Kathleen M. Darcy

Meet Meredith Grey, a woman trying to lead a real life while doing a job that makes having a real life impossible. Meredith is a first year surgical intern at Seattle Grace Hospital, the toughest surgical residency program west of Harvard. She and her fellow first-year interns were students yesterday; today they're doctors in a world where on the job training can be a matter of life and death. Such is the world of "Grey's Anatomy," ABC's midseason medical drama about young people struggling to become doctors and doctors struggling to remain human. It's a world filled with intensity, humor, sex and pain, in which the interns discover that neither medicine nor relationships can be defined in black and white -- real life only comes in shades of grey.

Leslie (Amy Poehler) enlists the help of Dave (guest star Louis C.K.) and Andy (Chris Pratt) in order to catch a local teen vandal. Meanwhile, Ann (Rashida Jones) struggles to make her Halloween party fun, and gets help from an unlikely source. Aziz Ansari, Nick Offerman and Aubrey Plaza also guest star.

When the annual bicycle messenger race takes place in Seattle, the hospital emergency room fills with an assortment of injuries, causing the interns to compete for the most severe cases. Meanwhile, Derek and Burke compete for the chief resident position, and while Derek continues to pursue Meredith romantically, a patient flirts with George.

As Cristina tries to recover, she proves to be a very difficult patient, and a visit from her mother doesn't improve her demeanor any. And Meredith's mother, Dr. Ellis Grey, has the hospital staff running in circles. Jeremiah, a cystic fibrosis patient, could benefit from Dr. Addison Shepherd's medical knowledge, but her involvement in his surgery could delay her highly anticipated departure from Seattle Grace Hospital, leaving Meredith and Derek's relationship hanging in the balance.

Derek and Addison Shepherd's professional relationship is challenged when their closest friends come to Seattle Grace seeking a radical, preemptive operation to avoid breast and ovarian cancer. Meanwhile, George can't understand why a patient who fell five stories doesn't seem happy to have survived; an elderly gentleman makes a difficult decision upon learning that his wife has only a few months to live; Cristina and Burke try to have a "normal" date, and Chief Webber is disappointed by Bailey's fellowship decision -- until he learns her reasons.