Meredith begins by observing that there's a red line on the floor of the hospital denoting the boundary between the public area and the inner sanctum of surgery and syphilis to which all medical residents aspire. Crossing the line is not tolerated. Outside SGH is a line of another sort—the much-feared picket line of nurses, who have made good on last week's strike announcement and are demanding fair hours and fair wages.

As the interns arrive for their shift, George refuses to cross the picket line; Izzie, reluctantly, says they have to. Cristina says screw the nurses, she needs her daily fix of surgical blood and carnage PRONTO. As she indignantly breaches the picket line, the nurses bombard her with food. Does she look like she needs food? What this ho wants is LIQUOR, so next time throw some of those little bottles from the EconoLodge minibar. Anyway, Izzie sees the nurses' assault as an affront to all that is good and Jesuslike, so her sympathy instantly hardens into old-fashioned Christian disdain. She breaches the picket line also and likewise gets pelted with food.

"I thought I was auditioning for Grey's Anatomy, not MISS SAIGON"

Meredith drops by the nursing home to visit her mother and is surprised to find that Dr. Webber is there visiting too. The sight of her old flame has Ellis sparkly of eye, rosy of cheek, and incontinent of bladder. Meredith notices that Dr. Webber initiates a little mild hanky-panky, touching Ellis's hand flirtatiously. She thinks Dr. Webber is crossing the line—ooh, a theme!—and watches them for a little bit before leaving.

Back at the hospital, the temp nurses are proving wildly inept, while the interns are trying to figure out who's been assigned to replace Dr. Bailey during her maternity leave. Before long, this replacement enters. I didn't catch her name—I think it's Dr. Sydney Heron—but she's played by Kali Rocha (of Meet the Parents and Buffy the Vampire Slayer), who's essentially an older, American version of Kate Winslet but, more important, ANIMATED AND BOUNCY AS SHIT. She greets the interns like she's head counselor at Fisher Price My First Bowel Surgery Camp and is SUPER excited to meet them—it's "awesome" and they'll "have fun." Yes, nothing screams fun like bedpans and abscesses. To top it off, Dr. Heron's philosophy is "heal with love." HA, Cristina will adore this.

All the interns scramble to avoid Dr. Uppers, but Izzie gets stuck with her. Just as the doctor is nicknaming Izzie "Izzie McGee" because she likes "rhyming"—oh great, not only is she annoying as shit, she's also DEAF—Izzie is rescued by Dr. She-Shepherd, who has some new little bastard child for her to deliver in obstetrics.

Cristina walks in on her first patient hooking up with her husband on her hospital bed. She has little sympathy for the fact that they're newlyweds and asks them to "dismount." Ha HA, I love good Sandra Oh moments. Meredith, meanwhile, is walking in the hall when she overhears some poor old woman calling out for help. The old woman is disoriented and having trouble breathing, but no nurses are around to assist. So Meredith, despite a temp nurse's best efforts to kill the patient, inserts a breathing tube to stabilize the old lady.

Outside the hospital, unclean nurse Olivia tells George it's okay if he wants to cross the picket line. But George says his parents were both union workers—his father was played by George Dzundza, after all, how much more union can you get. George takes a picket sign from the nurses and marches into the hospital to commence his own campaign for fair wages and pansiness.

Dr. She-Shepherd's patient is a young pregnant girl whose unborn baby has a spinal tumor. They plan an "exit surgery," a C-section to half-deliver the baby while the tumor is removed. The patient's family isn't well off, and the mother is worried about the expense, but Dr. She-Shepherd has some contacts that will make the surgery free. The mother leaves the girl in Izzie's care to go work her night shift.

Cristina's patient—the one who got a 10.0 on her dismount—has a large, nasty-looking rash on her leg. Cristina draws a LINE on the leg and challenges the rash to cross it. The patient and her husband turn out to be your stereotypical xtreme, Pontiac Aztek-owning Outside magazine couple from hell—they just finished climbing Mt. Rainier and want to run a 10k the next day. Dr. Heron enters and chats all bubbly-ly with the patient, pissing Cristina off royally. HAHA I love this. It emerges that the patient cut her foot on an oyster shell at the beach a few days earlier, so that may be the source of the infection. Worryingly, the rash has traveled across Cristina's line of demarcation in a mere 30 seconds. Yay realism!

Meredith starts to confront Dr. Webber about his flirting with her mother, but he implies that he hasn't seen Ellis recently, so she drops it. The picketing nurses, meanwhile, start asking George to do favors for specific patients inside the hospital, since the striking pinko bitches are too lazy to do it themselves.

Posted by m_ruv on February 1, 2006 10:45 AM