This is the tidiest that you will ever see Grace's hair.Saving Grace! I thought you were off the air until next summer. Imagine my happy surprise when TNT announced it would be airing four new episodes in December. More chaw-chewin' angels! And potty-mouthed detectives! And Holly Hunter looking like she's got a messy bale of straw strapped to the top of her head (is that really her hair?). It's a Christmas Miracle!
Earl, it seems, still has a penchant for chatting up Grace's friends, which I still find creepy in a mildly stalkerish fashion. He's talking to Ham over breakfast in a bar. Earl says he's in town to help someone who doesn't want it. How you save someone who's not interested? Ham sympathizes. A woman like that; no matter how mad you get, you still love her. Hey Ham! Pretty sure you're still married. This whole "jealously longing after your partner" thing has got to stop. Upon hearing a tornado warning on TV, Ham and Earl check out the sky outside. It doesn't look good. Maybe that tornado that wreaked havoc over on Desperate Housewives Sunday night is making its way in Grace's direction. Way to network-hop, tornado!
Cut to the morgue, where coroner Henry grimly examines the bodies of several children who were in a bus accident. Grace says that the bus' rear axle failed, and the first graders and their driver took a long trip off of a short bridge. Three dead, seventeen injured. This particular type of axle has been recalled, but the shady bus company owner swears that there were no recalled parts on his rigs. It's up to Grace and her posse to prove otherwise. Rhetta discovers that the axle's ID number was changed on some bus company paperwork, and signed off by someone with the initials DET. What's worse, the serial number on the axle itself has been filed off. Upon hearing this news, Grace looks like she's about to snort fire out of her nose. Tossing back her bale of hay hair, she stalks out the door.
Convict Leon, who shares Grace's last-chance angel, has a visitor who gives him a suspicious brown paper package. When it's time to go back to his cell, he's patted down by a rather incompetent new guard (the dude's so half-assed that he misses the big honkin' envelope Leon has tucked under his arm). Perhaps the guard's too distracted by the fact that he was best friends with the man that Leon murdered. Oops! This doesn't seem like it'll end well for ya, Leon.
Tornado warnings have been issued for the entire county, so Ham and Butch are doing their part for emergency preparedness by playing pranks on each other with the precinct's supplies. Cute as they are, Boy Scouts these guys are not. Their fun is interrupted when a man comes in yelling and demanding to see his daughter Jenny, who was killed in the bus accident. He cries, and crazy with grief, shoves Ham, who reacts admirably by hugging him and walking him away to get some coffee. Awwww. Meanwhile, Grace hangs out at the bus depot, doing her best to interrogate its owner, Jerry. Kinda hard to do, though, when he keeps brushing her off like she's some kind of annoyingly persistent, foul-mouthed gnat. Also, everyone but the uberfocused Grace is kinda distracted by the, y'know, impending funnel cloud of doom that's about to descend. Finally Grace gets Jerry's attention by nearly knocking him off of a ladder, and he shouts that she needs to talk to his office manager. That bus rolled out of there clean!
Right before the first tornado hits, Rhetta runs down to the morgue to drop off a piece of equipment as Henry tries to shuffle the bodies back into the fridge. Upstairs, office workers and Jenny's sad dad scramble for cover in a stairwell as airborne flotsam and jetsam come crashing through windows. Emergency sirens wail at the bus depot as the harried owner tries to skip out on this windy, accusatory little party. Grace keeps up her line of questioning and stands bodily in front of him to keep him there. I consider the fact that he is 25893 times her size and that if he so desired, he could crush her like an empty can of PBR. Fortunately for Grace, Jerry is suddenly distracted by the funnel cloud in the distance. Grace sees it too, but remains calm. "Me or the tornado, shithead - take your pick," she deadpans. Hee! Grace is the only heroine on TV who can get away with saying "shithead." I love it.
The bus depot's hit hard by the tornado, but most folks waited it out inside and are fine. The fire department shows up and multitasker!Grace helps them triage. Back at the station, Perry informs the pranksters detectives that they're about to become the center of the action, coordinating rescue efforts for a 10-block radius. Ham's worried because he can't find Grace, but clearly that'll have to wait; they've got bigger, tornado-related fish to fry.
The meanie prison guard has cleverly used the tornado lockdown as an opportunity to smother Leon. For some reason, though, he lets up before Leon loses consciousness. Earl shows up and is pretty blasé about his pal's near-death by pillow, choosing instead to be concerned about Leon's mysterious package, which turns out to be a Koran. Leon takes the opportunity to give Earl the "It's not you, it's me" Dear John speech. He wants to be a Muslim because apparently he's a big gardener, and the Islamic heaven is a beautiful garden. As images of badass Leon wearing a straw hat and flowered gardening gloves and kneeling on one of those squishy knee mat thingies to weed his carrot patch run unbidden through my mind, Earl says he's got no problem with that. But Leon will have to make a declaration. Who will it be: God or Allah?
Grace dons a hard hat and fireman's coat and manages to achieve the look of a five-year-old trying on her father's duds. She and a firefighter named Randy search through the rubble of the bus depot for two missing workers. They find one dead body as the wind roars outside; more storms are coming. Meanwhile, back at that wacky morgue, the corpse-freezer door's stuck open and the door to the hall is stuck shut. Rhetta's desperate to get out, but Henry figures that since they'll be there awhile, he'll calm her down with a little champagne he keeps stashed in the fridge for a special occasion. Turns out the champagne is 18 years old. Poor Henry. He doesn't get out much.
Deep in the collapsed building, Grace and Randy find a middle-aged woman alive and trapped beneath heavy rubble. Her name is Dorothy, and her dog Toto is sitting nearby with the ruby slippers of course she's super glad to see them. The area is unstable, and they can't reach backup on the radio. Randy puts an IV in Dorothy's arm and goes to find a backboard and some help. Before leaving, he gives Grace a syringe of morphine and instructions on how to administer it if needed. He promises to be back in ten minutes. Grace kneels beside the trapped woman and makes conversation. She's feelin' really sorry and sympathetic until she picks up some paperwork that's scattered nearby and realizes that Dorothy's full name is Dorothy Edwina Talbot. This is DET, the office manager who signed off on the accident-prone bus, and the owner Jerry's sister, all rolled into one. Grace switches tracks faster than Britney Spears driving away from a hit and run, and immediately asks Dorothy about recalled axles and dead children. This woman is trapped like a rat in more ways than one.
Drunkononeglassofchampagne!Henry blathers to Rhetta about how life got away from him, and his grand plans went with it. But now he has an understanding, sympathetic slutty bright spot: Grace! Rhetta cringes at the TMI, but admits she already knew they slept together. "Oh yeah, you tell each other everything," gushes Henry. "Not everything," Rhetta replies somewhat mysteriously. Hmmmm. What does this mean? If there's anything I've learned, it's that even seemingly insignificant phrases on Saving Grace must be closely examined for possible future Deep and Profound Meaning. Upstairs in the precinct, a still-worried Ham uses (snerk) a ham radio to call around to various other emergency headquarters, looking for Grace. Finally he gets a lead on where she is. At the bus depot, Randy the fireman is loaded into an ambulance - he was found unconscious in the rubble of the building. Did a chunk of cement bonk him on the head? Plot hole! We never find out. Whatever the reason for Randy's unconscious state, no help is coming for Grace and Dorothy.
Speaking of Grace and Dorothy, their relationship in the rubble only keeps getting weirder. Dorothy seems to need the reassurance of keeping Grace in sight, even though Grace is accusing her of awful things. For her part, Grace is simultaneously sympathetic and aggressive, trying to keep Dorothy reassured while figuring out what she knows about the bus accident. The atmosphere is full of compassion, anger, suspicion, kindness and raw human need. It makes for a very interesting dynamic and a fascinating scene, the likes of which I'm not sure I've ever seen on another show. To make things even more interesting, the building continues to settle, and Grace finds the exit blocked with debris. Suddenly she hears a bird call; it turns out to be Earl. Grace is so happy to see him that she flings her arms around him. Earl gets the expression of someone who has just accidentally come in contact with something kinda slimy. Why? Her affection's making him uncomfortable because he can't help her. At times like this, God wants one on one time with the people he's challenging. Crying, a betrayed Grace shoves him away. "You'd probably make it out if you left right now," Earl says sadly. "I'm not leaving her," Grace retorts.
In the morgue, the bodies are starting to smell not-so-springtime-fresh. Henry helpfully smears camphor under Rhetta's nose and she ends up looking like she's got a Hitler mustache. Fortunately, she's spared from having to wear it for long, because just then the fire department breaks down the door. They're saved from this useless b-plot! Back in the rubble, Dorothy tells Grace that her brother's not a bad guy, but Grace asks if he knew about the bad axle. Poor trapped Dorothy starts to cry and says that yes, he did. Jerry didn't pull the bus because they might have lost the contract. He intended to fix it next month, so Dorothy doctored the paperwork. At this, Grace gets pretty pissed off and gives the rubble on top of Dorothy's body a resounding thump. How could she do that? Dorothy makes for a pathetic picture as she lies pinned and sobbing about what she did to the children. Grace, her face a palette of conflicting emotion, gets out the morphine. As she puts the needle into the drip, Dorothy encourages Grace to give her an overdose. Nobody would know, and Dorothy thinks she deserves it. Grace looks at her for a long moment, and only gives the amount that Randy suggested. "That's enough... for now," she says.
Another tornado touches down as Ham heads for the door. Butch confronts him; he knows Ham's going looking for Grace. They bicker and then... ding! It's on as the two hotheads quit simply baiting each other and finally get down to what this is really about: a full-on testosterone-induced manly fight over Grace. The boys toss each other around the room and wrestle like wannabe-macho eighth graders fighting over a cheerleader, until Perry breaks it up by literally hosing them down. Hee! Meanwhile, over at the prison, Leon makes a rope out of his shirt, obviously intending to defend himself against the nutbag guard. But suddenly the door to his cell slides open and Earl appears behind him as he has a vision of heaven. A joyful expression on his face, Leon tries to walk forward, but something holds him back. He looks down and sees the guard that has been tormenting him, the shirt wrapped around his neck. The guard's arm clings to Leon's leg, preventing him from entering heaven. The illusion disappears, the door slams, and Leon goes tumbling ass over tits onto the floor. Well. You don't have to be a member of MENSA to crack the symbolism of that vision, do ya?
The second tornado approaches the bus depot, and Dorothy tells Grace to save herself. She believes that death by tornado is God's punishment for what she did. Grace doesn't move, so Dorothy grabs a nearby shard of glass and tries to cut herself with it. Grace pries the glass from her hand, cutting herself in the process, as well. Both women are emotionally raw and physically bleeding, wind whipping around them. A blood-spattered, still-pinned Dorothy sobs uncontrollably. Grace shouts that if God wants Dorothy, he'll have to go through her. She handcuffs them together as she places Dorothy under arrest. The wind reaches it's peak, and Grace shelters Dorothy with her coat and huddles close. "Forgive me," Dorothy whispers. The roof is ripped away piece by piece, and Grace looks up and screams, "You can't have her - she's mine!" Suddenly the sky changes color, the winds recede and the shaking stops. Of all things, the sun comes out. Grace sits up and stares up in shock at clouds racing over a blue sky. Whoa, dude. Intense.
Leon is praying in the direction of Mecca when Earl shows up. He lets his angel know that he's made the decision to convert, but will miss Earl. Hmmm. Why do I think it won't be quite that easy to get rid of our chaw-lovin', taco-eatin' friend? Leon makes his declaration, and sure enough, when he looks up, Earl is still there. Hah! Joke's on Leon... Earl's not exclusively Christian! It seems that all religious roads ultimately lead to the same place, and the same rules still apply. Leon has to learn to be kind, make amends, and oh yeah, adjust his Mecca mat so that it's actually facing the right direction.
The paramedics wheel Dorothy out of the building. She's still under arrest, but thanks Grace, who promptly goes over and stands on her tippytoes to arrest Jerry. Later, Grace gets her liquor on at the bar as her friends and colleagues show up. She admits to Ham that she was stupid to go off on her own, and apologizes for not thinking it through. She doesn't want to work alone; she prefers to have him with her. They hug in a totally non-partnerish dry humping fashion. Perry says that her whole team kicked ass, keeping cool heads during the storm. Over compliments and drinks all around, her cell rings. Perry tells Grace that Dorothy's ambulance was T-boned by a city bus on the way to the hospital. She's dead. Grace looks like somebody just punched her right in the gut. God, 1. Grace Hanadarko, 0.
Morgue. Grace writes Dorothy's middle name on her toe tag as Earl shows up and apologizes for the way things turned out. Grace tells him to shut the eff up. She wanted to get Dorothy out of there; she wanted to save her. "You did," Earl says. "She's dead," Grace replies flatly. "You just don't get it, do you, child?" Earl says quietly.
Hey Earl? In Grace's defense, I think that sometimes things are just so innately sad and messed up that you just don't want to get them.
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