singing to him while he was sitting there. I will say that there were two moments that had me edge of crying, and unsurprisingly, they were two moments that didn't include singing. The first was the opening scene. Jessica Capshaw really sold me on the sheer horror of the moment, until (you guessed it) ghost-Callie starting singing. The other moment was Meredith and Derek's elevator scene. It was a melodramatic, sad, and contained no singing. What more could I ask for? Plus, I've really grown to like Meredith again. She annoyed me for a while in some of the middle seasons, but she's back to being likable in my eyes.

Good job in the elevator scene. Four for you, Meredith Coco. You go, Meredith Coco.         Credit: ABC/Danny Feld 

In short, Grey's Anatomy, you know I love you, but please do not ever do a musical episode again. And, if you can control yourself, please tone down the whole supernatural thing. I'll be watching next week, because you know I'm a fan. Just don't pull any more funny business. You made a fool of yourself this week, and I was embarrassed for you.

Did you watch the Grey's Anatomy musical? What did you think? Feel free to join in on my bashing or alternatively, defend the episode in the comments.