They picked us.

Now, to understand what this meant to me, you have to understand how I write.  I don’t.  Not until the last possible minute.  Then I churn it all out in a crazed frenzy while eating ice chips and cursing the gods for not making me something sensible like an astronaut or a prima ballerina.  Prima ballerinas do not have to write things.  But I guess since they have to be freakishly thin, they may have it worse off than me.   

But I was sick.  Actually sick – not my usual drama sick.  So sick that members of the cast were peering through the door at me in my office and very kindly trying to suggest that maybe I might want to consider heading over to the nearest hospital and moving in for a while.  So sick that the medical research team did an intervention and sent one of their own in to examine.  So sick that the entire show had to be shut down for a week so that I could recover enough to not cough up pieces of my lung on my computer screen while writing.  Let me tell you: it sucked.

Now, I tell you this as a shameless ploy for sympathy.  I love sympathy as I am a neurotic writer.  And to distract you from the fact that, because I am a neurotic writer, I procrastinated and procrastinated until literally the DAY of the read-through (a read-through is when we gather together the entire cast and they do us the honor of reading the script out loud at a big round table – even after a season and a half, it is amazing to me that I get to hear my words read aloud by these truly talented people).  At which point, I started writing like a crazed fiend.  I finished writing the script just in time for my team to make copies of the script and race them over to put them into the cast’s hands as they were taking their seats at the big round table.  None of us, including me, had any idea if what I’d written would even work.   I was nervous and wishing I was still sick.  Because you never know.  I love my actors and my actors like me well enough.  But still…

Perhaps they would chase me with torches and stone me to death with rage at my idiocy.  Perhaps they’d smile politely but coldly at me and run to call their agents so that they could beg to get off this show.  Or, you know, perhaps they would raise me on their shoulders and carry me around singing showtunes in my honor.

They did nothing of the sort.  What they did do was gasp, yell, hoot with laughter, applaud and openly weep as they read the pages aloud.   Ellen Pompeo shrieked “HOLY CRAP!” right in the middle of the reading.  Katie Heigl started to cry somewhere around page 20.  Sandra Oh just kept whispering “oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh, oh, OH MY GOSH.”  And after I got hugs.  I am not the hugging kind but still…if you stand very still and hug back, it is nice.  The director, Peter Horton, was thrilled.  The writers were thrilled.  The studio and the network were thrilled.

Thrilled.  It’s good, that word.  Thrilled.

So please watch.

I hope you like it.  A lot of work by the cast and crew went into this episode.  Work I’ll be able to explain to you after the episode airs and it stops being the big giant secret episode that we don’t talk about…

Please tell me you watched the show.

PLEASE.

I say that because I’m gonna lie awake all night worrying that maybe you DIDN’T watch, that maybe you decided to go to bed or go out with friends or do something crazy like – I don’t know – NOT WATCH.  So please, please, please…

I’m betting many of you got to the last moment of the episode, heard Meredith whispering “what did I do, what did I do, what did I do…” and shrieked at the TV when you saw the credits.  That’s what my Mom did when I showed her the episode a week ago.  She was all, “THAT’S ALL YOU ARE GONNA SHOW ME?! WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?!”  And when I wouldn’t tell her, she got kind of mad and guilted me with the fact that I came out of her body.

To be fair to you, I get that you hate me right now.  I mean…I left you hanging.   But, to be fair to me, I did not know until a day into production that this was gonna be a two hour thing.  See, I made this innocent call to Channing (the coolest executive at Touchstone TV – if you meet her, buy her a free drink because she was instrumental in our show ever getting on the air) and I asked if maybe we could have an hour and a half for this episode instead of just an hour.  She said she’d make a few calls.  A few hours later, the president of the network, Steve McPherson (another extremely cool person) had me on the phone and was like, “I think two hours would be amazing.”  Now, a tip should you ever have your own TV show -- you don’t say no to the president of the network.  Frankly, I didn’t even THINK about saying no.  I mean, a chance to make the episode bigger?  A chance to do all the things I’d wanted to do with the episode but could never have done in 42 minutes (which is how long an episode is without commercials)?  That kind of chance, that kind of vote of confidence from the network for our show, our proverbial little show that could?

I said, “No problem.”  Then I hung up and hyperventilated.

Because while I knew I could do this first hour, this hour that you watched tonight, I had NO IDEA what I was going to do to fill the entire second hour.  So while director Peter Horton started shooting, I sat on the floor of my office and tried to figure out how to expand the episode without a) ruining the episode and b) expanding the episode so much that it didn’t flow.  And I did figure it out.  I think.  You’ll have to watch next week to see if you agree.

About this episode:  what I’m really proud of if that even though this episode is Grey’s Anatomy on speed, even though there’s a bomb in a body cavity, even though we had guest stars like Christina Ricci (how good was she?!) and Kyle Chandler (how cute is he?!), even though, even though, even though…it is still very much our show.  It is still more about the relationships that it is about the medicine. 

What this episode is about is birth, sex and death.  Bailey’s pregnant, Meredith’s afraid she might die and Izzie and Alex…well, they do.   Don’t knock Izzie for going for it – when life hangs in the balance, we all do what we can for comfort.   And her speech in the linen closet was one of my favorite performances of the episode.   That, and Meredith’s long speech in bed to Cristina about Addison taking her McDreamy, her McDog, her McLife.  But my favorite, favorite moment in the whole thing is the “Pink Mist” scene.  It’s one of the first times we’ve ever had a scene on GA that didn’t involve a single one of our 10 main characters.  And, as expected, Christina Ricci’s amazing but Dr. Milton…my God, we didn’t even have anyone to play the part until the very day we shot the scene and originally, he only had two lines…Dr. Milton is perfection.  My favorite line?  “Even beats.”

About the shower scene: I knew it was the Superbowl, people.  I knew a little girl-on-girl would be good with the Superbowl boys and maybe keep them watching.  I’m not stupid.  But I also wanted to do something  a) that was not gratuitous and b) that is turned on its ear in the second part that airs next week.  And Katie, Sandra and Ellen (that’s Izzie, Cristina and Meredith) were total troupers for pulling it off with such humor.  They wore sweatpants and little tube top thingies and soaped each other up for hours without a single word of complaint.  And it was cold that day.   Really cold.  It’s why I love our cast.  I write stuff and they leap.  They’re leapers.  So watch for next week’s shower scene and remember this one and know that I am shouting, “HA!  You think girl-on-girl threesomes are real?  NO WAY.  THIS is how women take care of each other.”

The Music:  a lot of you know that I pick the songs myself.  But this episode was different.  First of all, my editor Ed Ornelas and I used a lot of drums – which we’ve never done before.   The drums are the sound of Meredith’s fear.   Did you notice that the first Mer/Der scene starts with that drumbeat that sends us into a dream-like silence so you’d end up with the feeling that the moment between the two of them may or may not have happened?  Did you notice that the drums signal death?   I hope so.  Second, we had this AMAZING song by Chris Martin and Michael Stipe in our hands that we could debut on our show if we had a place for it.  And all the proceeds that came from people buying the song on iTunes would go to charity.  So that ending, that song placement was like a gift.

But there are some greater moments coming.  Please tell me you watched.  And that you’ll watch again next week.  Because honestly, aside from my daughter, I’ve never enjoyed anything more than working on this show.  It is a pleasure entertaining you.