Word of the sinkhole has made it to the hospital and Owen and Callie are gearing up to go perform an on-site amputation while the others prepare to receive tons of injured people. I'm thinking that we are just a couple weeks removed from the season finale, which means that we are just a couple of weeks since a plane crashed nearby. This is not working as a very good sales pitch for living in Seattle. Owen leaves April in charge. Mere then comes out and Cristina starts talking to her about all the head wounds that will surely be arriving but Mere angrily announces that she was fired. Alex is rewarded with a lot of pointed dirty looks at the news, but Cristina can't settle for just looks and starts punching and screaming at him. Bailey yells at April to break it up but she's of course totally ineffective, so Bailey finally grabs Cristina by the scruff of her neck and pulls her away. Alex decides to go out to the accident scene, totally ignoring April's squeaky protests that she didn't give him permission to do so. Hey April, remember when you turned out to be awesome at running traumas? Yeah, I barely do either. But let's call on some of those reserves so we don't have to suffer through more April-is-useless storylines. When an ambulance pulls up Meredith instinctively joins the other docs around the patients but Bailey shoos her away. After everyone has gone inside, Meredith is left standing alone, so very alone, in the ambulance bay. It's all so meaningful as the camera pans back and the only company she has is the flashing ambulance light. I think there's actually a chapter in the great Medical Show Bible that says that says that the best way to convey loneliness/a sense of being lost is to pan back slowly as touching music plays over a character standing alone in the ambulance bay.

Out at the scene, there is an awesome extra who is super excited for his shot at time on-camera, making grand, "Oh my gosh, what is this chaos?" gestures towards the sinkhole. That guy is SELLING it. Callie and Owen meet Karen, who is in charge of search and rescue. Danny has a slight head injury and a dodgy ankle but seems to be generally okay, and they would normally bring him up but he's refusing to leave Susannah. She's the amputation in question since her leg is trapped under their car. They all walk up to the barricades to view this sinkhole that is seriously not fucking around. It's about the size of half of a football field, and has gone so far as to take the edge of a building down with it. It reminds me of those chalk paintings that make their way around the internet via email forwards every so often -- the amazing ones that look totally 3D but are really just chalk on a flat sidewalk. (Those are a bit more realistic.) (Sorry, show -- this looks really amazing too! But there's just a bit of an unreal sheen to it that makes me imagine the actors all looking really worriedly at a green screen.)