By Kelly Haberstroh
Features Assignment Editor
In the two-hour season 14 premiere, Grey’s Anatomy managed to answer many fans’ pressing questions while still leaving room for suspense until the following week.
As soon as Owen Hunt first appeared on Grey’s in the season five premiere, it was inevitable that the writers tackle the issue of his sister, Megan, who was lost at war, but viewers just didn’t know when. It became more apparent in season 12 when Nathan Riggs joined the Grey-Sloan Memorial Hospital staff, signaling to viewers that the Megan plotline would soon come into play.
The opening scene starts where the season 13 finale left off: with Owen on the rooftop ready to identify his sister who’s been missing for the last 10 years. His sister, Megan, opened her eyes and jokingly asked, “Who are you?” before reassuring that she recognizes him.
This humor as a coping mechanism trope continues with her character throughout the first half of the two-hour season premiere, until she eventually admits she’s trying to take a humorous twist on her situation to help ease the pain she’s experiencing from a wound sustained while being kept hostage.
While the conflict of dealing with Megan’s situation is taking place, other subplots focus on gender roles in positions of authority, Jo coming to terms with her feelings towards Alex and Meredith and Amelia struggling with Megan’s return. In addition, there also is the return of Teddy and entrance of Andrew DeLuca’s older sister, because of course every one of the characters has a relative who’s a doctor.
Chief of Surgery Miranda Bailey laments her struggles of having to wear heels instead of her clogs to her husband, Surgical Resident Ben Warren, because society imposes these expectations onto women in the workplace.
Throughout the episode, viewers see her sigh and fidget with her heels, eventually hanging up the multiple pairs in exchange for her comfortable clogs. This mindset of female empowerment in the workplace causes her to make some decisions she may not have previously, such as allowing Chief of Neurosurgery, Amelia Shepherd, to perform a risky surgery or Andrew De Luca’s older sister to do a taboo experiment in their hospital.
In terms of Amelia’s erratic and reckless decisions during the episode, she distances herself from Owen and his family for more reasons than one. Not only are there still the lingering marriage issues over Amelia’s unwillingness to have another child after the loss of her son, but Megan’s return brings up painful memories for her: the death of her brother, Derek.
While Amelia is great at deflecting stressful situations, she takes on a surgical case that could’ve been more than she could handle. However, she got lucky and the patient managed to come out of the surgery alive and well, but her unsettling confidence kept viewers wondering if something more was going on.
Despite this, Amelia isn’t the only one with odd behavior. Meredith instantly jumps into Megan’s case, even though she is the fiancé of her current boyfriend, Nathan, who she pushed to go back to Megan.
This painful parallel also causes Meredith to reflect on the loss of Derek, her husband, who she desperately wished could come back from the dead the way Megan did. These feelings cause her to get overly invested into the case, as she wants to be the doctor who could’ve saved Derek. When her initial surgery to help Megan fails, Meredith retreats to their lounge in the hospital screaming and destroying anything in her path out of rage and frustration.
One plot that has taken the back burner for now is the Japril vs. Jaggie pairing plot where, in the previous season finale, April implied to Maggie that her ex-husband and best friend Jackson has feelings for her. This potential plotline is conflicting for viewers, as Maggie could technically be considered her step-brother, given her biological father, Richard, is Jackson’s stepfather.
With all the other drama taking place throughout the episode, this complicated love triangle is left being introduced through awkward encounters between Maggie and Jackson, ending with April tearfully telling Jackson she “can’t handle the pain his consolidating of their relationship causes her.”
However, De Luca’s sister’s experiment leaves viewers with a shocking twist of events: Amelia has a brain tumor, which likely is the cause of her strange behavior. This is oddly reminiscent of when Izzie discovered she had cancer through changes she experienced, but hopefully Amelia discovered it with enough time to save her life.
In this season, Amelia is forced to deal with the crumbling of her marriage, on top of a battle with a tumor to fight that fans can only hope she’ll win. She may also have to deal with the PTSD Owen implies she still faces because of her brother’s death, which is reignited when Megan returned. Megan’s return has caused a different type of drama to keep viewers interested as the relationship dynamics shift between Nathan and Megan, Nathan and Meredith and Owen and Amelia.
habersk15@bonaventure.edu
