Of all the tragedies in Grey’s Anatomy, this was by far the greatest

Meredith Gray once held a live bomb in a man’s chest. She was pushed off a dock by a trauma patient and nearly drowned. Another time, she was involved in a plane crash that nearly killed her, her husband, and her best friend Strictly speaking killed her (formerly estranged) sister. Meredith Gray has endured an exhaustive list of tragedies in her life, but in the eyes of the audience, possibly the greatest tragedy comes when Meredith Gray left the hospital voluntarily.

Ellen Pompeo, who played the titular Meredith Gray in Grey’s anatomy since 2005, the show has just left in its 19th season (it airs on Disney+). Meredith’s departure does not mark the end of Grey’s anatomy, for probably sensible reasons, I suppose. Her last episode aired a few weeks ago, and after the amount of trauma Meredith has endured, her exit from Grey-Sloane, formerly Seattle Grace Hospital, was relatively… trauma-free. Well, her house did burn down, but since no one died, she got off pretty lightly.

dr Gray decides to move her family to Boston so she can find a cure for Alzheimer’s (Boston is the only place where that’s possible, sorry Seattle!) and thus her eldest daughter Zola a school for brilliant kids can visit. Her final scene in the hospital has that distinct feeling of leaving a workplace you’ve worked at far too long and the only co-workers who say goodbye to you are people who’ve been there two or three weeks and don’t even know you Last name. For a show marred by disaster, it was oddly disappointing.

But maybe that was the point. Meredith’s life has been filled with so much torment that it’s kind of refreshing to leave her for normal reasons like jobs and being close to schools. Hasn’t she been through enough? There is no need for her departure to involve a helicopter crashing into a volcano, or a cyclone devastating Seattle, or a mad bear running through the hospital ripping people’s heads off. Having the character walk out of the hospital with all of her vital signs was a surprising turn of events Grey’s anatomy Universe.

Of course there was still drama. your friend dr Nick (Scott Speedman) couldn’t catch her before she got on the plane and then called her to finally tell her he loved her. (Meredith says “Huh? What?” in response and pretends she can’t hear him, so it’s nice to know that even though she’s an adult now, she’s still a bit messy.) The door’s standing open to the character to return to the show – perhaps in the same vein as Kate Walsh’s Dr. Addison occasionally returned to Seattle after being turned away private practice — and she’ll reportedly appear in the season 19 finale in May. In the episode, Meredith even says, “I’m just going to Boston and, you know, I’ll probably be here next week.” We believe you!

on this one. There has long been a rumor that the way a character walks, walks Grey’s anatomy is a good reflection of how co-creator/writer Shonda Rhimes and the rest of the series’ crew feel about the actor’s departure. If you’re popular, you’ll get killed tragically and heroically (get hit by a bus while rescuing someone, get shot while rescuing someone, save some people in a car crash, then get into a car crash yourself). and if you are hated, you will simply be sent to another city to continue your medical career. I’m not sure how accurate this rumor is – Sandra Oh seemed loved and her character was sent to Switzerland, my personal greatest tragedy of the series – but the idea of ​​rewarding an actor by freeing him from any obligation to Return Free (albeit only in dream sequences with a bunch of ghosts on the beach – yes, really) is very funny.

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if you think so Grey’s anatomy is silly, that’s your prerogative. It Is silly, and the character of Meredith Gray is very silly at times too (like the time she went to jail for helping a patient commit insurance fraud). But she was also an extremely interesting character. Of course, there were the numerous absurd tragedies that befell her, such as the deaths of her parents, including her stepmother, who died of hiccups of all things, and the death of her husband.