text: Meredith voices over about medical miracles as she continues to need one herself (see “Drowning on Dry Land”). Bailey asks Webber how much longer he thinks they can devote to trying to revive her. Webber refuses to give up, since Meredith is Ellis’ daughter, and Bailey assures him that she doesn’t want to give up either. Webber announces that he won’t consider Meredith dead until she’s warmed up and is still not responsive. Addison is paged to tend to Jane and Bailey asks her to be careful about what she tells the others. Meredith voices over that miracles happen every day, just not always when we want them to. In Meredith’s hospital afterlife, Denny and Dylan debate whether she’s freaking out, then bicker with each other. Meredith thinks she’s having a reaction to a ketamine neurotransmitter. She tells the guys that if she were really dead, she’d first want to see Doc (see “Losing My Religion”). Suddenly Doc is there and Meredith happily reunites with him. Dylan tries to get through to her, but Meredith is just happy to be with the dog and doesn’t care that she’s dead. Derek demands information from Addison, then announces that he wants to go in and see Meredith since she has a risk of having brain damage. Addison tells him he’s not in the right shape to see her. She then informs the other interns that things aren’t looking good and they need to prepare themselves. Alex heads off with her to check on Jane while Izzie continues to try to be positive. “I’m not doing this,” Cristina announces, walking off.
  In her afterlife, Meredith meets up with Liz (see “No Man’s Land”) and Bonnie (see “Into You Like a Train”), who tell her that they’re not in Heaven. Dylan tells her that they’re there because she called them there, and Denny asks her to talk about the water. Mark finds Olivia trying to tend to Ellis, who’s agitated, and okays some sedation. Elsewhere, Addison tries to tend to an also-agitated Jane, who thinks that Alex is her husband. She remembers meeting Alex but doesn’t remember the ferryboat crash or her own name. Outside the room, Addison tells Alex that the amnesia could be from head trauma or from shock. However, Addison is concerned about her lungs right now and asks Alex to run some tests. She asks if he wants to be with the other interns, but Alex is fine working. He tells Addison that Meredith always makes him think that “screwed-up people have a chance.” Webber, Burke, and Bailey continue working on Meredith but still get no response. Izzie enters and is shocked by the sight. She tells the others that Cristina left, even though she’s technically in the middle of her shift. Cristina is wandering around a dollar store, picking out random items. In Meredith’s afterlife, Denny and Bonnie try to get Meredith to talk about her drowning. Bonnie suddenly begins bleeding, then collapses. Meredith tries to tend to her, though Liz and Dylan tell her there’s no point. Meredith gives out medical orders, but everyone else disappears until she’s alone with Dylan. He asks her if she’s ready to talk or if she’s going to keep wasting time.
  An hour into tending to Meredith, Bailey wonders if it isn’t time to be realistic. Webber won’t entertain the thought. Cristina winds up getting drunk at the ECB while showing Joe all of her dollar-store purchases. Joe wonders if she shouldn’t be back at the hospital, taking care of the ferryboat victims. She tells him she’s coping. Bailey tells Callie to look after her interns and put them to work somewhere else in the hospital. Izzie and George (the only ones still waiting there) announce that they want to stay, but Bailey wants them to help out with the ferryboat victims. Callie tries to send them to the clinic but Izzie says she can’t leave. Callie tells her everyone is freaking out and they need to stay out of the way. Alex tries to quiz Jane about her family history, but they both know it’s futile since she can’t remember anything. Jane thinks something is really wrong with her since Alex looks pained; he tells her he’s worried about a friend of his. Sydney apologetically tells the victims’ families that they don’t have any additional information and asks them to donate blood. Izzie and Callie help out with the donation effort and Callie tries to assure Izzie that Meredith will be fine. Izzie snaps at her and Callie calls her on it. Izzie chastises Callie for acting like she’s one of Meredith’s friends, but she and George were the ones who were there for Meredith long before anything happened between George and Callie. Callie notes that George is her husband, but Izzie thinks that that’s just a technicality. Callie refuses to be run off, telling Izzie that George wants her there, so Izzie needs to learn to deal with it or George will probably cut her out of his life. She adds that Izzie should be careful about her friends now that she’s starting to lose them.
  Bonnie reappears in Meredith’s afterlife as Denny again asks Meredith what happened. Meredith will just say that she drowned, which Bonnie says hurts her to hear. Meredith notes that when Bonnie came into the ER after the train crash, she was brave and strong. Bonnie replies that she was in shock and on lots of painkillers. She reminds Meredith that what happened to her was horrible - she was about to get married and then died suddenly. Meredith is way too perky to be dead. Meredith argues that she fought to surface, but Denny reminds her that she almost drowned in the bathtub that morning. Liz announces that Ellis’ daughter would never give up like that; Meredith says it’s not about Ellis so Denny guesses that it’s about Derek. Bonnie asks how Meredith could be a surgeon and have little respect for life. Suddenly she starts bleeding again. Derek waits in a waiting room with a man whose wife was hit by a car on the ferryboat. Derek decides not to tell him that he’s a doctor, instead just confiding that he’s waiting for news about his girlfriend. Meredith tries to tend to Bonnie again, but she disappears and Dylan appears in her place. Dylan tells Denny that Meredith will either get this or not. He tells Meredith that it doesn’t matter how she got there; she’s either in this or she’s not. Denny can get mad because no matter what he’s stuck there along with Bonnie, though Dylan isn’t. He says that he had a good life and helped people, and when he died, his task was completed because he saved Meredith. Webber and Bailey keep working on Meredith with no results.
  Derek visits Ellis, blasting her for the way she talked to Meredith in “Wishin’ and Hopin’,” saying that he’ll blame Ellis if Meredith doesn’t survive. Addison overhears and calls him out into the hallway. Derek admits that he blames himself for what happened to Meredith; he knew something was going on and didn’t do enough to try to save her. Addison asks if he thinks Meredith went into the water on purpose. Derek notes that Meredith is a good swimmer. Addison tells him that he’s not allowed to break down when there’s still a chance that Meredith will survive. “Okay,” he agrees. Back in the afterlife, Meredith looks for something to help Bonnie the next time she starts bleeding. Denny reminds her that Bonnie can’t be saved, but Meredith says it’s not fair and she just wants a chance. They wind up in an OR and Denny asks what happened in the water. Meredith claims that she fought to surface, but Denny says she didn’t, adding that she can’t stay there. She claims that she doesn’t want to, but he thinks she does because it’s easier. He reminds her that George’s father died (see “Six Days, Part 2”) and that he himself died, then reveals that when Cristina was nine, she was in a car accident with her father and watched him die in front of her. He starts to say something about Alex, but Meredith interrupts, asking him to stop. Denny continues that her friends will be completely devastated if Meredith dies, and they don’t deserve that. Denny says that it’s a miracle Derek is the person he is, since he’s an optimist and a romantic, and if Meredith dies, that will change who he is. She finally gets it and starts crying, then sees that she’s alone. Back in the real world, Ellis flatlines.
  Webber has Burke paged so that they can try a cardiopulmonary bypass on Meredith. Burke has gone over to the ECB to let Cristina know that Meredith’s condition hasn’t changed. He tries to tell her that she could survive, and she reminds him that she’s “not a civilian” and knows about medicine. Burke tells Cristina she has a responsibility to Meredith, reminding her that she was there for him when he needed her. Cristina notes that that was only after she knew Burke was going to make it. She doesn’t want to go back to the hospital and watch while her best friend dies. Burke reminds her that Meredith is her person, and he’s sure that if she dies while Cristina is sitting in the ECB, Cristina won’t be able to recover. In the afterlife, Meredith tells Denny that at first she fought to surface, but for a second she wondered what the point was and stopped fighting. “Don’t tell anybody,” she says. He suddenly stops, smiling, and tells Meredith that he can feel when he and Izzie are in the same place. It’s almost like he can touch her, and he likes to think that she knows he’s there, too. He tells Meredith that’s all she’ll get if she dies - moments with the people she loves. She asks if this is really happening and he tells her he doesn’t know - it’s her afterlife, not his. He disappears as water creeps up around her. George confronts Izzie for what she said to Callie, asking why she would pick now to have a fight. He asks her to keep her feelings about Callie to herself because if he’s not making a mistake, she’ll look stupid, and if he is, he’s going to need her. Derek tries to help Ellis, learning in the process that Meredith is about to undergo bypass.
  As Meredith starts to warm up, the Meredith in the afterlife tells Denny, Bonnie, and Liz that she wants to go back. Bonnie and Liz tell her that they’re not sure it’s not too late. Meredith admits that she had intimacy issues and says it sounds really stupid now. She tells Denny it wouldn’t be enough just to have those brief moments with Derek and Cristina; she needs to be with them all the time. Bailey, Burke, and Webber wait for some sign that the bypass is working and finally get a glimpse of v-fib. They shock her heart as Bailey tells Meredith she can’t leave them after all the effort they’ve put into saving her. As Cristina enters the room, Meredith sees Ellis in her afterlife and Denny sends Meredith after her. Cristina tells Bailey and Webber to try one more time to revive Meredith. As Derek tries to revive Ellis, the Ellis in Meredith’s afterlife tells her daughter that she shouldn’t be there. “Just keep going,” Ellis says, adding that Meredith is “anything but ordinary.” The doctors continue working on mother and daughter, and while Derek has no luck with Ellis, Meredith’s heart finally starts beating again. Later, Addison comes by to check up on her and learns that she’s breathing on her own. However, her brain function is still in question, and Bailey doesn’t want to page Derek just yet. Cristina is left alone with Meredith as Meredith starts to wake up and tries to say something. Cristina encourages her to form just one word, and Meredith obliges by saying, “Ow.” Cristina happily tells her she and Burke are engaged. “You are the one person I wanted to tell,” she says. “Thank you for not dying.”
  Alex rejoins George and Izzie, who are all happy to hear the good news about Meredith. Derek is there when Meredith wakes up again, and he confirms for her that Ellis is dead. “I think it’s okay,” Meredith says. At the nurses’ station, Addison tells Mark that Derek never treated her the way he’s treating Meredith. She says that sometimes she thinks it was a waste to throw away so much history. Mark assures her that his being with her wasn’t a game. She challenges him to go 60 days without sex, and maybe she’ll believe him and give him another try. He agrees, as long as she goes 60 days without sex, too. Alex visits Jane and lets her know that Meredith is going to be okay. He tells her that though they still don’t know who she is or where her family is, they’ve learned lots of medical facts about her, including the fact that her baby is a girl. She says she feels like she’s married and Alex comments that he now knows more about her than some of his close friends. Bailey praises Sydney for holding things down well, and Sydney returns the praise by telling her she’ll make a good chief resident. “Yeah, I am,” Bailey says to herself. In the locker room, Izzie tries to apologize to George, who just walks away. Webber tells Ellis’ body that he’ll miss her and that her death doesn’t feel like a relief to him. Meredith and Derek lie in bed together as she voices over about taking miracles when we can and reaching across the gap to touch. Izzie suddenly stops in the middle of a hallway, seeming to sense Denny, who has stopped in the same spot and can sense her as well.
  Dylan: “You know what, that’s why I don’t like to be here with you. Because you don’t assess the situation, you just dive right in.”
  Cristina: “You’re not getting this, are you? Okay, this is 99 cents. Okay? You can buy anything for 99 cents. It’s small, it’s um, tiny size, it has cat-like creatures on it, but it is a chair. For 99 cents, you can buy a chair. That’s America, man.”
  “This is…this is quality Sudoku, Joe. This is like $2 worth of Sudoku.” - Cristina re: a 99-cent book of Sudoku
  “I’m getting married to Burke! Not that that should be anywhere on your list of thought right now. But just in case you slip on the hall later.” - Cristina to Meredith