Episode 19: Much Too Much

Sex. Everyone is having it.

The opening scenes of this episode are full of passionate kisses between various cast members, leading to clothes being thrown on the floor and, eventually, everyone collapsing into heaps of post-coital bliss. This type of scene was done far better in the movie Antonia’s Line, and I highly recommend watching that again (imdb’s one liner on that movie: “A Dutch matron establishes and, for several generations, oversees a close-knit, matriarchal community where feminism and liberalism thrive.”) over watching this episode.  But watching this show is my part-time (yes, I know, recently VERY part-time. You can shut up now.) job, so I’m in it for the whole 42 minutes.

McDreamy and Addison are finally re-consummating their marriage, though the viewer can’t help but notice how wistful and sad he looks after having sex with Addison. Um. Are we supposed to feel sorry for you here, buddy? Because I wish I had your problems. Well, actually, no, I don’t, but it still doesn’t mean that they’re actually problems. Stop looking so sad and grow some balls already.

Burke is pulling a traditionally lesbian move on Cristina: The U-haul. After one night together, he leaves her his key in the morning and later, over lunch, asks her to move in.

CRISTINA: "If a key turns in a lock, and no one asked for the key or even wanted the key, does it make a sound?" My feeling about this note: Why are "C" and "B" in quotation marks? Comments welcome.

Let me offer you some advice, Cristina: Run away. As fast as you can. I speak from experience here: I once had a girlfriend who brought a suitcase to date 2 and then didn’t leave my house for a year. When I finally broke up with her, I had to pack her stuff back into the aforementioned suitcase, put the suitcase in my car, drop her and the suitcase at her house, and leave her with a portable DVD player (which I never got back) so she could sleep in her own bed without being scared. All I’m saying is: a key on date number 1 is a bad sign.

Meredith has been bringing many different male visitors home from Joe’s Bar in an attempt get over her obsession with McDreamy. Good sex does have a way of making a person forget about past heartbreak, but Meredith being the queen of the whiners means that this is going to get complicated. Unfortunately, her most recent somebody from Joe’s bar arrives at the hospital right after the credits, uncomfortably holding a leather jacket (straight out of the 90s) in front of his crotch. Yes, in this unlikely world, even though he is not on trazodone and has not taken any drugs for erectile dysfunction, he is suffering from persistent priapism.

Redefining the "walk of shame." Nice jacket, BTW.

More unlikely than his final diagnosis of a spinal tumor (in fact, I could only find spinal tumor-associated priapism in a horse, so it’s clearly quite rare) is the fact that the actor who plays “Steve” is first Indian I’ve seen on this show. Come on! This is a show about surgical residents and none of them originate on the subcontinent? Anyone who has been in a hospital in the last 25 years knows that we (yes, I’m Indian, although I prefer to be referred to as one of “the metabolically challenged people.”) are everywhere in hospitals these days.

Izzie and Alex are hooking up but Alex is having some performance issues (God, sometimes I think this show is all about penises. Remember season 1?) and then, later in the episode, he hooks up in a call room with Olivia (the nurse to whom he gave the gift of syphilis. It’s so Douche with a Heart of Gold of him.) And, of course, Izzie catches them.

This is all going on while Izzie tends to a ridiculous plotline about a woman who is having quints (and who already has triplets. I do not care and will not talk about this plotline. Ugh.) while Alex treats hyponatremia in a man with a pituitary tumor (played by Curtis Armstrong , best known for his stint as “Booger” in Revenge of the Nerds).

Yes, Booger is alive and well and making the rounds between this show, and, I suspect, every Law and Order and CSI offshoot on TV.

When Alex announced to McDreamy that he was using “hypertonic saline,” to treat the hyponatremic patient, I was actively yelling at the television, “No! Use normal saline! It’s relatively hypertonic to the patient’s serum!” but nobody listened to me, and three scenes later (usually it’s more like three days in real life, but this is TV), the patient was seizing and foaming at the mouth, and clearly supposed to be suffering from a condition known as central pontine myelinosis, which is a sudden destruction of the protective coating covering the nerves in part of the brainstem. They don’t show what happens to him, but because this condition can lead to being “locked in,” I suggest you watch “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” to find out what the rest of Booger's life is like (ah. ee. oo. uu. repeat.). Oops, Alex. Maybe you failing the boards was the best thing that could have happened to your future patients.

Quotes of the week:

Alex : “O’Malley is a fetus. All whiny and afraid of the light.”

Uh, gross?

Izzie: “People have sex in this hospital all the time.”

I know. I've been complaining about this ridiculousness since episode 1.

Meredith: “Why does every guy I meet come with his own unique set of nightmarish humiliations?”

George: “Maybe it’s a matter of volume?”

Meredith: “You think I’m sleeping with too many guys?”

George: “I think you’re taking some risks. I think you’re going to find yourself in a hole in some guy’s basement being told ‘it puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.’”

The weird thing about this exchange is that the song playing in the background is "Lotion" by Greenskeepers. The words to this creepy song are “it puts the lotion in the basket.” Creepy.

The Urban Dictionary has reported that “it puts the lotion in the basket” is now a phrase that can be “Used to describe events or objects that are extraordinary in some way. Derived from the film The Silence of the Lambs, in which the line, “It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again” is uttered to a woman in an extraordinarily bad situation. Connotation is often but not necessarily negative, and always implied:

“What do you mean your wife is cheating on you? That totally puts the lotion in the basket.”

Cristina: Congratulations. You’re flaccid.

Ridiculous woman pregnant with quints: “I don’t believe in odds.” 

This was better said by Hans Solo in The Empire Strike Back when he yells at C3PO: “Never tell me the odds.” As a health services researcher, I struggle with this request.

Line most likely to be heard in a future episode of Greys: “That’s the tumor talking.”