Grey’s Anatomy Season 16, Episode 7 Recap: All In The Family

I wrote a few weeks ago about how it would be cool if they set an entire Grey's Anatomy episode at Pacific Northwest General — and Thursday, Nov. 7 I got my wish! Plus, this week's Grey's Anatomy features a very special guest star who is not actually an actress, but she did very well on "Papa Don't Preach." 

The guest star is none other than Crystal McCreary, a yoga instructor in New York and Kelly McCreary's real-life sister, who guest-stars on the show as Maggie's cousin; Chief Webber (James Pickens Jr.) is her uncle.

Anyway, Crystal plays Sabrina, who has come to see her Uncle Richard in Seattle because of her biatrial myxoma, which is a rare benign tumor of the heart, though Sabrina's is really serious because it's so large. She and Maggie have a lot in common and Maggie is cautiously interested in getting to know her — until Sabrina doesn't want Maggie to operate on her heart even though Maggie is the best. She's just not comfortable being operated on by a family member.

Maggie is stunned that someone would turn down the best, but Webber backs up his brother Chris (Matt Orduna) and his niece. He tells Maggie that it's a bad idea because god forbid something goes wrong and she kills her cousin, which is a valid point. How awful would that be? Spoiler alert: Turns out it's pretty awful.

But when Sabrina suddenly crashes, Webber insists that Maggie operate. During surgery, Webber confesses to Gemma (Jasmine Guy) how hard it's been for him with his brother and sister, who always accused Richard of trying to rise above his station. They were horrified to find out about his love child, Maggie, and want nothing to do with her.

Catherine (Debbie Allen) shows up, just in time to catch Gemma comforting Webber, of course, and she wasn't born yesterday, so she knows something is up. So what does Catherine do? She offers Gemma a job at the foundation... but not in Seattle. Sneaky sneaky, Catherine.

Meanwhile, there's a complication with Sabrina's surgery because she's heparin resistant and her blood is clotting too much, but Maggie didn’t know that before surgery. Sabrina’s blood clogs the bypass machine and they can't get it switched fast enough, so Sabrina is brain dead before they can get the bypass up and running. Maggie fights and fights to save her, but she can't. She panics about having to tell Webber and her uncle. Alex calms her down in a supply closet, letting Maggie break down so she can pull herself together to tell the family.

When she goes to the waiting room, it's pretty gut-wrenching. Of course, Sabrina's dad blames Maggie, saying that they didn't even want Maggie to operate, which actually has nothing to do with why Sabrina died, but he’s pretty crazed with grief. It’s incredibly sad all the way around, though props to the McCreary sisters for their performances, especially Kelly.

In a different wing of Pac North, a woman comes in who fell down the stairs because an herb she took to try to terminate her pregnancy made her dizzy. She's a single mom with a son and she doesn't want another baby, but she couldn't make time to get an abortion. Amelia (Caterina Scorsone) tells her Owen (Kevin McKidd) can have an OB take care of the pregnancy when he's operating on her spleen, but Owen kind of freaks out and refuses to do that. 

Amelia gets an OB to give the woman a Plan B pill, then confronts Owen about his behavior. She had just told him about her own pregnancy and she thinks that's what made him so weird — and she's right. His feelings are hurt because their marriage ended over the fact that she didn't want to have kids. So he feels like it isn't that she didn't want kids, it's that she didn't want them with him.

Amelia apologizes to him for ambushing him at work with this news and confesses that she didn't use to want kids — she wasn't even sure when she found out she was pregnant that she wanted to keep the baby. But after going through what they went through with Leo, she feels ready to be a mom. He says that's great and he's ready to have one big happy family — Owen, his ex-wife, his new baby mama, his ex-wife's baby daddy, and their three children. Yay?

Also, that final scene between Amelia and Owen was filled with a lot of longing looks. Good grief. Not those two again. Can't we just let them be friends? Also, Amelia and Link (Chris Carmack) are sooooo cute together. No, no, no to the Owen and Amelia thing.

And that's about it for this week, except for a small scene where Catherine weirdly seems to not know and/or understand that Jackson (Jesse Williams) and Maggie aren't together anymore. I think what the show was trying to convey is that Maggie doesn't have very much family, right in time for her to get some and then immediately lose them. But the way it was written made it seem like Catherine didn't know, which was weird.