The excellent tension

Here's one thing that makes characters incredibly compelling to me: tension between who they really are and who they present to the world. That's the most relatable thing, isn't it? Because none of us are who we think we are in our heads. There's no perfect transfer of who we are on the inside to the outside world, even if we always wanted to do that, which I don't think anyone does. You'd have to be one hundred percent at peace with yourself to do that. And who doesn't have some traits they'd rather be without?

I was trying to figure out what made the characters of Community so brilliant and that's what I figured out. They're all in a constant state of tension between who they are and who they present to the world.

There's actually a wonderful third part to that tension, in that they're all trying to become something new. That's what moves it beyond great to fantastic. We love watching people try to transform themselves or reach beyond, especially if they're not very good at it and fall back a lot.

Okay, Community. I fell in love with it in the last month or so. To an extreme degree. I had a bunch of episodes on the dvr and kept watching them over and over and then got season one through Netflix and did the same thing. Over and over, then with the commentaries, then again without the commentaries.

Obviously it's brilliantly funny, and it's a created family, which always gets me, but the thing that amazes me is that it's a half-hour comedy that's fundamentally character based. Characters grow and change. That's incredibly rare.

I can't even watch most half-hour comedies because of the translation circuit in my brain. It goes like this: say a character's funny thing is that they're mean. Like all the jokes in their lines are based on how mean they are to people, or how self-centered, or how stupid they are. Take Joey on Friends. He's kind of dumb. His lines are supposed to be funny because the joke is: he's kind of dumb. I can't stand that because due to the translation circuit, all I hear is: he's kind of dumb. Being dumb, is that funny? I don't laugh. I turn it off.

Yay for not being able to enjoy commonly appreciated humor! Whee! Go ahead and plot that on the spectrum.

So it has to be a bit more complex than that, see? Which Community is, because the characters are one thing and are also trying to be someone else, which makes them vulnerable and sweet and irritating and human.

If you've read the whole (flawed, incomplete) Canterbury Tales in the original a dozen times like some people who have no lives, you know that what makes it brilliant is the same thing. People presenting themselves in one way while unintentionally showing everyone else that they're not. Same thing! So brilliant!

Community centers on a self-centered lawyer who's nowhere near as cool and selfish as he thinks he is. Or maybe he wants to be that lousy person but a better side keeps forcing him to be a good person despite his inclinations. Either way, you see the jerk and the good person superimposed. The first time I watched it, I hated that guy. I wanted to punch him in the face. It takes a little time to see past the presented personality to the person underneath.

I'm not a good enough person myself to be able to do this IN REAL LIFE, where I mostly just get annoyed and avoid irritating people instead of seeing past the surface to the good person underneath. But here's a half-hour comedy that makes me realize that. Criminy! It's true that when I get that irritated with real people, I can generally get past it by thinking about what great characters they would make. Suddenly they're fun and interesting story generators! Yay! I know, I have some things in common with Abed, but I could also go on all day about how he uses the lens of fiction to understand the world through story and metaphor and how that's exactly what the show does for us. The show is Abed. I know!

I would love to hear the show's creator talk about this and see whether it's as conscious as I feel like it must be, but then again, maybe I'd rather give him all the credit in the world instead of finding out otherwise. Unrealistic expectations are limiting.

Here's why the show caused my brain to melt down. There was a terrible, terrible episode. The one about the chicken fingers. I forget the title, something about Poultry. It should have been more of what I just said, using a metaphor inside a metaphor to build something even better, but it didn't work. I've been puzzling for days over why it didn't work. I keep thinking things like: it was too absurd and over the top! But the whole show is absurd and over the top. The paintball episode was absurd and over the top and worked perfectly.

Was it the voiceover? The money aspect of it? The way the group was integrated into the whole economy of the school? That might be it, actually. The absurdity usually works so well because it's contained to our characters. I can accept that a group of people will build their own bizarro world, but I can't accept that everyone around them buys into it and plays a part in it. That's part of what makes the concept work, that no one around them buys into it. They're misfits and nerds and weirdos and don't belong to the rest of the world. The tension between what they think they are and what they really are was completely blown and destroyed. I kind of reject that episode in my mind, which I realize makes me bats in the belfry, but it just doesn't fit or work in the system the rest of the show creates.

Another incredibly annoying episode was right near that one, the one with the bratty high school kids making fun of Jeff and Britta. But that worked the other way around. An ordinary conversation started the episode, one that we would completely accept, but then these outsiders from the real world barged in and pointed out how ridiculous and sad and lame our characters were. It forces you to confront that same original excellent tension I've been talking about, that difference between how they see themselves and how they really are. We're on board with both, but then these brats shoot down how they see themselves completely and make use realize how pathetic the situation is on paper.

But everyone's lives can look pathetic on paper. Ooh, you work in an office. Ooh, you stock shelves at Lowe's. Ooh, you do other people's makeup. Or whatever. Put it in the voice of mockery and of course it sounds stupid and weak. That's kind of the point. The point is that mockery doesn't tear down anything. All it does is point out the divide between the truth about ourselves and the person we present to the world. Without that tension, and especially without the third part, the drive to change and move forward, there's no life there. There's no story.

I'm thinking a lot since the great chicken revelation about whether this tension is there in other shows I like. I have to think more about it. The opposite of this tension is WYSIWIG, something I can't stand at all--it makes for boring characters. Boring, boring, boring. And how do you even tell stories with them? I'm not sure anymore. I guess if you like or hate or laugh at people based on the assumption that what you see is all there is, then you can do sort of a D&D or paper doll storytelling thing. You could even write inner conflict in someone who is WYSIWIG, if they want two conflicting things. But it would be enormously better if they WERE two conflicting things AND they wanted two conflicting things. Orders of magnitude better.

Honestly, I think the people I like the most in reality have this going on. But that's a whole different story.

I need to use this much more in my own writing. I've already incorporated it into the current project, but as I'm looking back, I can see how this is a theme (thanks, Chaucer!) in a lot of other work. But Community made me realize this in a whole new way. Excellent tension chicken revelation for the win!

Attack the Block

I loved Attack the Block. I saw it on DVD a couple days ago and I've been thinking about it ever since. It hit on several of my favorite things all at once: science fiction movie tropes, class, found family, and so on.

My favorite thing right off was how realistic it was. What would a bunch of tough city kids do if an alien landed in their neighborhood and gouged three deep marks in the face of their leader? They'd go after it and beat it to death, obviously. I loved that so much. They didn't do any of the usual sci-fi things, like call the authorities, panic, run away, try to capture it, whatever.

This struck me all throughout. These kids did exactly what real kids would do, not what kids in movies would do. They protected their own, unless they couldn't. They weren't heroic. They ran away a lot. They did stupid things. They went to their own perceived authority figures instead of the official ones, in this case the local grower/dealer.

And the scientific basis of the whole thing worked perfectly, too. Of course they'd kill the thing and carry it around to show it off. Of course they'd get the scent of it all over them. Of course the rest of them would come after our kids in particular, something that is hardly ever explained in any logical way in any other movie ever. Except maybe the Alien movies.

The one woman in the bunch, Sam, plays our proxy in the sense of being afraid of the gang when they attack and rob her at the beginning, then slowly getting to trust them and getting to know them, then finally getting to understand Moses right near the end. When we find out Moses is 15 and lives with an uncle who is never there, the scary tough kid from the beginning of the movie--and he was presented as terrifying, pulling a knife on Sam and physically threatening her, scaring her half to death--turns into a scared kid who overcomes all that and saves the world. Saves the world! Go, Moses! Everyone chants his name together at the end and you want to cheer right along with them.

So there's an obvious social message wrapped up in the monster movie. It's also an interesting premise, that these tough kids are the best equipped to deal with an alien invasion. You can't imagine a bunch of suburban kids pulling off anything like what they do. Or even adults from anywhere. Sam keeps trying to get them to go to the authorities, but the kids know perfectly well they'll be arrested no matter who did what.

And in a lovely arc, Moses gets arrested for mugging Sam early on, and spends the whole movie with the broken handcuffs still on his wrists, then gets arrested again at the end for who knows what. Existing, apparently, since there's no way anyone could pin anything on him. Sam points out to the officer that these are the kids who saved her and saved everyone, but the movie ends on Moses handcuffed in a police truck, listening to everyone outside chanting his name, finally smiling. I'm sure it's the only time he smiles in the whole movie but I didn't realize it until right then.

The plot is a fairly straightforward monster movie set in and around an apartment block. We lose members of the gang along the way, mostly in gory and awful ways. But it's brilliant the way it uses only what they would really have. Fireworks, kitchen knives, backpacks, scooters, bikes, super-soakers full of gasoline. The stairs and elevators play huge roles, and the grow room is the calm center of it all, where the UV light shows the marks on them that the aliens have been following.

You could look at more of the sharp and funny tricks of the movie. There's one apparently female alien, the white one that they attack at the beginning. There's one white woman they also attack at the beginning, Sam. The gang is mostly black, though there was the one white kid, but they're all from the same social stratum and speak the same language. The rest of the aliens are big and scary and black. One of the boys even makes that connection for us, in case we're too dense to pick up on it, saying that the alien is blacker than his cousin.

I would have wished that Sam was more instrumental in her role as representative from a different world. She did go turn on all the gas in the apartment where the aliens were congregating, but other than that, her role was sort of dead end and wasted. I could see not wanting her to save the day, but if you wanted to make the point that everyone has to work together instead of running around alienated (ha) and scared of each other across class lines, then she and the scared stoner boy should have had more of a contribution. Actually she and the scared stoner boy should have been conflated entirely. Sam was a nurse and should have been the one to contribute the scientific knowledge about the moths and pheromones and all that. Honestly, the stoner boy was funny but otherwise wasted. Double ha.

So it didn't quite follow through all the way but it was an excellent movie. I should have had subtitles on and translation into something I could follow, though, because as an American, I missed probably 60% of what those boys said. Maybe more. You don't need to understand every word, thank goodness, but I wish I'd understood more.

Isn't there a section of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels where seriously dialectical English is subtitled and translated into English? That. I needed that.

Other favorite moments: when the boys all ran home to get weapons and their parents and whoever else all yelled things at them. It really brought home how young they were, lying to parents that they were out playing football and being forced to take the dog out for a walk when they were on a hunt for aliens.

And: the boys telling Sam she had a potty mouth and swore too much. Yay! And telling her they wouldn't have robbed her if they'd known she lived in the block. But she didn't look like them so how would they know? Exactly.

Excellent movie, enjoyed it very much.

Sarah Dessen: Dreamland

This was a tough book to love because of the ultra-passive heroine, but I did love it. It's something I watch out for in my own writing, and let me tell you, my first finished novel was all passive heroine all the time. But I'm currently writing something else that's all about a passive heroine waking up to that fact and snapping out of it in the first paragraph of page one--and how terribly hard that is for her and for everyone else around her to accept. It's like getting out of a nice warm bed into cold water, every single time she has to do something instead of allowing things to happen to her. And everyone around her shoves her right back into that old mode every time she moves a muscle.

So let's just say I'm very interested in the literary tradition of the passive heroine (you can trace it back to early saints' lives, at least) and that makes this book fascinating to me.

I have some dumb complaints I'll just get off my chest right away. Most of the girls' names started with C, which drives me crazy trying to keep them straight. The characters were very different, but why not go for some variety? I can think of a reason why not: they were all different versions of our heroine, different choices, different options that she didn't take. But still.

Other very dumb complaint: a merry-go-round is a merry-go-round, the low-tech round thing that you push and jump onto at the playground. Something nearly made me close the book and walk away on about page two, when the author referred to an actual merry-go-round as the low-tech version of one. Anyway. Letting it go.

This book could almost be subtitled: The Perils of Passivity. We watch Caitlin (not Cassandra, or any of the other C people) let herself be drawn into cheerleading, which she hates, and almost lets herself be drawn into a relationship with a boy she barely knows, just because it's expected of her. There's lots of inner dialogue about how she hates this, she doesn't like this boy, she doesn't want to do this and that, but she goes along with everything. The one choice she makes the whole book is stepping away from the football boy the others have chosen for her and turning toward Rogerson, the abusive drug dealer boyfriend. And even that is just accepting an invitation, not so much making a real choice of her own. Choosing from A or B that are in front of you is a choice, but just about the weakest possible thing.

Caitlin's choices are always: allow, put up with, go along with, avoid, be silent, cover up. She does seem to choose how long to wait before sleeping with Rogerson, which honestly doesn't fit with the rest of their relationship. He beats the hell out of her over nothing so I don't see a guy like that respecting her enough to let her tell him when that is going to happen. That jarred for me. Especially someone as utterly passive as Caitlin.

The weakness of the book was that Caitlin never, ever learns to stand up for herself. The abusive relationship isn't revealed because she grows a backbone or tells someone, despite tons of opportunities. She never does stand up to Rogerson, or confront him, or even tell him NO when he's belting her across the room. Instead, in the most utterly passive denouement possible, she gets knocked to the ground and *refuses to get up,* lying on the wet grass being kicked, which infuriates Rogerson because of course he told her to get up and she should do what she says. And one of the ladies at the big party sees this out her window and calls the police and her mother.

I wanted Caitlin to resist in some way. Some tiny way. She never resists at all. She literally never speaks about any of it to Rogerson. I would have been happy even if her day at the lake was a tiny gesture of rebellion and she got out from under his thumb for one afternoon that way, but even that was utterly against her will, dragged out there by her friend who won't take no for an answer (nobody in Caitlin's life ever takes no for an answer--she never enforces anything) and then when she finally does start walking, too agitated at not being able to reach Rogerson to tell him where she is, her friend's boyfriend drives her home. And that's even weaker. She can't even make anyone drive her home!

So I found this book infuriating, in a lot of ways that I think you're supposed to find it infuriating. Caitlin was certainly raised to be invisible and passive, with an overly involved mother who manages every second of her life. But where's the story if she never learns any better? Where's the story if the most passive character ever never stands on her own two feet even for one second? Her family sends her off to a treatment center for months and she seems to get better, deals with the emotional and physical abuse, quits her drug use, faces her fears. But again she never instigates or does anything.

And when she gets home, it's to a big comforting family that's going to take care of her again, her beloved sister back home from running away, a display of her photographs hung on the wall by her loving neighbors. She didn't do any of it. She didn't fix anything, or solve anything, or stand up to anyone, or ever even win an argument, except the one time her mom tried to take her jacket off and Caitlin wouldn't let her, because of the bruises. Which would be significant except it had no effect on anything at all.

Brilliant things: the inevitable slow descent into disaster. Brilliantly written. The comfort of passivity, letting things happen. Caitlin's self-loathing was amazingly well written, despising her own weakness and passivity even while she let everyone else rule her life. That claustrophobic feeling of being trapped by circumstances.

I'm very glad I read this book, for my own work and because Caitlin is a very real, compelling character, even if I wanted to yell, "Snap out of it!" about eighteen million times. But maybe we all need to hear that once in a while.

Medical medical medical

That (of course) is what Grey's Anatomy writers put in as a placeholder when they know they need to go look up some medical stuff to put into an ongoing dramatic situation. Isn't that cool? I love that.

"We have to go now!"
"We can't, not with the medical medical medical!"
"Then medical medical medical and let's get the hell out of here!"

Yay!

Today I went to a new doctor and had to give the whole saga of the absurdly dysfunctional situation with the old doctor. And it made me think about story. I don't honestly know how doctors think, but I get the impression it's part puzzle solving, part confusion/red herring/BS sifting, and part flow chart in which there are major junctions with big arrows leading to:

Are you dying of this right now? YES/NO
Should I refer this to a specialist (and therefore make it someone else's problem? YES/NO

And so on.

But coming out of a dysfunctional doctor relationship, my story was full of, "And then they said this, and then next time said the opposite! And when I asked, they said they never said that! And then they thought I was crazy because I remembered them saying that, and then they put me on medication for that! And then I had hallucinations with that medication and they were SURE I was crazy! So then I stopped taking it and that's always totally a sign that you really are crazy! So I started taking it again! And then they refused to renew it so I had to stop taking it!"

Part of that is probably pretty much a direct quote. But I tried to sound very calm and rational. In fact at one point I said, "I probably sound kind of anxious and upset about this," and the doctor said, "No, actually, you sound very relaxed and funny and smiley."

Smiley! I was trying.

There IS a simple medical story behind all this. Something is happening. But what that story is has been buried in all these layers of doctors forgetting what they said, refusing to do what they said, sending me to the wrong specialist, not listening to the right specialist, doing tests that were inconclusive, and then not doing anything at all.

You can lay out the events/symptoms in a clear timeline. Or I could if I had any memory at this point. But you can also watch it unfold in the records that the medical system kept. And I requested copies of everything all along, not because I'm paranoid (not *just* because I'm paranoid) but because I sometimes need a doctor relative to translate for me.

Today the medical center's computer went down during my appointment. The doctor couldn't get at any of my records. But I was able to access all the stuff that was sent to me by opening up my account on my iphone. Yay!

It's worrying, trying to tell your story to someone new. Especially when the old one was so (as I keep saying) dysfunctional. She's going to read the note from the NP who, when I questioned why the old doctor consistently refused to follow up on the specialist's recommendations and send me to a particular specialist, wrote me down as a personality disorder. And then walked out of the room while I was talking, though that part isn't on the record, I'm sure.

But she already saw the part where the specialist recommended that particular specialist. And that it never happened. And that he recommended the pain center, because of my terrible back, and she saw that THAT never happened either. There's a consistent pattern of refusal of care, which is why I left.

When people don't believe you, or don't take your story seriously, it can be very easy to expect or fear that the next person won't believe you or take your story seriously either. I've been a basket case for days, going over and over this in my head, how to explain the dysfunctional office without sounding like a loon, never realizing that the written record would back me up so thoroughly.

The story is written in all of those office visits and in all of the things that never happened, too.

It's like a mystery, right? There's something that really happened, on one level, the medical history that is pure fact and incontrovertible. But that is only accessible through flawed resources. My memory, which is an absolute sieve. The dysfunctional office's notes. The history of prescriptions. The records of all the other specialists and MRI readers and everyone. And layers of interpretation. These pieces of data interpreted in this way, or that way. Someone deciding I'm lying, or mistaken, can mean that all sorts of data just disappears. I have absolute faith in facts and data, but there are an awful lot of filters the data has to get through to get to the person who can do something about it.

I'm so glad I got away from the gaslighting doctor's office and got to this one. There are almost never new openings in this town. Far too few doctors for too many patients. Dentists are even worse. But this doctor is new to her practice. I saw the listing open up when I was at work on New Year's Day and called in right then, surprising the person working there, and surprising myself because I had expected to leave a message. I called at least four more times in the next week to make sure I got an appointment and was added to the practice. It's HARD to get away from a dysfunctional doctor's office around here. But I finally did it.

Gaslighting is horrible and I don't think it's always intentional, but it's extremely destructive to the person it's done to. Sady wrote about gaslighting here. Very worth a read. In fact, for any writer, I'd say it's mandatory, even if you just want to use it for Evil Characters.

I find this sort of manipulative behavior to be more the norm than the exception, which says a lot about the people I've met over the years. And it's the subject of at least two works in progress. Power lends itself to abuse and neglect. People who have experienced abuse and neglect are much more easily manipulated by gaslighting and other methods. The more it happens, the more it happens, until you find yourself unable to trust anyone and isolated because it's far better than the alternative. If fact I've run into this exact situation in the workplace also. People who want to push buttons will check to see what works and then lean on those particular buttons, so if you have these, they will be delighted and make plentiful use of them. Sady's article is called Bad Romance but this interaction is far more common in hierarchical situations, and even in friendships, in my experience.

One of my scariest childhood memories about this is falling down and hurting myself, blood everywhere, and having my mom say scornfully, "That doesn't hurt." That's all of this, in a nutshell. Denying someone else's feelings is denying that story but it also creates a hideously disorienting conflict between the person's experience and how others will allow it to exist. If others outside you deny your experience, you're going to be in deep trouble until you find a way of making sure that you assert it again.

The common thread is that there is a story, a set of facts, but there are always people (multiples, in my life recently) who will twist those around and deny the facts and assign blame and push and manipulate until they've achieved their goal. I have no idea what the dysfunctional office hoped to achieve, honestly. I think they were just really bad at what they did. Others act out of insecurity and misery, like bullies, wanting to hurt other people to prove they can, or to feel powerful, or to drag people down, or acting out of some ancient damage in their lives. It doesn't even matter. And like Sady says, you can't make toxic people treat you better. It's impossible. All you can do is deny them any power over you. (Which makes them enraged, but what can you do?)

So I'm very glad this story took a turn for the better. I'm hoping that in the week before I see the new doctor again, nothing changes for the worse, though I'm already seeing nightmare scenarios where she gets convinced of whatever the dysfunctional place believed--accepts their story. Surely not, though, right?

All I want is a solution, an answer to the question, a resolution to the mystery. I want it named and fixed. I don't care about the past, just about the future. I'm really hoping this is going to round off the story and get to THE END in some kind of satisfying way.

I read Speak a while back and of course it deals with all of this, people denying and contradicting someone's experience, that person unable to assert her own version of events, and how destructive it is to suppress your experiences in the face of contradiction. It really is insanely destructive to be gaslighted like that. "That doesn't hurt." Well, you can shut up, because it DOES hurt.

Medical medical medical!

Grey's Anatomy: If/Then

This episode played out a potential present day if Ellis Grey had never gotten Alzheimer's and died. It's set up as Meredith's actual dream that she dreams. Like we see her thinking, "What if?" and falling asleep. So presumably no logic applies. Except it's set up as x = normal only with Ellis Grey, so what's the point of that? Many sources of irritation right there.

The show sets up a happy, perky Meredith who wears pink and gets along with (and LIVES with) her mom and her dad, who is Chief Webber in this scenario. She's meek and earnest and very much in her mom's shadow. See, I think that could have made an amazing episode right there, to see how that Meredith would deal with a given situation, say with Lexie reappearing as a junkie.

But the show immediately breaks that premise. Ellis is alive and well and bossing everyone around, so...Derek and Addison never broke up? Why? Callie chose a completely different specialty? Why? Callie and Owen somehow met years earlier than they otherwise would have and had three kids together? None of this makes any sense. Mark doesn't follow Addison to Seattle because Ellis is there? Addison someone follows Derek immediately so that he doesn't meet Meredith? Or I suppose she's just not in the bar because she's a pink-wearing good girl because of her overbearing mother?

Again, none of this makes sense. If you set this up as consequences of the non-Alzheimerization of Ellis Grey, then you have to stick to actual consequences, not just make up random stuff and play off how different it is from our world.

It does point out how interesting and different things actually would have been for Meredith, however. But you have to leave her the same core personality. People are who they are, in reaction to and including stimuli, but Ellis was Ellis from day one and formed Meredith from the beginning, not just after the onset of Alzheimer's.

We sort of reach the same conclusion in a way, because the show bends over backwards to undo all the changes it has imagined into being and pushes everyone back to the way they are in our version of things. It was infuriating to watch, though. Fictional characters don't have destinies or lives that exist free of how you've been imagining them, show. Changing one element like that would change a lot, yes, and that would be very interesting to see if it were actually done honestly, but these people don't have destinies. They are as you write them. It's idiotic to suggest otherwise. 

This episode really makes me realize how true to themselves people really are. Honestly, they are. People change over time, but towards themselves, becoming more like themselves. Unless you're talking about traumatic brain injury or something.

So to imagine that Meredith or Bailey or Lexie or Cristina would be such very different people--all of them WORSE than in our world, naturally--makes absolutely no sense.

But the very worst thing about this episode is something that has bothered me since the beginning, and that's the demonization of the strong and powerful woman. It's completely common in every kind of literature, obviously. But this was a gratuitous episode full of it. AND it ended with the awesome powerful woman breaking down and crying, once she'd gone and ruined everyone's lives that day. That's just sickening from a show that pretends to be feminist.

How about this? Ellis Grey is strong and fully alert and doesn't have Alzheimer's, so she's a fantastic role model for her daughter and Bailey and Cristina and Lexie, all of whom want to grow up and be her and are inspired to great new heights of achievement. Women are not beaten down by other strong women. They admire them. And strong women don't leave a trail of battered beat-up weaklings in their paths. Men do that to women, not women. Is there really even one example out there of a strong mother who got where she was by beating up on and abusing all the women around her? Women don't tend to get ahead by behaving like that, of course, because of the double standard. (Again, men do.) And the last lousy thing it does is blame everything on the mother, once again.

This episode made me ill all kinds of ways, from the complete failure to stick to any kind of logic, to the demonization of Ellis Grey once again. She was the cause of all of Meredith's problems when she had Alzheimer's, so now that she doesn't, she's still the cause of all of Meredith's problems? How about Meredith is responsible for her own damn problems? Ever think of that?

Also, I'd like to see some kind of resolution between the two giant powerful founding beliefs of this show, namely: 1) Meredith Grey is utterly effed up every kind of way, and 2) Meredith Grey is the most awesome at what she does and everyone loves her. I don't think those two things happen together very often. Surely someone that screwed up would also screw up in her professional life--and I don't mean the way she wrecks opportunities in the show. I mean she would kill people because she'd be hung over or had no sleep or forgot things because she was in some major crisis. I realize we have this fictional contradiction buzz that we like so much, where two things that can't coexist in one person somehow do, but it doesn't actually make any sense in this character. If she's doing that great in her professional and personal life, then where's the problem?

Come on, show. George's mom is all kinds of sweet and awesome, even accepting Callie's wife and baby, but Ellis is a demon from hell no matter what you have her do. I refuse to believe what you're selling here. Meredith can't be a strong, awesome surgeon if she's nice and friendly and wears pink and is happy? She has to drink tequila and be mean and sleep with married guys she meets in bars, or she won't be an amazing surgeon? You don't really think that, do you? Because that sure seems like what you're saying.

I don't think this episode was thought out well at all. I think what the show's been saying all along is that your drive and ambition and strength of character determine what happens to you, not who or what your mom is, not your past or your relationships or what happens to you. They sort of tried to say that by having everyone swerve back to the regular show's way of things by the end, but it would have worked much better to have our beloved characters actually overcome those things and be themselves despite whatever else is going on. Bailey's ultimate Baileyness isn't made or broken by the presence or absence of someone else, no matter how big a bully.

That's ultimately pretty satisfying as a conclusion, so I wish they'd said that instead.

A Bailey who believes that we all make our own destiny is not going to be knocked off her game by someone else. Even if you can't *make* your own destiny--if it's destiny, then it's written in stone, y'all. Sheesh.