Station 19 Bosses Break Down That Emotional Series Finale, Its 3 Lasting Love Stories and Andy’s Fate

Grey’s Anatomy spinoff Station 19 has signed off for good — and two more of its beloved original characters have signed the underside of the Beanery table.

The finale picked up where the penultimate episode left off: with the team midway through fighting an aggressive wildfire threatening to reach urban Seattle. And the scenario certainly grew more dire, each character coped with the stress by considering the possible futures — and people — they were fighting for.

Eventually, Andy Herrera (Jaina Lee Ortiz) risked her life to save the group. It worked but wasn’t without consequences. She collapsed and wound up in the hospital — and, later, had scars on her neck from the burns she endured. Only Kate Powell (Kiele Sanchez) perished in the fire, and Theo Ruiz (Carlos Miranda) was badly injured but healing. Once the group survived, it became clear that each character was taking steps toward that imagined future: Travis Montgomery (Jay Hayden) and Victoria Hughes (Barrett Doss) headed to Washington, D.C., to take Crisis One national; Maya Bishop (Danielle Savre) and Carina DeLuca (Stefania Spampinato) were expecting a second child; Natasha Ross (Merle Dandridge) and Robert Sullivan (Boris Kodjoe) were wedding-bound; and Ben Warren (Jason George) was ready to head back to the O.R. (hopefully at Grey Sloan!).

Here, PEOPLE caught up with showrunners Zoanne Clack and Peter Paige to break down all the Easter eggs, all the tearful moments and more — and, of course, to see if this really is the end for Station 19.

PEOPLE: Congratulations on an incredible last season and a beautiful finale. When you learned that you were going to have to wrap up the series with this episode, where did you start?

ZOANNE CLACK: I think we started with the last moment: What did we want to see? What do we want from these characters? Then we worked backward from there.

Were any of those answers easy?

CLACK: We knew we were going to make Andy Chief. How we were going to do it, we weren’t sure.

PETER PAIGE: We had actually planned to do this two-part wildfire pre-cancellation. That was always on the books as our big season-ender. But then it felt right, like, “Oh, it’s an opportunity for our firefighters to show all the firefighting lessons they’ve learned inside this massive cataclysmic event.” But then we started talking about what is it we want to leave the fans with? What is it we want to be the thing that stays in the air after all is said and done? And thematically Andy’s last speech really is the thing we wanted to say: 19 is not over. Just because we’re not making the show anymore doesn’t mean that the values, the themes, the principles that we’ve espoused for seven seasons has to stop. You, the fans, get to carry that into your life. You get to carry that into action in your communities. If you love this show, honor us by carrying it forward.

Speaking of the fans, there were a lot of Easter eggs for them to find in this finale. 

CLACK: A lot of Easter eggs in 9 and 10. We put the voiceover back in, because it was in the first two seasons. We were really talking about honoring the past by going into the future, which is interesting because in Sullivan’s flash forward, his place is called “Sankofa,” which is a Ghanaian term for reaching back to the past to move towards the future. The character is half Ghanaian, so it actually is really full circle with what we were trying to do with the last voiceover, the last moments, and honoring the past of the show.

And you brought Dean Miller (Okieriete Onaodowan) back!

PAIGE: It was amazing.

CLACK: He was so in and so willing to play. I think it just was such a beautiful, again, past coming back to bring us to the future. It was just perfect for what we were trying to do.

Hughes had such a powerful arc this season and ultimately got to wrap the bulk of Vic’s story a little earlier in the season.

PAIGE: She inspired her big arc this season, honestly. She called me one night during the middle of season 6. She’d had a lot of great scenes, a lot of great work to do, but it had all been about taking care of other characters, and she was feeling the weight of that. I was like, “I hear you and you’re right.” It is so often what we demand of Black women in our culture, and I was like, “I have a very strong feeling that Zoanne Clack is going to relate to this.” We brought it back to the room and we constructed her whole arc around that idea basically that it is impossible to always and only be called upon to care for everyone else. It is an impossible ask of anyone. That was really fun and really satisfying. Barrett, of course, killed it.

CLACK: Killed it.

PAIGE: I love her breakthrough episode. I just think it’s so powerful and Boris did an incredible job directing. Then we got to write a beautiful platon-com. I’m so proud that the three great love stories that end this show—there’s kind of four—but the three primary ones are a Black couple in power finding their softness through each other, finding their joy and their humor through each other; a queer couple, two women who overcome a lot of damage that has been foisted upon them to find each other; and then two best friends who choose each other above all else. Those, to me, are such beautiful, beautiful things. And Andy and Jack was the classic kind of…

Are we really to take it that Andy and Jack (Grey Damon) wind up together? Because maybe that was just a possible future that helped her survive…

CLACK: Exactly, yes. I think that they lean on each other and they know that they are there for each other, and we took it to the relationship progressing, but it could be pretty much anything.

What story did you not get to tell that you wish you could have?

PAIGE: There were so many. We were going to fold Carina into the firehouse more.

CLACK: The whole lawsuit thing was supposed to be to get her to think about alternatives and that maybe she was going to do an emergency medicine fellowship. That moment that we have of her getting dressed and ready to go out there was something that we had wanted to do on a bigger level.

I have to ask, have you heard any whispers of a possible pickup? Or do you feel like, at this point, you’ve wrapped it up and it would be hard to undo the bow?

PAIGE: I think we’d happily go back into these waters. There was one moment when it felt like there was a realistic possibility someone was going to come step in, and then that went away. Then it felt like, “Okay, we need to honor what is here to be honored.” If somebody comes up and says, “Let’s do it,” we will figure out a way. Those futures, they’re just their hopes and dreams, so we can go back and watch them strive for those same things.

What was the scene in the finale that had everyone falling apart the most?

CLACK: I think the scene under the table.

PAIGE: Yeah, that was the last scene for most of the cast.

CLACK: We had a mini celebration because most of the cast was wrapped at that moment.

PAIGE: We wrapped almost everybody in the cast, except for Andy. She had to go get aged for the very last shot of the show. She went to hair and makeup while we all laughed and cried and talked, and then she came back and we shot the last moment of the series with everyone gathered together around the monitors, all of us together.

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer​​, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. 

Station 19 is available to stream on Hulu.