In the wake of Station 19’s series finale, the series’ showrunners Zoanne Clack and Peter Paige clarified the intention of the episode’s flashforwards — and it’s a somewhat frustrating reveal. The Station 19 season 7 ending culminated with the show’s firefighters banding together to contain a Seattle-threatening wildfire. While Grey’s Anatomy crossover characters Ben Warren (Jason George) and Carina DeLuca-Bishop (Stefania Spampinato) delivered a woman’s baby beside the blaze, the other members of 19 worked tirelessly to thwart the fire’s spread. Despite the high-level disaster, Station 19’s finale avoided major character deaths, trading tragedy for happy flashforwards.
Each of the show’s main characters faces a life-threatening or life-changing moment. No matter how brief the experience, these jarring moments prompt Station 19’s firefighters and doctors to get lost in thought as they envision their futures. However, Clack and Paige revealed that Station 19’s flashforwards aren’t canonical visions of the characters’ futures. Instead, the flashforwards portray the futures that the characters want for themselves. Ben, for example, imagines his and Miranda Bailey’s (Chandra Wilson) kids graduating from their educations. In hindsight, Station 19 season 7 ending’s use of non-canonical flashforwards is a significant misstep.
There’s no denying that Station 19 season 7 had its fair share of hurdles to overcome. In the wake of its cancelation, the show’s team suddenly had to curate the final season’s entries around a series finale. To make matters more challenging, production delays resulting from the dual SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes of fall 2023 meant that ABC gave Station 19 — and even Grey’s Anatomy season 20 — slim 10-episode orders. Needless to say, setting up satisfying and conclusive arcs for all the ensemble show’s main characters was never going to be an easy task.
Unfortunately, while the intention behind Station 19’s flashforwards was reasonable, the non-canonical visions don’t provide any real closure. Showrunning duo Clack and Paige confirmed that they wanted to include fitting send-offs for Station 19’s beloved characters, but that they also worked to ensure they didn’t “mess up their universe,” leaving the door open for Station 19 characters to return to Grey’s Anatomy. By using the flashforwards to depict what Station 19’s characters want for themselves, the showrunners left these endings completely malleable. Effectively, the finale is the opposite of closure, prioritizing the future of the Grey’s universe instead.
Andy Herrera looks serious in the Station 19 finale with a background featuring Ellen Pompeo as Meredith Grey smiling in Grey’s Anatomy season 20 and upset Meredith and Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh)
After seven seasons, Station 19 came to an end, and its underwhelming conclusion has some lessons for Grey’s Anatomy’s eventual series finale.
Knowing that Station 19’s characters’ endings can be changed at the drop of a scalpel not only undermines the finale’s stakes, but makes the final season of the long-running show feel somewhat meaningless. Instead of putting Station 19’s story first, the spin-off avoided making any major decisions at all. Theoretically, it does provide closure to a Grey’s Anatomy crossover story: In a scene dubbed, “The Future,” Ben and Miranda’s daughter, Pru, is shown to be one of 19’s new recruits. Conveniently, the only other characters to appear in the segment are Andy Herrera and Maya Bishop, ending Station 19 on a mostly unsatisfying note.
