Brave New World/Grey Matter

Debora Cahn on "Brave New World"...

Original Airdate: 10-16-08

To the dermatologists of the world: We love you. We really do. We think you do fine work. Important, difficult work. Life saving work. We all love you here at Grey’s Anatomy, and we’re a little concerned that you might not take tonight’s episode in the spirit it was intended. Light-hearted! No lack of respect! We kid, and we kid from love! I thought it was all going to be fine, and then I heard, one by one, that every Grey’s writer had made an appointment with their dermatologist this week, BEFORE the episode aired. Everybody wanted everything checked before we pissed off every dermatologist in the land. When one writer did it, I thought it was cute, and a little paranoid. But when the emails started pouring in… “Going to be 10 minutes late this morning, have appt with my dermatologist,” well, then I started getting worried. We love you, dermatologists. Please don’t hurt us. See, it’s Cristina that thinks surgery is harder. Not us. CRISTINA. When the writers of “The Shield” portray junkies calling police officers “f-ing pigs,” it’s not the writers who think they’re f-ing pigs, it’s just the junkies. Right? Cristina. Yang. Don’t hate us.

A word about diaries. When you find your mother’s diary, don’t read it. DON’T READ IT. I tell you this from experience. I found my mother’s diary. Not really a diary, a suitcase full of stuff she wrote for a writing class, but one of the assignments was to keep a journal, and my sister said DON’T READ IT and I read it, and I’m telling you. DO NOT READ THE DIARY. If they thought you should know, they’d have told you. And so I say to Meredith: Good on you for not reading it for a whole episode. And I say to Cristina: Lay off. She doesn’t want to read it, don’t tell her to read it. And I say to Derek: When you find the mother’s diary in the back of the closet under a pile of magazines, LEAVE IT UNDER THE PILE OF MAGAZINES. But even more importantly, I say this to the diary keepers of the world: What the hell are you thinking? You really think nobody’s gonna find that thing? You really think that the box in the back of the closet is a secure location? That an old sweater and a pair of long underwear’ll throw everyone off the trail? You’re dead, and your poor child/spouse/best friend is tasked with going through your stuff, and they see the box with the sweater and the long underwear, and they think, I’m not going to touch that pair of long underwear, it’s clearly a box of old winter clothing, let’s just close it up again and bring it right over to Goodwill. No, people. Anyone who hasn’t had a lobotomy is going to move the long underwear aside, and find the diary, and read it. And let me tell you, that little tiny lock can be picked with a bobby pin. If you feel you must put your feelings on paper, destroy those pages once a year. If you feel you must have a way to reconnect with your younger self, run the bonfire once a decade. And when you find yourself visiting an oncologist or cardiologist with some regularity, take it as a sign to THROW OUT THE DIARIES.

Ellis Grey. What were you thinking?

I know, you wish I were talking more about the episode. And the characters. Problem is, I’m in the middle of writing episode 511, and my head is totally in the middle of the season, so if I started talking about the characters, I’d inevitably wander into what’s going on with them in the middle of the season, and that’s the kind of thing that REALLY pisses Shonda off. So I’m gonna stop. Sorry. That’s it. Dermatologists and diaries.