Does richard webber die in season 16 how to#
Does richard webber die in season 16 series#

What’s even more bonkers than that is when, at the end of that two-hour premiere, Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) - the show’s lead since it debuted in 2005 - collapses, sick with Covid-19. I know the onset of the pandemic didn’t immediately cancel everyone’s personal problems, but this specific storyline, with its soapy twists and turns, stands out amid the grim realism of everything else. This choice means one doctor’s insistence that a couple who brought their daughter to the hospital for medical care are actually human traffickers - and the daughter is actually a girl they kidnapped - remains a vital plot point, even though everybody is suddenly wearing face masks and discussing a skyrocketing death rate. It’s rough!īut what’s even more bonkers is that the premiere then attempts to wrap up a number of extant storylines from season 16, which was cut short by a few episodes in spring 2020 as the pandemic forced production shutdowns across Hollywood. Richard Webber, previously pseudo-retired but active in the hospital in a primarily administrative capacity, returns to help coordinate its Covid-19 response and grimly announces that more and more places in Grey Sloan (including, eventually, the cafeteria) will be used to house Covid patients. Meredith Grey’s voiceover sounds more worn down than ever before. The premiere is exhausting in a way that makes you viscerally feel the numb horror of watching the casualty count climb higher and higher and higher and higher.Įvery character is masked and wearing multiple layers of PPE.

Does richard webber die in season 16 series#

The two-hour premiere of season 17 - listed as two separate episodes on Hulu - drops us into a Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital (the series renamed its central setting from Seattle Grace Mercy West in season nine, in case you haven’t watched since the show’s heyday in the mid-2000s) where everybody is overworked and everything is falling apart. But I kinda liked it? Question mark? Grey’s Anatomy season 17 is about both the grim realities of Covid-19 and hanging out on a mystical beach in the afterlife The doctors of Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital eventually grew inured to the Covid-19 crisis, though it continued to exhaust them. Judging from how many Grey’s fans said, “This was the saddest season ever!” every time I tweeted about getting caught up in time for the season 17 finale (which airs Thursday), a lot of people did experience the season as a real bummer. Acknowledging Covid-19 may have served to make a show many people think of as comfort food into a real bummer instead. It’s easy enough to imagine that viewers might have struggled to invest in sexy complications when the real world seemed like it was falling apart. Though it’s a medical drama, its heavy rotation of soap elements and storylines about people having sex with each other would seem to cut against the moment. In theory, Grey’s should have been just as confounded. (Comedies, especially Superstore and The Conners, had a better go of incorporating references to the pandemic into their typical fare.)

Does richard webber die in season 16 how to#

It played as an extremely recent period piece for me, and watching it was weird and discomfiting.Īcross the 2020–21 TV season, most major broadcast-network series set in the present day at least paid lip service to the idea there was a pandemic going on, but dramas especially seemed completely flummoxed by how to blend Covid-19 with their storytelling. Life was returning to a semblance of normal, where we all tried to figure out the etiquette of who should still wear face masks and when. But I watched 16 episodes of it in May and June 2021, as cases were on a steep decline and vaccinations were on the rise. When the season debuted in November 2020, many Americans were still in quarantine, and Covid-19 cases in the US were about to spike again. Watching the 17th season of Grey’s Anatomy over a couple of weeks, around a month after my Covid-19 vaccination became fully effective, was a strangely retraumatizing experience.