Previously on Grey's Anatomy, George (T.R. Knight) slept with Izzie (Katherine Heigl), Alex (Justin Chambers) named Ava (Elizabeth Reaser), Dr. Erica Hahn (Brooke Smith) from Mercy West Hospital liked Cristina (Sandra Oh), Meredith's (Ellen Pompeo) mother died.

It's Halloween tonight on Grey's Anatomy. Meredith opens the episode with a nightmare. The sequence includes familiar images of her near death experience and run-ins with her mother, and ends with her in a drawer at the morgue. Her dead self opens her eyes and repeats the “pick me, choose me, love me” speech she gave to Derek. She wakes up, grabs the urn containing her mother's ashes from out of her closet and goes downstairs to dump the contents of the urn into a Ziploc bag. It's one of the gallon-sized freezer bags so you know she means business. She explains to Izzie and Alex, who are carving pumpkins and baking Halloween treats, that her mother is haunting her and she needs to find a way to put her to rest.

It's time for everyone's shift to start at the hospital. All the residents, including Sydney (Halfrek from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) give Meredith suggestions on what to do with her dead mommy. Callie (Sara Ramirez) picks this time to announce to everyone that Izzie is sleeping with her husband, which Cristina finds more disturbing than Meredith's bag o' mommy. Ha!

Richard (James Pickens) sees Cristina posting signs about Burke's apartment on the bulletin board. Adele's filing for divorce, so Richard needs a new place to live. Cristina immediately promises him the apartment.

Lexie (Chyler Leigh) is wearing her scrubs and a Little Bo Peep bonnet to work, in honor of Halloween, and gets criticized by the daughter of a patient who needs a heart transplant for not looking professional. Seems like Cristina pulled one over on young Lexie. The daughter is also wearing a costume—she's dressed as a mouse—but she doesn't cut people open for a living, so it's OK if she looks silly. The daughter leaves, but is brought back to the hospital later by the paramedics when she is brained by a brick. Oh, Halloween hijinx. She's still alive, but in a vegetative state. She is also an organ donor, with a heart that her father could really use. Her father, being the next of kin, has the power to take her off life support and have her organs donated, but he doesn't want to take her heart to save his own life. George makes a trademark George speech about how he's sure that the daughter would have wanted him to take her heart because that is what he would have done with his own father, and convinces the man to take the transplant.

Bailey (Chandra Wilson) has a patient named James who claims that his foot that doesn't belong to him. He says it feels like a corpse's foot, and wants her to amputate it. Raj, the sarcastic psychiatry consult whom I've missed dearly, suggests anti-anxiety medication. But that's not going to fly with James who steals the chainsaw of a fingerless contestant of a chainsaw pumpkin carving contest and tries to cut off his own foot. The surgeons have no other choice now but to amputate the ragged mess that's left of his foot.

Meredith crashes into Derek (Patrick Dempsey) in the hallway, spilling some of her mother on the floor. The thing is, though, if she had made full use of the zip-top bag's capabilities, there would have been no spillage. Derek helps her scoop up the remnants of Dead Mommy as Meredith explains that she is trying to deal and evolve by finding a way to put her mother to rest. At this point, a young boy, the son of a cafeteria worker, comes to ask for McSteamy (Eric Dane). McSteamy is embroiled in his own problems right now because the nurses, Syph Nurse included, found out that he used the same lines to get them all in bed and banded together to form Nurses United Against Mark Sloan. Derek actually has a great scene when he pays the kid to ask McSteamy if he's his daddy. Priceless!

But really, the kid is there to ask McSteamy for ears. The kid can hear but has no external ear structure, so he wants Mark to reconstruct his outer ears. McSteamy wants to help, but he doesn't like to do pro bono work, and doesn't have any social capital to get it done anyway. Meredith offers to use her mother's cachet to get the surgery done. It's very adorable, really. I think non-dark, non-twisty Meredith is really cute, and she really delivers tonight. She and the earless boy go around trick-or-treating for ears from Richard and Bailey and all the others needed to do the surgery. She succeeds in getting everything together, and McSteamy commends her for her work. He tells her that even though her mother didn't take the time to take her trick-or-treating when she was a child, Meredith still turned out alright.

Norman (Edward Herrmann) is in Alex's group of interns today and asks if he can go home because he's feeling under the weather. Alex doesn't care, and after seeing that Ava is back, he really doesn't care. She and Alex go up to a call room and kiss. She reminds him that he chickened out when she asked him for a reason to stay, but she's back now because she wants to be with him. They have sex, and fall asleep. Alex gets paged and tells Ava that he'll be back so they can talk about their situation. But he doesn't come back for a very long time because Norman had a stroke. When he finally comes back to the call room, Ava is gone, and Alex has only his guilt and a red article of Ava's clothing to keep him company. Wait, was that her shirt? Did she just walk out of the hospital topless? Alex apologizes to Norman for not answering his pages and for ridiculing him when he felt sick. Norman decides to switch his specialty to psychiatry, which is what he wanted to do anyway, because surgeons are immature children and they all need a good shrink. Sadly, I think that might be the last we'll see of Norman.

Meredith and Cristina and bag o' mommy are in the cafeteria eating lunch when George and Izzie sit down to join them. They confirm that they are together and in love, but they are waiting to be together out of respect for Callie's feelings. Cristina snorts with disgust at this, but Meredith tries to be nonjudgmental.

Richard has invited Dr. Erica Hahn of Mercy West to perform the heart transplant. Izzie and Cristina compete to be in on the surgery. Hahn picks Izzie because she calls Cristina out on her propensity to sleep with her medical mentors. If she had the chops in the OR, she wouldn't need to impress her superiors in the bedroom. But the joke's on Hahn because, if you all remember correctly, Izzie was the one who stole Hahn's heart right from under her nose. This obviously doesn't go well with Cristina, and she has it out with Izzie. Cristina gets judgy about how Izzie slept with another woman's husband, and that sleeping with Burke, who was her boyfriend and fiancé, was completely different. I think this is a bit out of character for Cristina, though. I get that she was just jilted at the altar, but since when does she care how other people conduct their sex lives? Izzie complains that Cristina and Meredith are a closed circle, always excluding and judging her, and says that she is really sorry for hurting Callie. But wasn't Izzie supremely judgy when Meredith was sleeping with Derek, who was married at the time?

Callie and Cristina do the amputation surgery together and laugh hysterically the ridiculousness of each other's failed relationships. Later, Cristina tells Hahn off. She says that she didn't sleep her way to the top and that Hahn is being very unprofessional. Richard announces that Hahn is going to be joining Seattle Grace as the new head of cardiothoracic surgery, and Cristina responds by immediately taking her apartment back from Richard. She invites Callie to crash with her instead. This is going to be awesome because, for all its faults, Grey's Anatomy really excels at portraying female friendships.

McSteamy has put an APB out that Derek is lookin' again, so all day long, Halfrek and all the female nurses practically throw themselves all over Derek. He tells Richard that he doesn't want to start dating again, and Richard tells him that he doesn't want to live in the hotel anymore. I hope Richard finds a place to live because I'm sure that hotel is costing him a fortune!

After their respective surgeries, Lexie tells Meredith that she buried her mother's cat next to her because she thought that Susan would have liked to have the cat next to her. I really have no complaint with Meredith today because she kindly smiles and says thanks. Earless boy tells Meredith that she should bring her mother back to the sea, just like what he did with his goldfish. She doesn't exactly flush her mother down the toilet like a baggie of cocaine during a drug bust, but she picks the next best thing. She washes the ashes down the sink in the scrub area outside of the OR. Richard joins her, and Dead Mommy is finally laid to rest.

Late at night, Bailey is outside on the phone with her husband, apologizing for missing their son's first Halloween. Her husband hangs up on her, and it might be Bailey's turn to have her marriage on the rocks. Honestly, watching this show makes me never want to get married at all. George joins her outside. He apologizes for disappointing Bailey with his adultery, but she tells him that he's not a bad guy even though what he did was unkind and hurtful and wrong. She says that it takes two to reach the point he reached in his marriage.

Don't forget to set your TiVos appropriately, because next week is an extra-long Grey's Anatomy!


-Debbie Chang, BuddyTV Staff Writer
(Image courtesy of ABC)