Countdown To Teddy & Owen’s Exit Begins

SPOILER ALERT: The story includes details about the March 26 episode of ABC‘s Grey’s Anatomy, “Take Me to the River.”

In tonight’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy, the exit strategy for Owen (Kevin McKidd) and Teddy (Kim Raver) started to take shape, a controversial couple two seasons in the making became official and there was a surprise new pairing we didn’t see coming (or thought we needed.)

All season long, since Teddy’s “I’m choosing me” breakup line to Owen in last May’s finale, the two had shared the screen for only a few minutes here and there — glancing in passing at each other and their rebound flings, Nora (Owen) and Cass (Teddy), talking about their pending divorce and eventually signing the divorce papers, Teddy walking in on Owen and Nora in his trailer and, most recently, Owen giving Teddy a pep talk before a risky surgery and the two subsequently hooking up in Episode 2212, something they had repeated a couple of times since.

That changed in tonight’s Episode 2215, the first since it was revealed that Raver and McKidd will be leaving Grey’s Anatomy in the upcoming Season 22 finale on May 7. As the writers are setting up their departure, Teddy and Owen got a lot of screen time as the two were paired up on a medical case for the first time this season. In one of the main plot lines of the episode, Teddy joined Owen (with Simone and rookie intern Dani tagging along) for a surgical field trip to a rural hospital.

There, Owen and Teddy got to team up for an impromptu surgery, which triggered fond memories of their time together in Iraq. As they bonded — emotionally and physically as their hands were literally on top of each other in a patient’s chest cavity — Teddy was alarmed to find out that Owen had been offered a job at the hospital to build a surgical unit.

That gig looked like a potential sign where Owen might be going after leaving Grey Sloan in the finale but, to Teddy’s relief, Owen turned down the offer (at least for now), leaving us guessing how the two characters would be written off.

“The time was not right,” Owen said, to which Teddy responded, “Thank god, I thought you were gonna leave me,” in an apparent Freudian slip. She awkwardly tried to clarify that she meant him leaving Grey Sloan but it was pretty clear what she really was referring to, another sign of the pending reconciliation the now-divorced couple had been building toward over the last couple of episodes.

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As Deadline reported, there are no plans for Owen and Teddy to be killed off, leaving the door open to future returns, with Grey’s creator Shonda Rhimes teasing a “happy ending” for them in the upcoming finale.

In other developments, Winston’s (Anthony Hill) declaration of love to Jules (Adelaide Kane) and their first kiss at the end of the previous episode led to more kissing and him, under pressure from Jules, breaking up with Iris, the nurse he had been seeing — on the woman’s birthday, no less.

It is true that Grey’s most iconic couple, Derek (Patrick Dempsey) and Meredith (Ellen Pompeo), also were an attending and an intern when they started their relationship (technically they didn’t know of their workplace power dynamic during the one-night stand that proceeded it). Still, Winston being Jules’ boss continues to make their romance problematic, something Winston addressed in his speech to her, which he started with “I could be fired for everything I’m about to say.”

Making things worse, Winston, who referred to himself as “exemplary employee” who “follows every rule,” skipped over courting and small talk, asking Jules to have sex with him seconds after telling her that he had just broken up with his previous GF.

“I wanna take you out and then I wanna take you home,” he said.

Grey’s Anatomy showrunner Meg Marinis addressed the Winston-Jules storyline and its parallels to Derek and Meredith after the Season 21 finale last May.

“I think what we’re trying to do here is show the evolution of Grey’s,” she said at the time. “In the beginning, it was Meredith and Derek, and we didn’t talk about that being problematic, but 21 years later, we’re now talking about how it is a problem to have an attraction to someone who is considered a mentee, and you’re not supposed to have a romantic relationship between mentor and mentee.”

As for where the writers were looking to take Winston and Jules’ dynamic, “I think he’s going to try to do the right thing and resist and only have a strictly teacher-student relationship. But we’ll just have to know that it’s Grey’s Anatomy, so it’s going to be difficult,” she said last May.

Going back to tonight’s episode, in one of the most surprising, out-of-nowhere hookups, the bumbling new intern Dani made a move on Lucas (Niko Tehro), still grieving patient Katie’s death, who, somewhat inexplicably, jumped into bed with her right away.

And in another shocking development, Kwan (Harry Shum, Jr.) implanted an experimental synthetic lymph node into a dying single father (Michael Weston) as a last-ditch effort to save his life, committing a crime since the treatment had not been approved by the FDA and defying Bailey’s direct orders, leaving her to clean up the mess.

There are three more episodes of Grey’s Anatomy this season, on April 2, April 30 and May 7.