Grey's Anatomy recap: 'Dark Was the Night'

There are devastating episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, and then there are really devastating episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. This week’s was the latter, and it was no surprise, considering the hour was called “Dark Was the Night.” A title like that can mean nothing but ominous things, indeed. So much tragedy was packed into the episode, led by the not-all-that-shocking-but-still-very-sad death of Altman’s husband Henry and the not-all-that-shocking-but-still-very-sad likelihood that, no, Meredith and Derek would not be getting their baby Zola back. And it all happened in the span of one fateful evening. Happy holidays, Seattle Grace!

Let’s first deal with the loss of Scott Foley. My first reaction is: We had to know this was coming, right? We couldn’t have known that it was going to happen in this exact episode, but I feel like we Grey’s viewers should have been preparing ourselves all along for the eventual demise of the ever-adorable Henry, who has suffered from a life-threatening illness the entire time we’ve known him on the show. And the signposts pointing to his death were everywhere in this episode, like during the pre-surgery conversation between him and wife Altman. “You’re going to be fine,” she said, “you know that, right?” His reply: “I know, that’s why I started spitting up blood.” Then she was swiftly whisked away to a consult. I should add a sound effect here, and it goes something like this: Dun dun dun.

The way producers chose to deal with the circumstances around Henry’s death was especially cruel. We sat and watched as Cristina unknowingly operated on Henry, while his wife was off in her own OR operating on a patient. I cringed watching Webber stand there in stark silence, taking in Henry’s death, as Cristina rattled on about not wanting to take the heat for the patient, whose identity she didn’t know. “There was no way to take it out without killing him,” she told Webber of Henry’s tumor. “And there’s no way he could have lived with it for much longer.”

It was bizarre, then, seeing Cristina, Webber, and Hunt’s eventual — and very painful — reactions to the death of Henry while never actually seeing how Altman herself reacted to the news. Because, well, they decided not to tell her. Cruel, I tell you! No doubt we’ll see that horribleness in the next episode, which won’t be for at least three weeks. (ABC hasn’t officially announced when the next new episode of Grey’s will be — although it won’t be next week when Private Practice has a two-hour special, or on Thanksgiving, when Katie Couric’s Lady Gaga special is airing.)

No, instead of telling her, Hunt made the painful decision to wait until after Altman was done with her heart-repair surgery. When Hunt went in to check on her in the OR, Altman stood there, prattling on naively about her fight with Henry over his desire to go back to medical school, while Hunt tearfully stood behind a mask, knowing that her beloved was already gone. “This,” Altman said, referring to Henry’s decision to go to medical school with a smirk, “could ruin the next five to 10 years of my life. You do understand that, right?” The sad truth was that — unbeknownst to her — her life was already ruined for a while. If she’d known what was really happening, she’d happily take Henry and med school. It hurt to even type that.

Henry will be missed. No, he was never around very much, but he was nice in that he was pretty to look at and he gave Altman something to do besides torment Cristina. What will she do now? I hope producers give her a good storyline going forward. (Personally, I think Kim Raver has always been rather under-used on this show, until more recently.) Maybe Altman will start the next great clinical trial at Seattle Grace? Maybe she’ll go running into the arms of her good friend Hunt and stir up his relationship with Cristina? Maybe she’ll leave the show? Give this woman something to do, especially now that her husband is gone.

Meredith’s storylines, naturally, were nearly as sad as Henry’s death. First, it came out that she and Derek probably weren’t going to be getting Zola back. But the case isn’t exactly closed. “The court cancelled our hearing date, and when they do that it means either one of two things: That they looked at our file and they love us and they’re giving her to us, in which case they call Janet and tell her that, or they hate us and they’re giving her to another family.” Meredith didn’t get the they-love-us call. Social worker Jane’s exact words? “I think it’s time you and Derek start thinking about moving on.” If only it were that easy.

Meredith finally broke the news to Derek, who was similarly devastated. “Zola was our baby, and she’s gone, and I don’t want another baby,” Meredith said to Derek as she hopped into an ambulance with Karev to go retrieve a premature baby at a hospital in the hills. Derek later explained the situation to Sloan: “Meredith didn’t want kids. I pushed her. She opened herself up. Now I feel like I did this to her.” The layers of mess between these two run deeper than you or I could ever imagine.

NEXT: Another tragedy for Meredith

It wasn’t too long into the Zola disaster, though, that another can of worms presented itself to Meredith. On the way back to Seattle Grace with Karev, the ambulance they were riding in broke down. (I mean, of course it did. Could her day get worse?) The driver went back for help, leaving them there, and told the pair they needed to get out of the ambulance because it was filled with oxygen tanks that would explode if hit by another vehicle. But, of course, it was a Catch-22 situation: Get out of the ambulance and risk the baby’s life in the pouring rain? Or stay in the ambulance to save the baby but risk everyone’s life in the event a car slammed into them? Sophie’s Choice resulted in them staying put, until — yup — they got hit.

My first thought was that it was the new ambulance that hit them. Alas, that wasn’t the case, but the situation — which we could fully appreciate after a bumped-and-bruised Meredith and Karev emerged from the struck ambulance with the baby in tow — wasn’t any better than that, as a car laid on its side and bodies were strewn around the abandoned street. Again, we could have invoked the sound effect from above here: Dun dun dun. And that’s when the episode cut off, leaving us wondering what will become of Meredith and Karev in the dark wilderness. Will the helicopter make it? Will the baby survive? Oh, the drama!

It was a bad night for our Seattle Gracers, kind of a downer of an episode to leave us with before Thanksgiving. But who am I kidding — what episode of Grey’s isn’t laced with enough depressing storylines to make even the most mentally stable of us not feel a little bit sad? This one, though, was truly a doozy.

What did you think, Grey’s watchers? Did the dramatic nature of last night’s episode do a number on you? Are you prepared to deal with Altman’s reaction to the death of her husband? What’s to become of Meredith, Karev, and the baby? Could AB have made this episode any more depressing?

Tanner on Twitter: @EWTanStransky

RATE THIS EPISODE: