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Mar. 6th, 2020 06:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretOkay I have slept on it and I am still angry about last night's episode of Grey's Anatomy.
So for the context, in the fall, Justin Chambers announced that after sixteen seasons he would no longer be playing Dr. Alex Karev, who was one of the original interns on the show and the only one left other than Meredith Grey. He gave no particular reason why, other than a desire to move on, but the sudden mid-season departure makes one suspect there was a particular reason, and also perhaps that the writers of the show were unhappy with being left in the lurch.
In subsequent episodes, Alex Karev was supposedly visiting his schizophrenic mother in Iowa, an excuse that grew increasingly thin as time wore on and more and more characters sought communication with him. Last night's episode was billed as the final goodbye to Alex Karev, but though Chambers narrated large chunks of the episode, he did not appear at all. The show's inability to film him seems to have greatly limited their storytelling options.
In early seasons of the show, Karev was nicknamed Evil Spawn and was often an antagonist. He was irresponsibly promiscuous, notably being the vector for a syphilis outbreak across the hospital, and causing many conflicts by mistreating women he was involved with. He frequently competed with Yang and Grey professionally, often resorting to cheap tricks to score points on them. When he did enter serious relationships, notably with Izzy Stevens, he repeatedly betrayed her trust.
With the stunning time that sixteeen 20+ episode seasons gives you, he matured convincingly over a number of well-told storylines. By the sixteenth season, he was happily married to a fellow doctor, living a stable life and working an exciting and challenge job as the Chief of Surgery at rival hospital Pacific Northwest General.
Somehow this combination of facts boxed the writers into a corner where the only way out was to establish over the course of an hours worth of lazy Tell Don't Show monologues that Alex had decided to give up his stable life and abandon his wife because he learned his ex-wife from nine seasons ago had decided to unfreeze their embryos and have 'their children'. Betraying sixteen years of character development, and betraying his wife without the courtesy of talking to her face to face.
It's an astonishingly, pointlessly cruel storyline, and it is remarkably unnecessary. The show could have transitioned Alex to an unseen character with very little trouble, had him work at a different hospital, have Jo and Meredith make occasional references to plans with him. They also could have killed Alex, a much crueler ending but storylines about coping with grief are well within the wheelhouse of the show. Instead, they had to whomp Jo, who has only just gotten out of a psych hospital stay triggered by HER FEAR OF ABANDONMENT BY THOSE WHO SHE THOUGHT LOVED HER. A storyline that was all about how Alex Karev stayed with her in spite of how difficult it was, because he loved her and because he was no longer the immature guy who ran away from difficulty.
This episode was an infuriating violation of the emotional continuity of the show, and doing it in an episode where we couldn't even see Justin Chambers try to sell it as an actor made it even more frustrating and unfun to watch.
If Izzy having Alex's children were actually a storyline the show wanted to consider in a serious way, there's so much more work and story the show would need to do. Jo would need to have real conversations with her husband about what that meant for their relationship, and Alex as we have seen him drawn for many seasons now would of course be willing to participate in those conversations, because he is a grownup who knows how to treat people he cares about well. Doing this instead is the worst kind of bad writing.
So for the context, in the fall, Justin Chambers announced that after sixteen seasons he would no longer be playing Dr. Alex Karev, who was one of the original interns on the show and the only one left other than Meredith Grey. He gave no particular reason why, other than a desire to move on, but the sudden mid-season departure makes one suspect there was a particular reason, and also perhaps that the writers of the show were unhappy with being left in the lurch.
In subsequent episodes, Alex Karev was supposedly visiting his schizophrenic mother in Iowa, an excuse that grew increasingly thin as time wore on and more and more characters sought communication with him. Last night's episode was billed as the final goodbye to Alex Karev, but though Chambers narrated large chunks of the episode, he did not appear at all. The show's inability to film him seems to have greatly limited their storytelling options.
In early seasons of the show, Karev was nicknamed Evil Spawn and was often an antagonist. He was irresponsibly promiscuous, notably being the vector for a syphilis outbreak across the hospital, and causing many conflicts by mistreating women he was involved with. He frequently competed with Yang and Grey professionally, often resorting to cheap tricks to score points on them. When he did enter serious relationships, notably with Izzy Stevens, he repeatedly betrayed her trust.
With the stunning time that sixteeen 20+ episode seasons gives you, he matured convincingly over a number of well-told storylines. By the sixteenth season, he was happily married to a fellow doctor, living a stable life and working an exciting and challenge job as the Chief of Surgery at rival hospital Pacific Northwest General.
Somehow this combination of facts boxed the writers into a corner where the only way out was to establish over the course of an hours worth of lazy Tell Don't Show monologues that Alex had decided to give up his stable life and abandon his wife because he learned his ex-wife from nine seasons ago had decided to unfreeze their embryos and have 'their children'. Betraying sixteen years of character development, and betraying his wife without the courtesy of talking to her face to face.
It's an astonishingly, pointlessly cruel storyline, and it is remarkably unnecessary. The show could have transitioned Alex to an unseen character with very little trouble, had him work at a different hospital, have Jo and Meredith make occasional references to plans with him. They also could have killed Alex, a much crueler ending but storylines about coping with grief are well within the wheelhouse of the show. Instead, they had to whomp Jo, who has only just gotten out of a psych hospital stay triggered by HER FEAR OF ABANDONMENT BY THOSE WHO SHE THOUGHT LOVED HER. A storyline that was all about how Alex Karev stayed with her in spite of how difficult it was, because he loved her and because he was no longer the immature guy who ran away from difficulty.
This episode was an infuriating violation of the emotional continuity of the show, and doing it in an episode where we couldn't even see Justin Chambers try to sell it as an actor made it even more frustrating and unfun to watch.
If Izzy having Alex's children were actually a storyline the show wanted to consider in a serious way, there's so much more work and story the show would need to do. Jo would need to have real conversations with her husband about what that meant for their relationship, and Alex as we have seen him drawn for many seasons now would of course be willing to participate in those conversations, because he is a grownup who knows how to treat people he cares about well. Doing this instead is the worst kind of bad writing.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-07 04:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-07 11:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-11 10:29 pm (UTC)