This week on Grey’s Anatomy the doctors are bombarded with casualties from a fire that has the staff scrambling in near chaos. During this time, a woman dies and nobody is willing to own up to the woman being their patient.

The episode starts with a hall full of doctors nervously sitting outside the Chief’s office to be questioned individually to determine what caused the patient to die and who was responsible for it.  The episode flashes back and forth to what transpired earlier in the day to the events that are happening in real time.

The episode picks up a week after the merger and the doctors are still antagonistic towards one another.  Because of this, there is a lot of jockeying to get on the cases with patients in critical conditions, while other patients with seemingly minor injuries are not given proper attention.

This particular lady that died was one of the latter. She was literally passed around from doctor to doctor, with no one actually claiming her as a patient.

It is discovered that her death could have easily been avoided, but when the doctor who was diagnosing her saw a man being wheeled through with an axe protruding from his chest, she lost focus and fails to check the woman’s throat for soot from smoke. This leads to the patient’s airway collapsing and all of her body’s organs shutting down, resulting in her death.

After the doctor’s mistake is discovered and she is fired from her job, Dr. Shepard points out to Chief Webber that it is the constant state of chaos that has surrounded the hospital since day one of the merger that was the real root cause of the death. And he puts it squarely on the  the Chief’s shoulder because of his inability to mesh the old doctors and the new doctors into a cohesive unit that garners respect and trust for one another.

Somehow the Grey’s Anatomy writers took a fairly commonly used approach of flashing back and forth in time and pretty much took it to the tenth power. This was some extremely good balancing of timing and sequences that didn’t make you confused, but it kept you, as the viewer, in a ton of suspense.