What Is The Thing Owen’s Sister Appears To Be Too Fine on Grey’s Anatomy?
Last week we finally got the two-hour premiere of Grey’s Anatomy. Among the grapple with Amelia’s very familiar predicament, the hints at Meredith’s future and all that sexy underwear time, there is one conflict that sticks out throughout the episodes. We’re talking about Owen’s sister Megan, who after being presumed dead for 10 years has reappeared alive and well. It turns out that she had been in captivity, but the bottom line is that she is fine. A bit too fine…
Before we start judging on how mentally stable Megan should or should not be, let’s first see the facts. A decade ago, Megan Hunt was in the Middle East along with her brother and then fiancé, Owen, and Nathan Riggs respectively. We have heard about this event from both of them. On the day it all happened Megan knew that Nathan was being unfaithful and had Owen advising her to get some distance. She then boarded a helicopter to safely transfer an injured patient, however, there was only room for one doctor. The trip was through unprotected space. Nathan was reluctant, but eventually, he let her go. The helicopter vanished and for 10 years there was no sign of Megan. And now, suddenly, she is alive.
Every Monday AM. ? #GreysAnatomy pic.twitter.com/vBq5X286Kq
— Greys Anatomy (@GreysABC) September 29, 2017
Megan comes to Seattle and from the very beginning something seems…off. Even when she is on a stretcher, she makes a joke. A joke! She then explained what happened: “I was not kept in that hole, I was tossed into the hole when the bombing started, they were trying to protect me. Trauma surgeons aren’t easy to come by in Iraq . . . I was treated really well! They’d just, you know, kill me if I left.” In a later scene, she says, “I’m OK. There were some beatings, in the beginning, to make sure I didn’t try to escape. But, after a while, I made friends, and played cards, and did surgery, and raised my kid, and I was OK. I didn’t want you to waste your life looking for me.”
Ok, here we can start to nitpick. Our first remark is that even if the need for her was great, the treatment wouldn’t have been that good. They would at least put her underlocks and guarded.
Even if Grey’s could somehow make the story about a comfortable imprisonment in Iraq-I suppose it’s not that farfetched, for her to find compassionate people there. However, I find it even harder to believe that she was totally fine with it. She couldn’t have just been so indifferent about leaving her old life behind, to forget the past 20 years of her life and just…go with it. Would her number one priority be trying to come back home?
Who is ready for more @GreysABC ??? #MeganHunt #TGIT @KristaVernoff @shondarhimes @msdebbieallen ?? pic.twitter.com/UJbfHWld3Y
— Abigail Spencer (@abigailspencer) September 29, 2017
What’s more perplexing is the whole return part, coming back as if nothing happened, those years of imprisonment and leaving behind her life. She is cracking jokes, ordering coffee. No signs of trauma at all. Perhaps it might be a case of Stockholm syndrome. Maybe she is holding it in and will have an outburst in later episodes. It is highly unlikely that a person that has been held against his will for 10 years, threatened and beaten if an escape is tried, would probably leave some kind of emotional scarring.
Perhaps the weirdest thing is that everyone seems to go along with it. Beyond some flashbacks or her retelling what happened no one asks anything else. Not even a psych evaluation. Megan dives into the drama and the gossip in Grey-Sloan Memorial hospital. Instead of focusing on her, the light is on everyone else but her. I find it quite vexing. It doesn’t matter if she has a kid she’s attached to over there. It’s irrelevant that they treated her well. Ten years as a prisoner, when you’re forced to forget everything you’ve ever known, is going to leave its toll. I wish she was more than a character for misplaced jokes, marriage interventions, and belly laugh. I hope we will explore her character deeply in the coming episodes.