On Thursday night, ABC’s long-running medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy” said goodbye to its titular character, Dr. Meredith Grey.
To some extent, it was a long-awaited opportunity. Star Ellen Pompeo discussed the possibility of leaving for more seasons. At the start of the show’s 19th season last fall, ABC announced that he would only appear for a few episodes as he prepared to move on to new projects, including acting and executive producing. an upcoming Hulu series.
In the build-up, the first six episodes of the season set the stage for Pompeo’s exit, placing Meredith at a time of major life transitions. First, she struggles with whether to take a dream job from her beloved Seattle, and her relationship with boyfriend Nick (Scott Speedman) has reached an impasse. Then, following a series of anxiety attacks, his daughter Zola (Aniela Gumbs) fell in love with a new school in Boston that suited her better. And in a moment of conflict before the show goes on a midseason hiatus until Thursday’s episode, Meredith’s beloved home caught fire.
So how could the hit series have a proper exit?
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Previous outings and episodes with the main cast pulled out all the stops, like big guest stars, emotional monologues, callbacks to previous seasons of the show, and lots of tears. However, Meredith’s farewell was surprisingly understated and, frankly, disappointing. For the most part, it felt like a typical “Grey” episode. Meredith’s impending departure from Seattle was just one standard story among many other stories that were mostly business as usual.
Set on Meredith’s last day on the job at Gray Sloan Memorial, the episode begins with Meredith’s usual narration. As longtime viewers know, some of the themes of the upcoming episode are frequently mentioned, supplemented by a larger narrative at the end of the episode summarizing those themes.
“Often, surgery is just the beginning of recovery, rather than the end. Because for weeks or months after surgery, people have to learn to live without the body part we just removed. And it’s not always easy and it’s never painless,” Meredith says here. “So surgery is not the ‘happily ever after’ that our patients hope it will be. Like everything else in life, it’s an evolution.”
We learn that Meredith is dealing with the logistics of moving while she assesses the damage to her home. It still stands, but the fire burned a huge hole where the bridge once was. Things also continue to be tense with Nick, who is upset that he wasn’t told about Meredith’s move. Later in the episode, the two operate on a patient, a famous author named Tessa, and end up failing to save her. Normally this would be dramatic. But in “Grey’s” 19 seasons, where many, many patients died during surgery, it was pretty simple.
At the end of the day, his colleagues throw him a surprise going-away party with cake and sparkling cider. It was heartwarming to see Meredith’s mentors, Bailey and Webber (played by Chandra Wilson and James Pickens Jr., the two remaining members of the show’s original cast), struggle to find the right words to say goodbye good. But it was much shorter and steeper than expected. given the shared history of these three characters.
Every once in a while, an episode of “Grey’s” will give viewers some clever, parallel calls to classic episodes. However, there were few here. Near the end of the episode, Taryn Helm (Jaicy Elliot), former resident of Joe’s Gray Sloan practice turned bartender, tells Nick to go get Meredith and fix her. With a similar cadence like some of the show’s signature speeches when a character speaks an impassioned defense of another characterHelm says of Meredith, “She’s brilliant and she cares and she can be mean sometimes, but only when she has to be and sometimes she can be selfish because she’s earned it.”
And in the episode’s most direct callback, hinting at what could have been a bigger, fuller farewell episode, Meredith tells Nick that she’s choosing herself, her kids, and her career over a man.
“I’m not going to ask you to love me,” she tells him, a reversal of her famous “pick me, pick me, love me” speech to Patrick Dempsey’s McDreamy in Season 2.
It’s proof of how much Meredith has grown and changed since the show began. However, other than that, there wasn’t much hype in this episode. It’s particularly bad compared to previous character farewells, such as the multi-episode farewell for Dr. Cristina Yang when star Sandra Oh left the show in 2014, or even the departure of Jesse Williams as Dr. Jackson Avery with two seasons.
Two moments at the end of the episode could serve as metaphors for the role of this farewell episode. First, a trio of the show’s new surgical interns have now taken up residence in Meredith’s old house and have been tasked with the repairs. It parallels the early days of “Grey’s,” when Meredith opened her home to her fellow interns at the time. It also marks the show’s current transitional period. The new in-house characters played a much bigger role throughout the season than the previous sets of new characters introduced in past seasons. The show made a concerted effort to develop its backstories. For example, Meredith bonded with new intern Simone (Alexis Floyd), who, like Meredith, has gone through the painful process of slowly losing a family member to Alzheimer’s. Handing over the house to the new interns signals that the show is now in their hands.
Meredith’s final scenes are also like a lesson. In a nod to one of those romantic airport chases, Nick goes to the airport to catch Meredith before she and her kids take off. When she realizes she won’t make it in time, she declares her love over the phone. But Meredith, who’s already on the plane, says her cell phone reception is bad, says she’ll call after she’s settled in Boston, and hangs up. On the plane, she reads her kids a draft of Tessa’s latest novel, which includes a few lines that are pretty clear references to her trajectory on the show.
“I saved lives and I saved my life. I’ve been through broken bones, a broken family and the death of people I love, but I’m still here,” she says. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my adventures, it’s that there’s no happy ending unless ‘happy’ simply means that we’re still alive, that the sun rises another day… So the ending my history is not an “even after” sort of thing, because I’m still alive. I’m still here and the sun is still rising in my life.”
No ending could have been satisfying for such an iconic and enduring TV character. But for a show with so much drama over its 19 seasons — shocking character deaths and countless traumatic events that befell Meredith — it’s an odd feeling to see its titular character fade quietly into the background. But maybe it’s also a reminder of what we’ve known for a long time: “Grey’s” is a different show now. It’s the end of an era.
Like Meredith’s house, the show remains, but we’re left with a huge and potentially irreparable hole.
