Grey’s Anatomy’s Cristina-centric episode on Thursday night began with a voiceover from the cardiothoracic surgeon that’s focused on self-reflection.
"Do you know who you are? Do you know what's happened to you? Do you want to live this way?” she asks. “All it takes is one person, one patient, one moment to change your life forever.” That patient, for Dr. Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh) is a young man named Jason left paralyzed from the waist down following a car accident.
Cristina and Shane (Gaius Charles) operate on his heart in the OR, not realizing that the damage to his vertebrae is irreparable. Effortlessly, Cristina shows Ross how to repair the hardest vessel to work with – dubbed the “black mamba.” Dancing her way through it, she executes a perfect repair. Riding the high of the successful surgery, she learns from Derek (Patrick Dempsey) that though the patient's heart is fixed, she’s going to have to tell his wife that he’s paralyzed – and let Jason decide whether he wants to live with a vent doing his breathing or die.
The wife tells Cristina that knowing her husband, knowing everything about him, leads her to believe that he won’t want to live like this. When the sedatives wear off, Cristina is able to ask Jason what he wants. He wants to be taken off the vent. Deeply effected by the scenario, Cristina paces over to Owen (Kevin McKidd) by the elevator and tells him that they’re meant to be together, while Jackson (Jesse Williams) accidentally destroys his hand behind them. Cristina and Owen kiss, and their future begins to unfold.
Next we see them, they’re congratulating each other on christening every room in they’re big, new home. Owen says the place is too big for one, so they go to a shelter and Cristina picks out the smallest dog available – a male pup she names Mrs. Rodriguez. A couple years later and Jackson’s hand still hasn’t recovered enough for surgery and Owen has been offered an opportunity of a lifetime to head up a military trauma unit in Germany. Cristina refuses to go, leading Owen to ask if he can ever get what he wants in their relationship.
Flash-forward some more and Cristina is still at Grey Sloan Memorial, but she’s pregnant with her and Owen’s first kid. While delivering her son, she intimates to Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) that she’s made a terrible mistake. After taking the baby home, she’s even more certain of it. Eventually, she even starts putting the boy, named Theo, before her career. A handful of years later she’s pregnant again, openly unhappy. Several more years later, Cristina presents a Harper Avery Award to Shane Ross, who surpassed her after she became a mother. She sobs in a bathroom stall, destroyed that it would never be her up there.
Back to the present with Jason and his wife, Cristina is shown once again asking him if he wants to have the air vent removed. After searching his wife’s eyes, Jason tells her that he’d like to keep it; that he’d like to live. A gleeful Cristina – again bypassing Jackson as he wrecks his hand – goes up to Owen by the elevator. This time, she wasn’t proposing they get domestic with each other, she just wanted to celebrate with some sex.
After sleeping together in his trailer, Cristina asks Owen if he can keep up the casual thing. He says he can. He says he doesn’t need kids; he just needs her. Of course, the subject comes up again, and Cristina tells him that she was upfront with him about what she wanted.
Meanwhile, Jason is benefiting from Derek and Callie’s (Sara Ramirez) clinical trial with the sensors. Despite being paralyzed from the neck down, they’ve fitted him with a bodysuit of sensors that make it possible for him to walk. When he suffers a non-life threatening complication, Jason’s wife wants Cristina at their side – trusting her from her previous work on her husband. But, Cristina has grown colder and shrewder and refuses to step away from her trial work for even a moment. Jason's wife confesses to Owen that their life together is miserable.
At night, Cristina meets up with Owen at Joe’s. There, he tells her that they’re officially done. He can’t keep up the ruse of pretending he doesn’t want more from her. Hoping to put the constant on-off relationship behind her, Cristina tells Meredith that she and Owen can’t keep doing this, and that she needs Meredith’s help to not go back to him.
Cristina manages to end her relationship with Owen, but he’s not doing so well without her. He’s arriving to work drunk, screaming at Jackson about his ruined hand and forgetting to order important tests. When Cristina goes to see him hooked up to an IV in the hospital, an intoxicated Owen professes his love for her.
A few more years later, Cristina is at the Harper Avery Awards, accepting her fourth honor, which is presented by her protégé Shane Ross. Back at the hospital, Owen’s drunkenness on the job has spiraled out of control, causing Arizona (Jessica Capshaw) to call an emergency board meeting to discuss firing him.
Back again once more to Jason and his wife, this time he confidently and assuredly nods that he doesn’t want to live on the air vent. Accepting his decision, Cristina walks towards the hall – this time stopping to prevent Jackson’s hand injury – and doesn’t seek Owen out by the elevator. Meredith walks up to her to chat about the patient and the two walk off, with Cristina and Owen’s future still hanging in the balance.
– Chelsea Regan
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