SPOILERS AHEAD! DO NOT READ IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW!
Meredith Grey may or may not make it on Grey’s Anatomy.
If you missed tonight’s mid-season finale, viewers saw Meredith wake up from her comatose state following testing positive for coronavirus and battling the infectious illness for the past few weeks on the series.
While she woke up – and saved a patient’s life in the process – Meredith, played by Ellen Pompeo, collapsed and it was revealed she was on a “COVID high”.
It turned out that Meredith’s lungs are so bad that her only chance to live is to get on a ventilator, which is something she was not in support of. But if she doesn’t, her chances of surviving aren’t looking good.
As her medical proxy, Webber made the difficult choice to defy her wishes and put her on the ventilator, and just as the episode ends with her going on it, she’s back at the beach once more.
Executive producer Andy Reaser spoke to ET about Meredith’s future and why the show chose to tell her story this way.
“It’s not something that we take lightly and we don’t want to feel like Meredith is being let off the hook too easily,” he says. “The virus keeps everyone guessing and it’s relentless, so it’s going to take relentlessness to fight it.”
Meg Marinis, also a producer on the show, added that COVID is “so unpredictable. No one can predict how the disease will go in a healthy person or an older person. There’s no consistency to it. And Meredith Grey is as a young, healthy person, healthy doctor.”
“The fact that it’s gotten this far, it’s super scary for all of us, as fans and also people living with this. There’s an urgency because it’s COVID,” she adds.
So, is Meredith Grey going to die? They won’t say, and they also won’t say when Meredith’s beach visit will be over either.
“I don’t know if you picked up on this, but this episode ends with the closing voiceover starts, but then it doesn’t really stop. Then you just hear the music and you hear the sound of the ventilator and we’re not sure, going into this specific moment in the season, how capable Meredith is of imagining herself being on the beach. It will come back in ways that it has not yet, that we haven’t seen yet,” Andy said.
He also commented on the speculation that Grey’s could be ending this year: “Not to get too hung up on words, but there’s a difference between an ending and the ending. Elements of this season definitely involve an ending.”
Grey’s Anatomy will return with new episodes on March 4 on ABC.
