Grey's Anatomy Season 14, Episode 8 Recap: "Out Of Nowhere"

Buckle up Grey’s watchers, because the winter finale delivers a bumpy ride. Straight out of the gate, Wilson (Camilla Luddington) doing her best Bailey (Chandra Wilson) circa the Nazi impression as she practices to be the chief resident is a fave. So is Bailey telling Webber (James Pickens, Jr.) he’s an imbecile for giving Warren (Jason George) a fellowship so he can train to be a fireman or whatever (the joke was good, the long path to his spinoff is not). The new interns all raising their hands begging to be chosen for a rotation by Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) and Amelia (Caterina Scorsone) is like the fun early days of Grey’s.

Echoing Hunt’s (Kevin McKidd) question: What the hell is happening? When he and Kepner (Sarah Drew) experience a mass failure of heart monitors in the pit, poor Sam (Jeanine Mason) acts a little too quickly and shocks a man who was only asleep back to life. The interns are in for a tough day. The problem is obviously hospital-wide, as we see in a shot with (Maggie) Kelly McCreary, a non-working monitor in Meredith’s operating room, and a locked screen on an intern’s iPad as well as Bailey’s laptop. In a plot twist right out of Die Hard, hackers have attacked the hospital. It’s slightly more believable than the Sandra Bullock classic, The Net, but nowhere near as accurate as Mr. Robot on the scale of computer shit I believe. Long story short: They’re holding the hospital’s records hostage and demanding a ransom. I already need another glass of wine by the time the FBI shows up.

It seems the challenge for the entire hospital will be how to exist without technology. It's a clever conceit, especially considering how dependent we’ve seen the doctors become on their iPads, imaging technology in surgery and diagnosis, 3D printing, and other tech hacks into medicine. It’s also well-timed, considering the show's introducing a new class of interns who idolize so many of the characters we’ve known for 14 years. So if everyone is on a level playing field without technology (but not as far as experience, obviously), are these people still the best? I predict one intern could become a shining star in this episode and I have the vibe that it’s going to be Glasses (Jake Borelli). After his faux pas, he's thirstier than everyone else.

Bailey figures out that the hackers came after them because they announced Jackson’s (Jesse Williams) stupid contest, so she goes to him for the money to pay off the hackers but gets blocked by the FBI. Jackson, though, is willing to do it! (Hook up with him Maggie, make it happen!)

That pair, incidentally, is thrown together to treat a dying man whose daughter just met him, which echoes their shared experience. Tell me again why a plastic surgeon would be working on this case though? Oh, that’s right, to move their couplehood forward. Fine, it’s approved! Not approved is the Carrie-esque scene that occurs when they’re on the plane together and said patient’s tube pops out, spraying blood everywhere. Just…could you not?

Lady Deluca (Stefania Spampinato) gets temporary operating permissions due to the crisis and is going to deliver a baby but her patient is way less excited about it than she is. The experience doesn’t get better, as Lady Deluca asks her to submit to an orgasm to hurry the birth up – the lights go out, and as she tries to leave the baby is falling out of her. Arizona’s (Jessica Capshaw) superpower of talking people into doing things they don’t want to do via sage parenting advice saves the day. There's a tangled Deluca/Arizona/Hunt love triangle headed our way, I suspect.

Meredith’s is in the middle of removing Hairspray star Nikki Blonsky’s spleen when the power goes out in her surgery, so she has to switch from a laparoscopic surgery to open her up. Glasses fucks up, so there goes his moment to shine? He goes to get blood for the patient, only to find the hackers changed the door code to get into the blood bank. So now they’re operating on a patent without any access to blood. When Mer asks the room who is O negative – meaning who is going to donate blood for her surgery – Glasses raises his hand. The look on her face is pure JFC. I guess after this we’ll have to start calling him Schmidt.

It turns out I was wrong about who would shine in this episode because the star is Webber. He tells lots of doctors how to treat their patients without modern meds using his old school hacks.

Amelia, Karev (Justin Chambers), and Wilson are with that little boy who wants his mom to marry Karev — and who may have a blood clot in his brain. I am obsessed with Karev and Wilson’s dynamic, where women flirt with him nonstop, and she’s confident enough not to be bothered, a la the single mom whose adorable son has his medical jargon to English translations down pat. Their storyline is a wild goose chase that serves to show how dangerous the reliance on digital tracking for medications, staff, and monitoring can be. It strikes me as the most technophobic, but in the end, it’s designed to highlight how important it is to rely on your gut.

Just as Wilson dramatically runs in to make sure they don’t follow their gut and give him medication that will kill him, she runs into Paul Stadler (Matthew Morrison), her abusive ex. Reader, that moment TOOK MY BREATH AWAY. I was not prepared for this to be the moment in which he returned.

But I suppose I’ll have to accept it because we are now on hiatus until 2018...