Grey's Anatomy recap: 'Judgment Day'

Tonight’s episode was number 1420 and it definitely played the 420 part to the highest (pun intended) degree.

It’s Surgical Innovation Prototypes Day at Grey Sloan Memorial, and everyone has gathered for the long-awaited presentations. Arizona brings in a tin filled with cookies, and starts offering them to her colleagues as she tells them that her lesbian patient who wound up not having cancer baked them for her in appreciation. As almost all of our favorite surgeons grab one (or two), Maggie jokingly calls them “lesbian gratitude cookies.”

Whatever you decide to call them, they’re not the only things that end up baked. It turns out that the lesbian couple that made them accidentally used peanut butter cannabis in the Famous Gaymoses. Zoinks! They page Arizona 911 to tell her about their mistake, but it’s too late.

The presentations are already underway with Webber (who did not indulge in a treat) being first up. Everyone is understandably impressed by his Path Pen, which detects cancer cells in tissue.

Jackson and Catherine begin their presentation, but the edibles have already started to take effect. As Jackson is rambling on about making a better vagina, Arizona explains what happened to Meredith and Jo. “Who had the cookies? Meredith asks, and Arizona immediately shoots back, “Who didn’t?” Jackson keeps falling down the ganja hole as he continues, “Vaginas are terrific just the way they are. I came from one. This one –” he points at Catherine before finishing, “hers.” Like the rest of us, April starts giggling hysterically.

Meredith announces that the presentations are being postponed. She then tells the room that the cookies were tainted with rat poison, to which an already stoned Arizona audibly gasps in surprise.

In another room, Meredith tells the inner circle that they weren’t really baked with rat poison, but rather, budder (get it?). Arizona scolds Meredith for her lie: “You scared me to death,” and Meredith reminds Arizona that she knew. Meredith then instructs everyone to stay in the room until the effects wear off. She says that Jo will handle everyone’s patients, and makes them turn over their phones. As Jo collects Maggie’s phone, Maggie tells her, “You’re so pretty; like a cartoon.”

Elsewhere in the hospital, Amelia is on the phone with a very nervous Owen. Social Services is bringing him a foster baby — a boy — and he’s not even close to being ready. Amelia tells him she’ll come over to help him out, but first she is brought up to speed on her stoned colleagues as Arizona comes searching for Maggie who did not listen to her sister’s instructions to stay in the room. Deluca, meanwhile, goes from petting the plant wall to hilariously staring at a wall print. Eventually Arizona manages to corner both Maggie and Deluca in the room with the computerized dissection table as Amelia goes to check on Karev.

Looking like the Nutty Professor, Amelia immediately deduces that he’s stoned and decides to take him with her to Owen’s.

After their hot mess of a presentation, Catherine tells Jackson the truth about Rebecca Froy: His grandfather was a sexual predator. Jackson asks her how many women besides Rebecca, and he’s shocked when Catherine tells him there are 13 women they have under NDA. “This is so bad, Mom,” he bemoans as Catherine is frantically searching for her glasses, which she has on her head.

Jo and Meredith round up the interns. Meredith tells them about the Famous Gaymous cookies, and then turns their sudden-increased workload into a contest; whoever wins gets to scrub in on her with a whipple. As the interns scatter like rats, Meredith gets a page from Bailey who is high as a kite in the OR.

Meredith explains everything to Bailey who thought she was having a heart problem. “No, this is your brain on drugs,” Meredith somehow manages to say without even cracking a smile. Meredith assures Bailey she will take care of the patient now lying open on the table as Jo comes in to assist. As Bailey is leaving while telling Meredith she loves her, she manages to get Meredith’s fingers caught in the door. It’s not like a surgeon needs her hand for anything.

This means Jo is now going to be performing the gastrectomy since Meredith is unable to. As Jo is elbow deep inside the man’s cavity, she tells Meredith who’s sitting in the OR icing her hand that the tumor feels smaller than she thought. Jo wonders, therefore, if she has to do the full gastrectomy and asks to take a look at the pre-op scans. (Recap continues on next page)

Amelia and Karev arrive at Owen’s, and immediately Karev starts to raid Owen’s kitchen. “I am waiting for a six-month-old, and you bring a stoned guy?” an incredulous Owen asks Amelia. Amelia assures Owen it’ll be OK and tells him to go shower as Karev laughs, “Dude, you’re so screwed.”

Holed up in the dissection table room, Maggie and Arizona start blurting out their streams of consciousness while a hallucinating Deluca is on the floor imagining Bello is lying next to him. Maggie’s thoughts center entirely on cheese as she starts listing all of the kinds she loves, though she just calls Swiss cheese “the kind with holes in it.” Arizona is second-guessing asking Carina to stay and not go back to Italy.

Bailey winds up in a room with April who happened to overhear Jackson and Catherine’s conversation. They confess to each other that they hadn’t done pot before, and then a spiraling April admits that what she heard was “end of an era bad,” but doesn’t explain further, causing a frustrated Bailey to tell her, “I thought marijuana made people peaceful, but I don’t think I ever hated you more.”

Jackson initially thinks that his mom is messing with him because he’s high, but unfortunately she’s not. He quickly gets angry, asking her why she didn’t try and stop his grandfather, why she was complicit in his abhorrent actions. Eventually she tells him it was a different time. When Jackson lashes out with the fact that she forced him to buy this hospital, but failed to tell him what it was built on, Catherine fights back with how she, herself, had to get harassed as it was something that came with the job. She explains she didn’t have the voice she has now, and that at least she could help the women get some money and set them on a path to move forward. With a surprisingly measured voice, she finishes, “I’m not ashamed of myself, but I am ashamed of what your grandfather did. I’m sorry you have to carry that burden with me.”

Back at Owen’s, he’s in the middle of unraveling when Karev tries to hilariously comfort him by telling him that all Owen has to do is hold a baby “like this” as he cradles a bag of chips before accidentally crushing them. Karev is then once again banished to Owen’s bedroom, but not before he opens the door for the social worker who is holding adorably squishy Leo. “You got a cute one; sometimes they look like an old man,” Karev announces. He introduces himself to the social worker, telling her that as head of pediatrics at Grey Sloan, he’s there to give the baby a checkup. Luckily she buys it.

Dr. Qadri and Carina fill Webber in on the staff situation as Dr. Roy goes to help out a patient in systolic. When the nurse tells Dr. Roy that the patient needs a central line, he starts to wild out, trips over a cart, and somehow gets stabbed in the arm with a scalpel. As Webber, Dr. Parker, and Dr. Qadri tend to Roy’s arm, he starts complaining about his fellow interns being there so Webber says they’re going to sedate him. Roy asks if the sedative interacts with other drugs because, surprise, he ate a Famous Gaymos. The look on Casey’s face after Roy’s admission is priceless, and someone needs to get me a gif — stat.

Back in the OR, Jo is looking at the patient’s scans, but is no closer to figuring out what to do. On the one hand, if she follows Bailey’s original plan and does a full gastrectomy, he’ll be eating through a feeding tube for the rest of his life. But if she only does a partial one and misses cancer cells, that’d suck, too. Meredith tells her to pull up her big girl scrubs and make a decision. If only Jo had something that could tell her if his tissue had cancer cells…

She sends Glasses to get Webber’s Pen and the machine, but Glasses is stopped by the patient’s wife and children who want to know how things are going. This causes him to become more invested in the outcome of the guy’s surgery. Thankfully, the Pen works, and Jo decides that she’s going to save half the man’s stomach. Meredith later tells her that this is what she would’ve done, only she wouldn’t have needed the pen. Jo asks why Meredith didn’t just tell her what to do, but Meredith explains that making tough choices under immense pressure is how you get better. Meredith’s lesson lands when she points out that now Jo gets to tell the patient that not only did she save his life, she also saves his quality of life as well.

Back in Stoner High, Maggie and Arizona are still waxing philosophical, only now, Maggie’s become obsessed with the dissection table. She ends up “losing” the patient’s liver, and freaks out to the point where they call a time of death on the table. A sheet is dropped over it as it’s announced the patient died of “acute liver disappearance.” Deluca is now crying, and I start coming down as he’s seen reaching out to touch Bello’s face.

Bailey and April are still stuck in Stonerville, and April’s mutterings allude to the fact that she suspects something is happening between Jackson and Maggie. But, in a whispered confession, she admits that she has a secret, too: She’s been seeing someone. Bailey tells her all about her colonoscopy device and pairing up with a porn company for the Tailblazer.

Amelia and the boys (including the littlest one) drive to Meredith’s house to raid her baby stuff for Owen. As Owen continues to doubt his abilities, Karev tells them a story about the best foster dad he had who worked nights in a warehouse. He would come home and crash for an hour before waking just to have cereal with Karev before going back to bed. Karev tells him this guy was good because he simply gave a crap, and as it is, Owen gives so many craps. Ah, from the mouths of babes…

In what is easily the funniest scene out of the entire hysterical episode, Meredith walks in on April and Bailey being human bagpipes by holding their noses and humming — though April is providing the melody by hitting her throat. On Twitter, Sarah Drew admits that she told writers that this was her special skill in the beginning of the season. And, what a skill it is. “Playing” the funeral march, the two are mourning the end of the Harper Avery era.

Hunting down Jackson and Catherine to find out if her stoned sources are accurate, Meredith finds out that, yes, the man who built a legacy that both she and her mother spent their careers chasing was a monster. Meredith puts two and two together super fast to realize that Marie Cerone must’ve been one of the 13 women silenced. “So my mother had to take her name off the paper or she never would’ve been able to win the Harper Avery,” Meredith concludes.

Before they can get ahead of this PR nightmare, we watch as the news breaks on a hospital television.

But they’re not the only ones with a dubious future ahead of them. Webber visits Roy in his room to tell him that he’s fired.

“Here’s his jacket, his bag, and I packed him some snacks for the road,” a surprisingly maternal Amelia says to Jo as she hands off Karev to his fiancée. After Karev notices that Jo looks happy, she tells him that she had a good day. It’s not until after they leave that Owen is able to get Leo down to sleep. A few hours of taking care of an infant has him wiped, and Amelia offers to stay and help. Which is especially good when Leo wakes up again, and the three have a pretty sweet moment leading us to believe that Owen may get the family he’s so desperately wanted.

Deluca is sobering up on Meredith’s couch while she peruses her mom’s journals. Maggie asks her if Jackson knew, but Meredith assures her that he didn’t know until today. As Maggie tucks into a huge cheese board, Meredith admits that she just doesn’t know what to do.

Zoinks!