'Grey's Anatomy' season finale recap: 'Concrete Results'

Grey's Anatomy season finale: Big kisses

Conclusion: I need more surgery in my life. As far as aphrodisiacs go, the stuff is clearly more potent than tequila, wine, bubble baths, candles, snowstorms, down comforters, Before Sunset, and the Juno soundtrack. Combined. I know a lot of people make out on this show, but the ending of tonight's two episodes of Grey's Anatomy may have set some kind of record. The kind where everyone but Yang and Sloan (and Bailey, natch) is sucking face with someone. And I wouldn't be surprised if those two found each other later in the night for a quickie. I mean, why not?

But first, apparently, we had to get through some crazy high-stakes surgeries and a lot of talking. Talking was important tonight: "It's okay to talk about it," Meredith's shrink told her at the top of the first hour. Meredith had just revealed that her mom had taken a scalpel to her own wrists, right in front of young Meredith, back in the day. Meredith, incidentally, has returned to the form in which I like her best: delicately balanced among nutty, driven, sweet, and funny. "Do you wanna dance it out?" she asked still-dark-and-twisty Cristina later that night. "Do you wanna drink tequila?" Cristina wanted none of the above; she did, however, accept Meredith's cheer-up gift of the sparkle pager, the magical device that gives its owner dibs on all the good surgeries. Or, as Meredith said, "shiny, shiny pager, with lots of shiny surgeries." See? Fun Meredith. Yay.

Speaking of, ahem, fun, the only people getting it on at the beginning of this episode were Sloan and Callie, with Sloan indulging in too much dirty talk about Callie and Hahn getting it on. Lesson to the six men being forced to watch this show with their significant others: Do this and you too could end up losing your girl to another girl. Well, that probably won't happen. But you're not getting a threesome, either, so enough already.

But all the fun and games came to a halt when the "big trauma" arrived: a 19-year-old encased in cement because of a stunt he pulled to impress a girl. "I'm not normally this dumb," he said. The gang was informed that everyone would have to "work as a team or that man dies"—and that would happen in four to six hours. That is, everyone except Meredith and Derek, who were still on brain-tumor clinical-trial duty, much to Nurse Rose's chagrin. "The legend of Meredith and Derek," she told Mer. "It's intimidating." More intimidating was the status of their study: They'd killed 11 people and would get one last patient, before midnight, to make it work. Naturally, two were on deck: a guy and a girl who were—only on Grey's Anatomy, folks—dating. And once Meredith kinda bent the rules and said the Chief had signed off on both getting surgery, they (perhaps realizing exactly what hospital they were at) kindly inquired if they could go ahead and have sex for the first time before they got their heads busted open. "What's it like?" the girl sweetly asked the decidedly unvirginal docs. "Is it magical?" The patients in this episode, incidentally, really killed it…er, were really good. And touching. And stuff. Point being, these two had my tear ducts flowing before the first hour was up, right around the time the boy, Jeremy, told his girlfriend, "We're not finished yet. I'm not finished loving you." I mean, are you kidding me? Was Shonda Rhimes (who wrote this episode) trying to blatantly manipulate me? I'm guessing yes. And I'm okay with that.

NEXT: Things aren't set in stone

Except when Jeremy died. Not so okay with that. And way more bummed about him than I was about Ava slicing her own wrists open when Alex turned his back on her for just a few seconds back at Meredith's house.

Enough with her already, really. I just wanted to know if Jeremy's girlfriend was going to go through with her surgery. "We did learn from Jeremy," Meredith told her. Derek wanted to be more cautious, of course, and wanted to give up. "You kill things over and over and over again," he snapped at Meredith. This, of course, cut right to Meredith's core dilemma this week—working through dear old Mom's attempted suicide. Meredith remembered what would've been her mother's parting words if she'd been successful: "Be an extraordinary woman, Meredith." Derek wouldn't let up on his main issue, either. "This clinical trial is making me a failure," he told Rose, though he was really just thinking out loud. "I fail her over and over and over." Finally, though, the patient herself forced him to do the operation on her. "Come on, what are you, scared?" she chided. "Me, too. So let's just leap, okay?"

Cement kid, meanwhile, was still holding on. "I do need to be kissing her," he said of the pretty girl who'd brought him in with the other idiots who'd dared him to lie down in the concrete but insisted they weren't his friends. "My whole life is about kissing her." Bailey warned him he could very well crash when the doctors removed the final piece of cement. "Just, if you see the warm, welcoming light," she said, "do not go into it." He made it into surgery, though the girl didn't want to come see him—or even admit that she liked him. That is, until after he'd pulled through; then, finally, mercifully, he got a real kiss from his dream girl. The things a guy has to do around this place to get some action. Callie, however, did admit to Sloan that even though they'd all been working together to help cement kid, "this entire time I've been turned on because of you and your dirty talk." Sloan gently suggested that perhaps she was more into the subject of his dirty talk—that is, Hahn. But Hahn was getting smacked down by the Chief for criticizing Cristina more than teaching her during the surgery. "You want to work here with my residents," he said, "then you need to do better."

NEXT: Floor plans

Meredith finally made it home only to find Ava's near-suicide blood all over her kitchen, which she was forced to clean up while Alex was at the hospital getting her fixed and arguing with Izzie over whether she should be committed. (It's a credit to Rhimes' writing that I didn't even see the connection between Ava's wrist cutting and Meredith's mom's until this moment. But once it was obvious, it was still resonant.) Ava, we learned, had borderline personality disorder; that's when Alex finally gave in and handed her over to the nice folks in psych. Meredith, newly cleansed in a way, headed back to the hospital, where she ran into a Chief who wasn't so happy about the two brain surgeries that went on without his permission. She, in turn, detonated the most unfair ever emotional time bomb on him. "My mother tried to kill herself after you left," she said. "Did you know that?" It was then that she put together the two disparate facts: that her mom was an "extraordinary surgeon" and that she'd failed to slit her own wrists correctly. That, of course, she hadn't really wanted to die—she'd just wanted Richard back. Meredith gleefully ran to relay this to her (apparently always on-duty) shrink, then scampered off to check the tumor patient. And, hey, good news! The tumor had shrunk! And off she was to track Derek down to tell him.

The good-news montage continued: Cristina had learned her lesson and started trying to teach Lexie instead of torturing her. Bailey handed clinic duties over to Izzie so she could have more family time. George announced to Lexie, back at their house, that the Chief was letting him retake the residency exam. (That news came with a deliberate peck on the lips. Uh-oh.) The Chief went back home to his wife, and she said, "It's about time," before they locked lips. A broken, crying Alex kissed Izzie and begged: "Just for this one night? Please?"

And, yes folks, it was finally time: Meredith and Derek connected—and Meredith made her grand gesture, outlining the "floor plan" of their "dream house" on Derek's land, in lamps. I won't get bogged down in the practicalities (where'd she get all those lamps? how could she tell what she was outlining?), because I bawled. Like crazy. I figure I felt a lot like Meredith, actually. "I did this stupid, embarrassing, humiliating, corny thing," she blathered to him. But we also knew she meant it. And, well, it was about damn time. Can't wait to see how all this happiness unravels next season—but glad we have a few months to revel in the moment.

What did you think of the season finale, and the season as a whole? Post below!