‘Grey’s Anatomy’: A return to form

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There are several reasons ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ is an award-winning hit and if last week’s episode did not include any of them, this week more than made up for it. The trademark combination of weird medicine — patient with toxic blood practically kills half the leads — and weird romance — George and Callie got married in Vegas! Addison and Karev make hungry-wolf eyes at each other! — kept the action moving in full scrubs-flapping, one-line snapping form.

But more important was the near surgical display of the show’s beating heart — the non-romantic relationship.

No one does female characters better than the Grey’s writers. To a woman, the female leads are complicated and irritating and impossible to categorize. Adulterous Addison turns out to be vulnerable and afraid. Ambitious and driven, Christine does secretly want to be loved. On her own terms. Which she’s willing to reconsider. At times. Saintly, muffin-baking Izzie has a very vivid streak of leggy blond meanness running through her — ‘That’s what’s so great about small stones,’ she says, examining Callie’s engagement ring with the snide kind of smile that Maggie Smith would envy, ‘No one will steal it.’

Which isn’t to say that when these contradictions are revealed, the characters suddenly collapse into stereotype. Despite the often heavy handed and totally dispensable Meredith voice-over (‘This episode is about hope, do you get it, do you really get it??) the characters remain blissfully unaware of such conventions and form friendships and alliances that anyone can recognize from their own workplace and life.

But the best thing that happened in Thursday night’s episode was the showcasing of Meredith’s mother, mysteriously (and probably completely unrealistically but who cares) emerging from her advanced Alzheimer’s to experience a day of total lucidity. When the show began, each episode ended with Meredith visiting her mother, a once-brilliant surgeon left tossed between confusion and non-specific rage. Someone subsequently decided that this was too confining a format and Ellis Grey often did not reappear for episodes at a time. Last night made it clear how much she is missed.

In a matter of minutes, a mother-daughter relationship of Medean proportions was established, the desperate bullying motherlove — ‘I raised you to be extraordinary’ — that so many films try and fail to capture.

Clearly, Christine, is the daughter Ellis thought she would have. But Meredith is the daughter such a woman would probably actually have, someone capable of actually hearing her mother’s disgusted dismissal — ‘You’re just ordinary. What happened to you?’ — and moving on anyway. There’s an intact ego (but no wonder she’s so damn thin.)

Kate Burton, who plays Ellis, should win an Emmy for the episode; hell, she should win an Emmy for the moment when Ellis disappears back into her Alzheimers. In a moment, the woman’s face goes from the definite contours of a person alive in real time to a woman vague and lost. It was an extraordinary thing to watch and something unimaginable on stage or even the big screen.

So who says television, even big ol’ popular soap-operatic ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ can’t be art? Not me.

-- Mary.McNamara@latimes.com