Author: Morgan Flake|Morgan Flake
A fascination with hospital television shows has pervaded the United States since E.R. in the early 90’s. It’s not really the blood and gore that fascinates us, it’s not that the shows are medically accurate or educational. What draws us in are the relationships and the characters. The setting of a hospital extracts the greatest dramas from people – the most heartfelt connections one can feel through a television screen with an artificial character.
The season premiere of Grey’s Anatomy last Thursday, Sept. 25 set up this season for another series of heart-wrenching dramas between doctors, interns and patients.
“Dream A Little Dream of Me” opens with a cliché dream sequence to introduce the themes of fantasy and reality, dreams and failure. Doctors deal daily with the fragility of life and the giant implications of the small errors they make. This becomes all the more apparent when character Dr. Cristina Yang’s mistaken stitching leads to the death of a patient.
Cristina is later swept into a surreal fairy-tale-like mini-romance when she is impaled by an icicle outside the hospital (probably the first icicle in Seattle since the last Ice Age) and an army doctor sweeps this damsel in distress off her feet. Of course, with sassy Cristina this romance couldn’t last long, but hopefully it will kindle the first passion in this girl since Preston Burke left her two seasons ago.
Last season left us with Meredith Grey’s dramatic candlelit attempt to regain the heart of Derek Shepherd after months of teeter-tottering relations between the two. Meredith worries that her recurring dream of Derek’s death means that she’s afraid of a happy ending, but she’s really just afraid of failure. She’s terrified of repeating the mistakes of her parents.
Happily ever after may not exist in terms of fairy tales, but if Meredith compromises with Derek and reconciles her idea of a happy ending with reality, I think she can achieve it.
Three trauma patients dressed like aging Disney princesses arrive at the Emergency Room with cuts and head injuries as well as bankruptcies and infidelities. When their injured husbands arrive and the truths are revealed, the fact is that money doesn’t protect people from the problems that can destroy their lives. The bond between the three women is stronger than the lies that would tear them apart, proving that relationships are truly what matter most and what we cling to in times of disaster.
The episode also brought up the question of the risks we take. When Dr. Callie Torres dares to attempt an unconventional method to prevent paralysis which involves freezing the patient, she chooses to risk killing a man for the possibility of giving him the chance to walk again.
Anna, a trauma patient, risked her relationship with her husband and her best friend when she slept with MaryBeth’s husband. Meredith will take the risk to move in with Derek. Sometimes these attempts will fail, but it’s all part of trying to make dreams come true.
In Grey’s Anatomy, mistakes are made both in the operating room and the bedroom, and occasionally in the elevator, but these mistakes make these characters who they are. The doctors tend to take their own perceived deficiencies out on each other, but according to Dr. Hunt, “mistakes are how you learn.” If the doctors want to improve the ratings of Seattle Grace as a teaching hospital, a lot of mistakes will have to be made to get better.
In the end, Meredith says, “Reality: it’s so much more interesting than happily ever after.” And Grey’s Anatomy is so much more interesting than reality.
This article has been archived, for more requests please contact us via the support system.
