Your Official ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Recap: Season 21, Episode 5

Oh, how typical, Grey’s Anatomy! A storm is coming. And no, I’m not just talking about the mess that is Teddy and Owen’s marriage at the moment — I’m talking about a literal storm! One that puts two of our doctors and their patient in a life-threatening situation in a transport helicopter. Like, I know this show is set in Seattle, but do our docs ever get a break? The answer is no, not really. And if we’re being honest, we like it that way, don’t we? Grab your umbrellas — let’s see what the storm brings in “You Make My Heart Explode.” (I’m guessing more than just rain.)


Levi Schmitt meets his destiny … maybe?

Since it was announced earlier this year that Jake Borelli would be leaving Grey’s Anatomy this season, and with his departure, we’d be saying goodbye to Chief Resident Levi Schmitt, né Glasses, I’ve been wondering how they’d be writing this character out of the show, and the latest episode just might hold the answer. If you thought Levi discovering that his new boyfriend, James the Chaplain, was married while snooping around his apartment post-sex was a major revelation, just wait for the one our guy has after a helicopter ride from hell.

Monica Beltran has Levi and Lucas take a helicopter (Levi: please, no; Lucas: yes, please) to transport a young girl, Ofelia, who fell off a moving tractor and has a head and a leg injury, both too severe for the small hospital near her to properly take care of. Immediately, Schmitt can tell that if they don’t get Ofelia to Grey Sloan right away, she’ll lose the leg. He keeps the parents calm, he keeps Ofelia calm — he’s, honestly, miles away from whoever that Glasses guy was — and even when a huge thunderstorm puts everyone in the chopper in danger, he sticks to the task at hand: keeping Ofelia alive. Eventually, that means using an IV tube to create a temporary shunt for her femoral artery before she bleeds out in the sky. No pressure or anything.

Back at Grey Sloan, Monica is spiraling when she learns the helicopter had to make an emergency landing, and they’ve since lost contact with the group. She put Levi and Lucas on that flight, and if anything happened to them, she wouldn’t be able to live with herself. In a truly unexpected turn of events, it’s Amelia — yes, that Amelia — who pulls Monica out of that spiral, helping her remain calm until there’s something to actually worry about. Listen, we’re all surprised about it, even the Queen of Spirals herself (she is very self-aware these days). And in the end, Amelia is right: There was no need to worry. Levi and Lucas pull up to Grey Sloan in an ambo, and thanks to their quick thinking and almost superhuman ability to do detailed vascular surgery in extreme turbulence, Ofelia will be fine after some physical therapy. Monica has never seemed prouder of Schmitt — nor more convinced that despite Schmitt not getting the pediatric fellowship he wanted, he is meant to pursue a career in pediatrics.

He knows it in his bones too. As terrified as Schmitt was to be on that helicopter, once Ofelia needed him, all that fear was just background noise. He’s meant to be a pediatric surgeon. Monica wants to help him: She knows a lot of peds surgeons who got their fellowship after doing some research, and she has a friend in need of someone to help him with a clinical trial. It could be Schmitt’s way in. The catch? That friend who needs the help is in Texas.

jake borelli, michael thomas grant

Anne Marie Fox

Jake Borelli and Michael Thomas Grant

You might be thinking it could be the perfect time for Schmitt to get a fresh start, what with the whole sleeping-with-a-married-chaplain thing, but friend, you would be wrong. When James finally gets Schmitt to have a conversation with him, he explains that his husband, Ryan, died four years ago. He also tells Schmitt that he thinks what they have is real. “You’re kind of the best thing that’s happened to me in a really long time,” James adds. Now that might be a little bit harder to walk away from.

We’re all scared, Jo!

Oh, Jo. As much as it seems like the Josephine Wilson we met when she rolled in to Grey Sloan as an intern has grown up, she still cannot seem to get a handle on the fact that she doesn’t have to face her worst moments and her biggest fears alone. When she freaks out about something, her first instinct is to push people away, and that’s exactly what she’s doing with Link as she begins to panic about carrying and raising twins. She locks him out of the car so she doesn’t have to talk to him. When he mentions needing a minivan for all these kids before their ultrasound, she tells him she can’t take his “everything will be fine” attitude anymore and kicks him out.

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Clearly — and understandably — all this bothers Link. He’s not himself all day, taking his frustration out on patients and other doctors. When he rants about a patient “suffering in silence because no one cares,” you know he’s not just talking about his patient. Even Bailey has to tell this guy to cool his jets when he starts to get out of hand during a surgery. Finally, when he meets up with Jo at the end of the day, he tells her how he’s been feeling. She might be freaked out, but so is he. Holding back tears, he tells her how scared he is for the babies and how scared he is that something might happen to Jo during this pregnancy. And now, on top of all that fear, he has a new one: the fear of what’s going to happen to them once these babies arrive since they can’t even seem to keep it together; they can’t seem to lean on each other for support like they’re supposed to now. If they don’t know how to be partners now, is there any hope for them once the real stress comes?

All by myself (Winston’s version)

We’ve got to talk about our sweet Winston. If returning lingerie to a woman from your home in a manila envelope only to learn that that piece of lingerie did not, in fact, belong to said woman and must have come from some other woman you’ve had over recently isn’t a cry for help, I don’t know what is. It’s the manila envelope that really drives that point home, you know? This poor man is lonely, okay! He needs friends. Friends who will tell him to just hand over the lingerie like a normie.

After that cringey interaction with Monica (who actually is totally good with it), made more cringey when Amelia walks in and clocks the lingerie (she tells Monica that it’s none of her business when the peds surgeon tries to explain it’s casual), Winston puts out even stronger signals that he could use some buddies when Darren Riley’s situation gets much worse. Darren is the high school band teacher who almost died on Simone’s (not) watch last week. While he’s been extubated, his one lung has been so liquefied by necrotic tissue, it needs to be removed immediately, and then he’ll have to wait in the hospital until a donor lung is available. It’s just bad news after bad news for Darren.

adelaide kane

Anne Marie Fox

Adelaide Kane

Ben and Jules are assigned to Winston’s service, but you wouldn’t know it from the way Winston’s working. He refuses to delegate even the smallest jobs to his two residents. And with the knowledge that Winston is writing the first evaluation of Ben’s work, our surgeon firefighter is attempting to impress with his skills — if only he could use some of them. Ben starts to believe that Winston doesn’t trust him and gets so frustrated that he calls Winston out on it during surgery. But of course, Ben’s got it all wrong.

After Mr. Riley’s surgery is over — the necrotic lung is removed, but Darren has a long way to go — Winston wants to explain himself to Ben. It’s not that he doesn’t trust that Ben has the skills; it’s that Winston has maybe gotten overly invested in Mr. Riley’s care, especially after what happened to him last week. Mr. Riley has no family, and his students aren’t able to visit — he’s had nothing but complications and is handling them all on his own. Winston doesn’t want Darren to feel alone; he wants him to know he has someone in his corner.

It’s very sweet, and now we can forgive Winston for the whole lingerie debacle of 2024. It also clues Ben in to the fact that everything with Darren might be extra-personal for Winston because, as it turns out, the guy is clearly lonely himself. When Ben finds out that Winston is headed over to Joe’s for dinner alone because he “like[s] the noise” there, Ben tells Bailey he’ll be home late because he wants to hang out with Dr. Ndugu at the bar. Did Ben just become Winston’s first real friend in Seattle? Our sweet boys!

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System failure

Bailey is unbothered by her husband’s last-minute plan, most likely because she’s had herself a day and she simply does not have the time. Bailey winds up working on a case with Kwan and Simone, who attempt to help a Grey Sloan custodial worker named Zayne after he collapses from pain due to his sickle cell disease. His hip joint has eroded so much that he needs a replacement — something that his insurance wouldn’t cover until now, when his joint is all but destroyed. Yes, in case you’re wondering, that is the U.S. health insurance system at work.

No one is happy about the fact that this person who literally works in their hospital, who eats in the same cafeteria as they do, cannot get the help he needs. Even more infuriating: There is now gene therapy available that will cure sickle cell, but it comes with a $3 million price tag. Let’s go over that one more time: There is a cure for sickle cell, but it is so cost prohibitive, the people who are out there suffering from this disease by and large cannot afford it. Simone and Kwan go crazy thinking about how they have all the tools to save this man from a life of pain but can’t do anything about it.

alexis floyd, harry shum jr, chandra wilson, chris carmack

Anne Marie Fox

Alexis Floyd, Harry Shum Jr., Chandra Wilson, and Chris Carmack

Until they decide to do something about it. They take their grievances to Dr. Webber, searching for some way to get Zayne the treatment he needs — to show the “idiot suit in an insurance office” that Zayne isn’t just some code on a piece of paper. Of course, the moment they decide to bombard Webber with their cause just happens to be while he is meeting with some of those idiots in suits in his office. Thankfully, instead of being offended, they decide they want to help. They have a grant Zayne could apply for to cover the cost of the gene therapy. It feels like a huge win … until it very much doesn’t. When Zayne learns that the treatment will take about a year, including some lengthy, isolated hospital stays, the offer is a nonstarter: He has a special-needs son, and he can’t afford the care he’d need if Zayne is out of commission that long. Once again, the system feels broken.

Hopefully, Zayne’s story doesn’t end there — his hip replacement goes well, so at least that’s one win — and the good docs at Grey Sloan will figure out a way to help him. There is another silver lining, though: The entire day Simone has been on Kwan’s case for not being registered to vote. This whole situation with Zayne puts into perspective how no matter how helpless you feel within the system, there is at least one thing you can do to make your voice heard. It’s not the most subtle storytelling Grey’s Anatomy has ever done, but maybe it shouldn’t be — vote like your life depends on it, people!

Perhaps what happens to Simone at the end of the episode is karma for doing a civic duty. When she gets home, Lucas is there waiting for her, cooking her dinner and ready to end his really long day with her in his arms. It’s so adorable that maybe it’s some good karma paying off for all of us too. I mean, if anyone deserves a peek at some joy, it’s those of us who let Grey’s traumatize us season after season for decades.

the text provides a fun fact about a specific visual effect known as 'bloodsplosion' used in a tv production it explains how the effect was rigged to protect the actors' eyes, noting that it required rehearsals and multiple takes to achieve the desired outcome as seen on screen

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Putting Band-Aids on hemorrhages

If only all our Grey’s Anatomy couples could be so happy. Alas, Teddy and Owen are around, and they are borderline miserable. They’re in couples therapy and have been assigned to schedule sex for the week, a notion Owen finds preposterous. Teddy, however, thinks it’s a great — and necessary — idea. To Owen, his wife is simply putting a Band-Aid on a hemorrhage. A very apt metaphor for a medical marriage, no?

Later, with a patient dealing with fluid around his heart post-cardiac surgery, Teddy wants to face the problem head-on and deal with the fluid now. This time around, Owen thinks it’s best to wait and see — why force this guy into a procedure if he doesn’t actually need it yet? Now who’s putting a Band-Aid on a hemorrhage, dude?

No, seriously. Who is putting a Band-Aid on that patient’s hemorrhage? Because that man’s chest cavity explodes, and all the blood and fluids that were building up go everywhere! We need so many Band-Aids, people! It is disgusting … and yet, it relieves all of the pain the patient was feeling. It turns out that Teddy’s instinct to do a pericardiocentesis before things got worse was the right one. (Not like she’s an esteemed cardiothoracic surgeon or anything.) But instead of them playing a game of I-told-you-so, the sheer ridiculousness of being covered in that much blood gives the feuding couple the giggles, and in turn, a moment for apologies. They both want to fix this marriage — they’re on the same team here. But while Owen’s plan to take Teddy on a nice date and not dinner at Joe’s for the one-thousandth time is a good start, one date doesn’t fix a marriage. This is only the beginning.

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