After a week off, Private Practice was back with a brand-new episode last night. It was called “In Which Dell Finds His Fight,” and as usual, dealt with a number of storylines. From what I’ve read, this is the last new ep that will air until the writers’ strike is resolved, and your guess is as good as mine as to when that will happen.
Addison/Naomi: These two spent most of the ep dealing with Jeffrey and Kathleen, a couple that Addison and Pete previously treated (regarding the wife’s intercourse issues). Now the couple is having fertility problems, so they get a battery of tests done. The results show that Jeffrey is sterile, which means they have to look into alternative options for getting pregnant.
After briefly considering the use of a sperm donor, the couple beg Addison and Naomi to do whatever it takes to allow them to have their own baby. Addison decides to perform a cutting-edge procedure to extract one of Jeffrey’s “swimmers” for fertilization. It works, so it looks like the couple will have their baby soon.
On a more personal front, Addison and Pete decide to be friends, and Pete actually encourages Addison to see Kevin, the policeman who asked her out a couple eps ago. So she does. But then Pete ends up having a change of heart and shows up at her house later that night; however, Addison is already with Kevin.
Dell/Sam: Dell thinks his grandfather Wendell is being abused at his nursing home because whenever Dell sees him, Wendell has inexplicable bruises, cuts, and scrapes all over his face and arms. Sam examines Wendell, who insists that nothing of the sort is happening. Later on, Sam reviews Wendell’s medical file from the home and sees that there has indeed been an increase in these minor injuries over the past few months.
Sam and Dell then race to the nursing home, where they discover that Wendell is participating in the home’s very own version of Fight Club. Many of the residents were bored with just sitting around playing bingo or watching TV all day, so they thought they’d spice things up by having bare-knuckle fights in the basement — complete with betting and everything.
In addition, Dell tells Sam that he’s going to go after Naomi because she “dazzles” him and is worth fighting for. Sam doesn’t like what Dell’s getting at, so he decides that he’s going to fight for Naomi too.
Cooper/Charlotte: Cooper steals Charlotte’s list of dads signed up for a parenting class at St. Ambrose, and gets them to come to the OWC instead. When Charlotte finds out, she’s momentarily pissed, but she and Cooper continue sleeping together anyway. It looks like they’re even going to be a regular couple for now, so you better get used to this pairing.
My Reaction: I wasn’t as into this episode as I have been with previous ones. I thought the elderly fight club plot was utterly ridiculous, and didn’t like having Dell be in the forefront so much. He’s pretty much just eye-candy, and should just be on screen for a limited amount of time each week, IMO. And I can’t stand his relentless pursuit of Naomi. Doesn’t anyone on TV worry about sexual harassment lawsuits? She’s his boss and part owner of the practice. There would be some MAJOR liability there if those two started up a fling and it ended badly, and I just can’t see Naomi’s partners allowing something like this to happen.
I can’t believe that we’re already moving back into Sam/Naomi angst again. Weren’t they just two happy people in the previous episode? What happened between then and now to change that? Can’t anyone in Shonda’s universe be content for more than one day???
I do like the fact that Addison is going to start dating outside of the workplace for once. I don’t know enough about this Kevin character to decide if I like him or not, but at least this relationship won’t feel so damn incestuous (in terms of sex among co-workers, I mean).
Nothing about the patients’ storylines interested me tonight. The medical procedures that they showed Addison and Naomi doing were laughable, so I hope no one gets the idea that this kind of crap is possible!
As I said before, there won’t be any new Private Practice episodes for a while. It’s too bad that this particular one has to be the last impression I have of the show….