Grey’s Anatomy – Season 16 Episode 21 (The Finale) Recap and Review

Metal Poisoning

After a tumultuous season, Grey’s Anatomy ends with a decent enough finale as we finally find out what is wrong with Richard and revelations are brought forward. While this last episode wasn’t as shocking as the previous year, it did bring some conclusions to a few of its story lines and leaves things open for some of our characters going forward.

The season 16 finale of Grey’s Anatomy starts as Meredith and DeLuca are still busy trying to figure out what’s wrong with Richard while his family and friends are taking turns visiting him. After seeing how obsessed Meredith has become, Maggie tries speaking to her and tells her Catherine is taking Richard home as they believe he has Alzheimer’s.

Tom finds out that Teddy is getting married that same evening while Jo, Avery and Hayes are dealing with a young girl with a neurological condition which stops her from having any facial expressions. Her father is not completely on-board but the girl insists as she wants to be able to smile.

A trauma arrives with a man who has a bat impaled in his chest. Owen sends him to the OR while DeLuca is trying to stop Catherine from taking Richard home. Meredith tells DeLuca to walk away then hears that Richard has numb legs and fingers. This makes her realise that these are not signs of Alzheimer’s and wants him to do neurological tests. Afterwards, the doctors come to the conclusion that Meredith is right and are back to trying to find out what’s causing this. As they are all discussing their new findings, Amelia’s water breaks.

After talking to Teddy about the mistakes he believes she is doing, Tom heads off to see Catherine who mentions that she has made mistakes and tells him she might want him to play a bigger role in the foundation.

While Bailey and Meredith are about to perform a biopsy on Richard, DeLuca bursts in the OR and stops the surgery. He tells them Richard had a hip replacement three years ago and he believes he is suffering from cobalt poisoning which would explain his symptoms. After running tests, they see that he is right and decide to remove and replace the artificial hip. DeLuca wants to scrub in but Bailey is reluctant so Meredith insists as it is his diagnosis. Bailey goes to get Link who is with Amelia during labour but insists that he performs the surgery.

In her OR, Maggie finds out about Richard’s diagnosis while Tom pages Teddy to come see him. He tells her not to throw her life away as he believes that she loves him so he will wait for her that night in his car. He starts kissing her and they sleep together.

Link starts the surgery on Richard and sees how much damage it has made. He also realises that a lot of people could have the same issues and tells DeLuca that it is a game changer. They manage to remove the old hip and replace it with a better one.

Avery, Hayes and Jo’s surgery is a success too while Bailey is helping Amelia give birth. Link arrives after and meets his baby boy. At the same time, Tom receives a voicemail while removing the bat from his patient’s chest and as he asks Schmidt to play it, he hears Teddy having sex. After the surgery, he listens to the rest of the voicemail and hears that she slept with Tom.

Later on, Richard wakes up and is already doing better as he remembers everything and everyone. Catherine arrives and he asks what she’s doing there as he hasn’t forgotten what she has done, telling her to get out of his room.

As the episode closes, Hayes asks Meredith out for a drink but she tells him to ask her again another time as she is exhausted. She then finds DeLuca who is equally as drained and she takes him home. Teddy is getting ready for her wedding and as she arrives in Owen’s house, his mother is there and tells her Owen has been pulled in for last minute surgery. This then makes her realize that he must know about her affair.

The 16th season of Grey’s Anatomy has definitely been the weakest one so far as it brought us some very poorly written scripts, full of filler episodes and doctors acting out of character. Thankfully, the finale offered us one of the better episodes this year, even if it lacked the usual dramatic cliffhanger ending we’ve become accustomed to.

It was nice to see DeLuca save the day too and while he clearly has some issues, he is a very good surgeon and with Meredith helping him, it will be interesting to see what will happen to those two, especially with Hayes in the picture. Richard’s story line was probably the best one this season while we see Teddy getting her comeuppance at the end of the episode.

Just how next season will fare remains to be seen but unfortunately the 16th season will remain a disappointment and might have caused some of its fans to give up on this medical drama.