Grey’s Anatomy is between seasons, but not for long, as the 21st season’s release date inches closer and closer. Its fan base has ebbed and flowed slightly over the years but has certainly endured over the decades. There are more than 400 episodes of the beloved show available for fans to binge on, but some are far better than others.
Grey’s isn’t twenty years old quite yet, but it still beat out the beloved ER as the longest-running medical show in primetime TV history. The show follows a pretty simple format, blending healthcare sciences with human nature and relationship drama. At its core, it’s a run-of-the-mill medical drama, but it has always exceeded expectations. Before the show took off, network execs simply didn’t have faith in the show, and fans certainly didn’t expect 21 seasons of it, but there’s no end in sight. Until Shonda Rhimes cranks out a hundred more episodes, there is a solid bunch for fans to hold on to.
10. “A Hard Day’s Night” Opened the Series
“A Hard Day’s Night” opens with Ellen Pompeo’s Meredith Grey waking up in her box-filled living room after a one-night stand and rushing to her first day of work at Seattle Grace Hospital. Upon her arrival, she meets fellow first-year surgical interns Cristina Yang, Izzie Stevens, George O’Malley, and Alex Karev. The episode follows their first 48-hour shift under the iron fist of the toughest resident, Miranda Bailey. Meredith, as the center of the spotlight, not only experiences trouble with an irritating teenage patient with a medical mystery, but she also must work closely with her one-night-stand, Dr. Derek Shepherd, the head of neurosurgery and her boss. It perfectly sets the stage for the rest of the show as the interns struggle to balance their tumultuous surgical residencies with their dramatic personal lives.
A pilot episode always sets the stage for the rest of the show and often establishes the show’s worth to TV networks and potential creatives. “A Hard Day’s Night” does that perfectly for Grey’s Anatomy, effectively setting up the blend needed to succeed. It’s a memorable episode and effectively enticed audiences to keep watching.
9. “Flight” Was Unexpected
“Flight” opens after a group of surgeons, including Meredith Grey, Derek Shepherd, Cristina Yang, Arizona Robbins, Mark Sloan, and Lexie Grey, embark on a trip to Boise, Idaho to assist a local hospital in a risky conjoined twin separation surgery. It picks up on the back of a major cliffhanger that reveals the plane crashed in the forest. The episode features Meredith relatively unscathed, waking up, finding Cristina, and fighting to locate her loved ones. Arizona is the easiest to find as she shrieks in pain from an open femur fracture near the plane’s cockpit. Derek is significantly harder to find as he was thrown much farther than the other doctors. Tragically, no one makes it out of the woods unscathed, with Lexie dying in the middle of the chaos after getting crushed by part of the aircraft, Derek’s hand getting mangled, Arizona’s leg slowly dying, and Mark facing serious internal injuries.
The episode is extremely intense, to say the least, as plane crashes rarely end well, especially in Grey’s Anatomy. It truly came out of the blue, as Season 8 featured so many characters thriving in their personal lives, and the only tragedies fans expected were the residents possibly moving out of Seattle. The episode remains highly emotional and keeps viewers on edge throughout. It effectively closes out the season in a perfect Grey’s vibe by ruining the characters’ general happiness.
8. “What a Difference a Day Makes” is Beautiful
“What a Difference a Day Makes” is the 100th episode of Grey’s Anatomy and spotlights Meredith and Derek as they prepare for their wedding. It’s not exactly a smooth experience for the happy couple, as Meredith, in particular, isn’t keen on the frills of a traditional wedding, but they allowed a cancer-fighting Izzie to plan her dream ceremony amid her battle with metastatic melanoma. On the day of the ceremony, the hospital’s ER gets slammed by a multi-vehicle collision of college students, and Izzie gets slammed with the returning hallucinations of her late fiancé, Denny, which she attributes to her brain tumor worsening. When the episode heads toward the big moment, Meredith surprises Izzie by bringing in her wedding dress and gifting the MerDer wedding to Izzie and her long-term boyfriend, Alex.
Some viewers praise “What a Difference a Day Makes” as one of the most emotional and well-crafted episodes in the series, leaning heavily toward the happy side of the Grey’s Anatomy angst spectrum. It’s an important episode in Alex Karev’s character development as he ends his womanizer ways. It also doesn’t hurt that fan-favorite Denny Duquette made one of his final appearances on the show, even if his visit was bittersweet.
7. “The Sound of Silence” is Unique
“The Sound of Silence” takes place shortly after Meredith’s life fell apart following the death of her husband and co-parent, Derek, in Season 11. It starts like a typical Grey’s episode, as Meredith treats an MVC patient having a brain bleed-induced seizure in an ER trauma room, but unfortunately, the man experiences post-seizure hyper-aggression while she’s alone in the room with him and he, in his daze, attacks her brutally. The assault leaves Meredith with severe injuries, primarily a broken jaw and hearing loss, and the moments immediately after feature a heart-wrenching scene where her loved ones attend to her injuries in the same trauma room, all visibly shaken up from her state. For much of the episode following the attack, which acts as the episode’s cold open, there’s little-to-no clear audio, as the audience experiences Meredith’s perspective during the traumatic and isolating healing process.
While it wasn’t intentional, some could consider the attack an incident of power-based violence, which Grey’s has covered extensively, with another unique episode even breaking Grey’s music title tradition. Meredith going through trauma is also nothing new, as Grey’s Anatomy has put its main character through the wringer since the pilot, and numerous flashbacks revealed she’s been going through it since she was a baby. “The Sound of Silence” features one of the most unique storytelling techniques and spotlights Meredith before, during, and after a trauma, displaying her healing process for one of the first times. It was notably directed by actor Denzel Washington, who created a blockbuster-quality episode.
6. “Fear (of the Unknown)” Closes a Chapter
The Grey’s Anatomy Season 10 episode, “Fear (of the Unknown),” packs a lot of intensity into the season’s finale. It picks up with the audience knowing it’s Cristina Yang’s final episode, as she accepted an opportunity presented by her former fiancé, Preston Burke, to run the prestigious Klausman Institute for Medical Research in Zurich, Switzerland. Similarly, Derek prepares to go to DC to work with the White House and invites Meredith to move with him. As Cristina and Meredith say their goodbyes and have a final dance-it-out session, Cristina gives Meredith an important reminder with the quote, “Don’t let what he wants eclipse what you need. He’s very dreamy, but he is not the sun. You are,” before heading off into the sunset. The episode closes the chapter on the Twisted Sisters chapter of Grey’s but also reveals that Meredith has yet another half-sister in Cristina’s replacement, Dr. Maggie Pierce.
Cristina was a fan-favorite character and a really important part of Meredith’s life, so it was important for Grey’s to properly wrap up her storyline, and she’s one of the few long-term characters that earned a respectable exit. Fans miss her and dislike her exit, but not because of how she was written off. That said, the episode isn’t just a sappy Cristina-centric episode and keeps the pace of a proper Grey’s Anatomy finale episode as it features a mass-casualty incident and brief uncertainty over Cristina’s fate.
5. “Losing My Religion” Featured the First Fan Heartbreaks
Unsurprisingly, “Losing My Religion” is also a season finale episode of Grey’s Anatomy, wrapping up the second season. It picks up soon after Izzie and Denny get engaged, and he gets his long-awaited heart transplant after she cuts his LVAD wire. As a punishment, Dr. Bailey’s interns are forced to plan an in-hospital prom for Chief Webber’s niece. Near the end of the episode, Meredith and Derek must take their dog, Doc, to the vet and have him euthanized, and despite Meredith’s mourning, they all attend the prom. Meredith and Derek don’t dance at the prom, instead they hook up in an exam room. Unfortunately, the episode is more tragic, as Izzie gets into the elevator, excited to show Denny her pink dress, only to find him dead from a stroke.
The loss devastates Izzie, and after she’s pried from her fiancé’s embrace, she quits the surgical program. The MerDer rendezvous also leaves Meredith with a sour note as she’s stuck between McDreamy and her boyfriend, McVet, during the worst moment of her friend’s life. While he wasn’t the first character death, he was the first character to really steal fans’ hearts. Even though his relationship with Izzie was wildly inappropriate, given her role as his doctor, he was quite the charmer and remains a beloved character despite dying off nearly twenty seasons ago. The episode notably featured the first instance of the now-infamous song “Chasing Cars” and was the first to open the door to a main character’s grief.
4. “It’s the End of the World”/”As We Know It” Pioneered Disasters
Grey’s Anatomy Season 2 also had a two-part episode split into “It’s the End of the World” and “As We Know It” around halfway through the season, and it remains one of the most intense cliffhanger episodes of the series. The action starts when Dr. Bailey’s water breaks, and two ambulances roll up to the ER, one with a car crash victim and the other with a screaming lady. The screaming lady accompanies a man with a gaping chest wound and a paramedic’s hand inside of him, and the crash victim is later revealed as Bailey’s husband, Tucker, presented with a traumatic brain injury. It doesn’t take long after they’re taken to the OR that Karev realizes that a bazooka blew a hole through the man’s chest and didn’t explode. The Code Black gets called while Meredith preps for surgery with Dr. Burke, Izzie preps to operate with Dr. Shepherd on Tucker, and George assists female healthcare legend Dr. Addison Montgomery-Shepherd during Bailey’s labor.
The first episode ends when the paramedic, Hannah, takes her hand off the bomb, and everyone in the room braces for the explosion, except for Meredith, whose hand slips into the cavity and replaces Hannah’s. The second episode resolves everything smoothly, with Bailey delivering a healthy baby boy, Tucker surviving surgery, and the bomb getting removed successfully. Unfortunately, though, the bomb does explode, killing Dylan, the Bomb Squad guy, and giving Meredith her first big trauma of the show. A little bit earlier in the series, Meredith faced her first mass-casualty incident when a train crash brought a pair of patients stuck together with a steel rod impaling them. But Meredith never faced a life-or-death situation, and audiences didn’t have to worry about the hospital blowing up. The episode built tension perfectly. Every other disaster episode simply had to top the original.
3.”Silent All These Years” is Powerful
“Silent All These Years” is one of the most recent Grey’s episodes with a 9/10 or higher rating, and it’s also one of the few that doesn’t revolve around a death, character exit, or a mass-casualty incident. Instead, it focuses on one patient, Abby, who Dr. Jo Karev treats soon after meeting her birth mother and finding out that her conception resulted from a sexual assault. Abby is understandably traumatized and reluctant to receive the care she deserves because she partially blames herself for the attack. But Jo and Dr. Teddy Altman stuck by her side, helping her navigate through treatment. The most powerful scene in the episode, and likely the show, happens while Abby’s on the way to surgery, as female staff members line the hallways in solidarity.
While the subject of sexual assault and power-based violence isn’t new to Grey’s, it’s hard to ignore the impact “Silent All These Years” made on survivors. It also notably didn’t feature Abby’s assailant as another character, unlike other power-based violence-centered episodes where the abuser receives treatment in the same hospital. Even though the move could’ve been inadvertent, it helps Abby’s story remain in the spotlight, providing better representation for real-life survivors.
2. “Now or Never” Ends with Uncertainty
“Now or Never” is Season 5’s final episode, picking up immediately after George O’Malley decides to join the army. Early in the episode, he informs Dr. Bailey of his choice, and news spreads like wildfire while his loved ones believe he’s in surgery. In a different form of intensity, Izzie struggles to recuperate after surgery to remove her brain tumor left her with severe short-term memory issues. Other than Izzie, the primary patient brought into Seattle Grace, is a John Doe who got hit by a bus while saving someone else. Before going into one of his surgeries, Meredith goes to check on John Doe, and he traces “007” in her palm, calling back to George’s first surgery, where his peers labeled him as “licensed to kill.”
“Now or Never” is Season 5’s final episode, picking up immediately after George O’Malley decides to join the army. Early in the episode, he informs Dr. Bailey of his choice, and news spreads like wildfire while his loved ones believe he’s in surgery. In a different form of intensity, Izzie struggles to recuperate after surgery to remove her brain tumor left her with severe short-term memory issues. Other than Izzie, the primary patient brought into Seattle Grace, is a John Doe who got hit by a bus while saving someone else. Before going into one of his surgeries, Meredith goes to check on John Doe, and he traces “007” in her palm, calling back to George’s first surgery, where his peers labeled him as “licensed to kill.”
1. “Sanctuary”/ “Death and All His Friends” is Endlessly Heavy
Like Season 2’s bomb scare episode, “Sanctuary” and “Death and All His Friends” is an intense two-parter, acting as Season 6’s season finale. It starts with Meredith finding out that she’s pregnant and her voiceover explaining how the Seattle hospital has always been her happy place as she passes Gary Clark in the hallway shortly before he goes on a rampage. “Sanctuary” ends with Gary finding his greatest target: Derek. The Season 6’s finale cliffhanger features Meredith’s voiceover reprise as Derek lies shot on the ground. The next episode picks up immediately after that, as Meredith rushes to him and Cristina performs emergency surgery on Derek with Dr. Jackson Avery, even working at gunpoint. By the saga’s end, Gary Clark had shot Derek, Dr. Owen Hunt, and Alex. He also fatally wounded Dr. Reed Adamson, Dr. Charles Percy, and several other members of staff at the hospital, leaving his name and face scarred in the minds of Grey’s fans forever.
