BWW Recap: Dr. Herman Suffers from a Crisis of Hope on GREY'S

By: Feb. 26, 2015
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After reading last week's recap, I was emailed this food for thought: "Think they'll make Lady Shepherd fail and she'll be tempted by the drugs again? I hope not. We don't need to see that, but Geena Davis doesn't feel like a long term cast member." So these are the questions that milled around my brain this evening while I allowed GREY'S to give me agita.

Ginger Doc got Lady Shepherd coffee and she turned it into this mega awkward, I-Wish-I'd-Just-Thrown-The-Coffee-In-Your-Face-Instead moment. We must forgive her though. She had a lot to think about. She had a series of lectures to give, and had to deal with the fact that she had knowledge that some tumors grew teeth, hair, and stray eyes. Lady Shepherd knew the grotesque nature of the world.

"Life will always find a way to continue," she said to a relatively small audience. So when a foreign body has leeched onto your body, it's basically just a battle for control. Therefore we have Dr. Herman (Geena Davis) versus Her Tumor.

The episodes took us through several weeks. Herman started undergoing radiation treatment while wearing a protective head piece that I think I saw once on Lady Gaga. A week later when her hair started falling out, she told Lady Shepherd that she wasn't going to do it anymore. It was her body and her potentially short term life. "We have very little control over the time we have, and we have a plan." She had things to do like teach Arizona everything she knew before she died.

Callie became very concerned with how much Arizona laughed when she was with Herman. Alex pointed out that sometimes they had sleepovers, and Callie had a mild wig out. Was it jealousy, concern, or just loneliness? Are we going to see a resurrection of Arizona and Callie at some point, or can we stop beating that dead horse? There was talk of relationships without the pressure of female grooming. After all, Maggie explained that "it" is down there, and your partner should be able to find "it," hair or no.

Bailey wanted Herman to help Glenda (Marla Sokoloff, remember HER? Netflix, I'll need to you add THE PRACTICE to your instant library, STAT), a pregnant woman whose unborn baby had a tumor in its back. Herman said no. She was busy. She had a cork board preset with a variety of colored 3x5 cards designating preapproved patients. There was no time for Glenda. Well, unless they lost a patient and Arizona started to cry. There's no crying in pediatric surgery, Arizona. Thus Glenda got her own colored note card.

Herman started radiation again, which made her sick and caused her to tell Lady Shepherd that she was done. Again. Lady Shepherd wasn't done though. She had newfound ideas; her "genius was flying around the room," and causing her to yell at Stephanie, her Resident. Stephanie is getting reamed a lot this season, but at least this time she got to tell Lady Shepherd to start acting like she was worthy of everyone's confidence and admiration, and to "get it together."

Lady Shepherd presented her final lecture to a sold out crowd. She planned an 18 hour solo procedure, using difficult techniques she'd never done before, and Callie asked when she was going to quit playing games with my heart, and call Derek. She wasn't going to call Derek, though. She had something to prove; she didn't need her big brother. She was not "the Other Shepherd."

Herman had this really great scene where she told Arizona that she and Lady Shepherd had infected her with a sense of hope. She had initially come to terms with the fact that she was going to die, and now that the other two had gotten involved, there was this sense of Maybe floating in the air. The radiation was making her feel sick; her hair loss was making her look it; she was still pretty certain she was going to die, but the brief stint with hope was making it harder to let everything go. Way to go, Hope.

While operating on Glenda, Arizona branched out from Herman's method and showed that although she's been too scared to admit it, she's actually been learning something. Herman's eyes got fuzzy, she had Lady Shepherd scan her, and it turned out it was time for the Big Surgery. Arizona kept saying "Amelia's got this," but I think that's because she wasn't registering the sheer terror that was always on Lady Shepherd's face.

"You don't have half the time you imagine." Stop it, Geena Davis. Somebody let me see when her Grey's contract is up.

So the email's questions still hang in the air. Will Lady Shepherd succeed in saving Dr. Herman's life, or is Geena Davis a throwaway character that they can go ahead and kill off? There was a brief shot of a helicopter. Who's making an emergency visit? I have my hopes, but I can't bear to type them out, only to have them dashed in Shondaland next week.

Photo Credit: ABC



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