The new Olympic Floor at Grey Sloan Memorial comes with hotel-quality bedding and its own private security. On the day Catherine Fox (Debbie Allen) unveils it, two planes collide on the runway at Sea-Tac and send a surge of critically injured patients to the emergency department below it. “Grey’s Anatomy” came back to ABC on Thursday night, October 15th, with “Collide,” its Season 23 premiere. The hour spends most of its time asking who a hospital is really for, and it answers in the most expensive way it can. By the time it ends, the hospital has a new chief of surgery most of the staff barely know, and two of its doctors are facing changes nobody saw coming.
Season 22 closed with a bridge collapse in “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” the farewell for Owen Hunt (Kevin McKidd) and Teddy Altman (Kim Raver), who left Seattle for France, and it ended with Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) newly engaged to Nick Marsh (Scott Speedman). Amelia Shepherd (Caterina Scorsone) was caught with Cass Beckman (Sophia Bush) just as Toni Wright (Jen Landon) was ready to choose her. Benson “Blue” Kwan (Harry Shum Jr.) was fired for giving a patient an unapproved drug, and Jo Wilson (Camilla Luddington) was still carrying the delivery of her twins, which nearly killed her. Showrunner Meg Marinis, in her fourth season running the show, told The Hollywood Reporter the gap is “about a month,” in part because Nick was left in a hospital bed and Speedman was busy shooting “R.J. Decker.” Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Grey’s Anatomy” Season 23 and the endings of the Jo, Simone and Amelia stories in “Collide.”
By the time it ends, the hospital has a new chief of surgery most of the staff barely know, and two of its doctors are facing changes nobody saw coming.”
The month off has not fixed much. Simone Griffith (Alexis Floyd) has picked Wes Bryant (Trevor Jackson) after last season’s drunken hookup with Lucas Adams (Niko Terho). She still manages to walk in on Lucas in the shower while she is hunting for a condom to use with Wes, which is the closest the hour comes to comedy. Toni is back at work and answering Amelia’s texts only because they are colleagues, Jo is seeing a therapist and looks fine on the job, and Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson) is about to start a master’s degree in public health. Winston Ndugu (Anthony Hill) is covering for the trauma surgeons who left, so the bench is already thin before the first ambulance pulls in.
Upstairs, Catherine opens the Olympic Floor, a privately funded VIP wing backed by Seth Norton (James Wolk), a surgeon-turned-businessman whose company, Olympic Regent Health, put up the money. Downstairs, the injured arrive from the airport, where a single air traffic controller had cleared both planes. Amelia and Toni take one of the pilots together and start fighting over her almost at once. Amelia pushes for a CT because she is worried about the pilot’s neck, while Toni is focused on the bleeding in her face and wants her sent to plastics, and when Amelia calls her on it, Toni storms out. Between patients, Amelia asks Atticus “Link” Lincoln (Chris Carmack) whether he knows anyone he could set her up with and notices him working his sore shoulder, a detail that pays off later. Then the pilot seizes, and the diagnosis is internal decapitation, which seems to settle the argument in Amelia’s favor without making Toni wrong about the bleeding.
Meredith came back to Seattle for the opening, not for a mass casualty, and she is pulled two ways inside of a few minutes. Seth tries to book time with her while she heads for the emergency department, where Charlie (Martin Martinez), a 17-year-old in foster care, has been waiting about six hours with a hernia that needs surgery. On the new floor, its first VIP patient wants her gallstones out now and wants Meredith, or Sloan, to do it, and Richard Webber (James Pickens Jr.) sends Meredith to the elective case and pushes Charlie’s surgery back. She operates on the VIP and leaves before the closing to check on Charlie, who has gotten worse while she was upstairs. A routine repair becomes an emergency the hospital’s own priorities helped create.
Larry (Dominic Burgess), that controller, comes in as a patient himself, overworked and panicking, and Winston finds an aortic aneurysm. Winston, Bailey and Jules Millin (Adelaide Kane) are working on him when he crashes in the elevator on the way to the operating room, and they have to open him up right there. Jo is in that elevator, and it is the moment the premiere’s careful picture of her recovery comes apart, with Jo close to passing out as a patient bleeds in front of her. Across town, Blue is still fired and filling his days with online French lessons, until he notices his teacher showing signs of a stroke over video and tells her to meet him at Grey Sloan. Simone treats her and covers for Blue when Richard comes by, and when she offers to tell Richard who really made the call, Blue tells her it will not change anything.
Larry pulls through. The pilot does not, dying despite the surgery Amelia and Toni fought to get her to, and Charlie learns that Meredith found a buildup during the operation that may be cancer. He is angry with her, with good reason, and the best she can offer is a promise to see him through whatever comes next. Then she goes up to the Olympic Floor, finds Catherine, Richard and Seth together, and tells them the hospital is putting the new floor ahead of its standard of care. Catherine answers by announcing that Seth is the new chief of surgery, and reminds Meredith, who now lives in Boston, that she is not there all the time. Richard tells her the hospital needs the floor to stay afloat. “This will implode,” Meredith warns him, and leaves.
The closing stretch hands out the bills. Bailey realizes she missed the registration deadline for her program in the chaos and starts talking herself out of school, until Winston tells her to delegate, and she does it by making him residency director, which makes him the direct boss of Jules, the resident he has been secretly dating. Earlier in the day, Ben Warren (Jason George) had told Winston to “come clean” and “get ahead of it,” and he is now in a much worse spot to do either. Simone finds Lucas in the locker room and asks him for space. Amelia shows up at Toni’s door and admits that sleeping with Cass was a mistake she made because she believed Toni was going back to her ex. Then she tells Toni she is “desperately, madly, dizzyingly in love” with her, and after a pause long enough to hurt, Toni says, “I’m not done,” and kisses her.
The two cliffhangers land in the same final minutes. Simone looks down at a positive pregnancy test, and since she slept with Lucas once while she was seeing Wes, the father could be either man. At home, Link slips a bottle of Jo’s old pain medication into his pocket moments before Jo comes through the door and tells him she has quit her job. Marinis has been plain that this is not a one-episode wobble. “This definitely plays out,” she told Deadline, adding that Jo will not be working regular shifts. “I wanted to not gloss over it,” she told TheWrap about Jo’s postpartum trauma. Link’s side of the marriage is darker still. “There might be a dependence there,” Marinis told TheWrap about Link and the painkillers. As she put it to Variety, Jo thinks she is the only problem at home and has no idea what is brewing beside her.
Seth is the premiere’s real experiment, and the most interesting choice in it. Marinis told Deadline that the show has never “had a chief like this who isn’t part of the hospital to begin with,” which is the whole point of him. “Medicine’s business for him, and that’s not typically how our doctors have treated their careers,” she told Variety. Wolk, a “Mad Men” alum, plays the premiere mostly as a pitch, a handsome man in a dark suit trying to book Meredith’s time while the emergency department overflows. Marinis described him to The Hollywood Reporter as “a villain you learn to love,” and for now the premiere only shows the villain half. She also told that outlet that she saw one of these VIP floors in real life when her father had pneumonia in Houston, which explains why the premiere treats the idea as current events rather than science fiction, and why it makes a 17-year-old in foster care pay for the opening.
Simone’s test is the twist built to run the longest. “It does not automatically mean it is Lucas,” Marinis told Deadline, even though Simone and Wes were careful. She told Variety that last season’s fertility story, in which Simone was told she may not be able to have children, was planned as setup. “She’s definitely not ready to have a baby, but she doesn’t know if this is the one time that she’s got,” Marinis said. That gives an old soap device more weight than it usually carries, and it may also keep Simone quiet for a while, because the question Marinis keeps coming back to is whether she tells either man at all. The weakest stretch of the hour is the Amelia and Toni reunion, which arrives a month after a betrayal and one lost patient later, and Marinis admitted to Deadline that the writers’ room debated whether Toni could forgive her that fast.
What comes next is already partly mapped. Marinis told Variety that Bailey will be on campus in episode 2. Episode 3, “It’s All Wrong, but It’s All Right,” brings in a Dolly Parton impersonator as a patient, a story she said was pitched in the writers’ room and titled after one of Parton’s songs. Behind all of it sits the money, since the season is expected to run shorter than the usual 18 episodes, while Marinis is co-creating a spinoff set in rural West Texas with Shonda Rhimes, aimed at midseason. A show that opens its 23rd year with a VIP floor nobody downstairs asked for, while its own budget shrinks, is telling on itself a little, and that self-awareness could be the sharpest thing about this season, if the writers keep pressing on it.
What Do You Think? Is Seth Norton the villain Grey Sloan needs to keep its doors open, or is Meredith right that the Olympic Floor will implode? Is Lucas the father of Simone’s baby, and will she tell either man before she decides what to do? How long can Link hide those pills now that Jo is home every day?
Catch up properly: every “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Private Practice” and “Station 19” episode in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s Grey’s Anatomy timeline.
See you on the next binge!
