Does Patrick Dempsey return to Grey’s Anatomy after season 11?
Season 17 of “Grey’s Anatomy” aired in the fall of 2020, so it’s safe to say it was a really weird time for both the show’s narrative and the audience at home thanks to the ongoing lockdowns and the raging COVID-19 pandemic. Frankly, the series handled it as well as it could; dressing the characters in full protective medical gear made sense for the story, and a medical drama was, in many ways, obligated to address the real-life pandemic. The show didn’t have to put Meredith Grey into a COVID-related coma and create a dream beach in Meredith’s mind where deceased characters return to the fray … but for whatever reason, it did.
That’s how Patrick Dempsey returns to “Grey’s Anatomy” — in a dream sequence where he appears on a beach and reunites with Meredith (the two even have a real “wedding,” something that never ended up happening in real life). In an interview with Variety, Dempsey said that it was extremely emotional (in a positive way) to reunite with Ellen Pompeo, and that he loved the way the then-showrunner Krista Vernoff found a way to bring him back on board. “”I thought it was a beautiful way to close it,” Dempsey told Marc Malkin. “The intention was to really give people some hope because they are such an iconic couple. We’ve lost so many people this year, the thought that we’d have angels hovering around us taking care of us is a good message to send out in such a bleak world that we’re living in. So for all of us, it was a beautiful ending to this story. I’m so grateful that I did it and happy that the fans really loved it.”
