How Teddy and Owen Leave

SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains major spoilers from “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” the Season 22 finale of ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy.”

Doctors Owen Hunt (Kevin McKidd) and Teddy Altman (Kim Raver) have finally clocked out of Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital.

In the Season 22 finale of the ABC medical drama, Owen survives a bridge collapse on his way to work and, true to form, springs into action to save all four members of a family who were also caught in the wreckage. After being unable to reach Owen, who was unable to find a cell connection, Teddy begins to fear the worst, especially when the fire department found his truck abandoned in the water under the bridge.

Confiding in Richard (James Pickens Jr.), Teddy laments that her final conversation with Owen may have been a disagreement over whether she should take a new job offer in Paris. But while overseeing Blue’s (Harry Shum Jr.) care of a patient in the ER, Teddy notices that a key chain matching Owen’s own was used to perform a cricothyrotomy in the field, giving her a glimmer of hope that Owen had made it out alive. After operating on that patient with Kwan, Teddy walks into the OR next door and finds Owen working to save the father of the family he was treating.

Once they save him, Teddy tells Owen in the scrub room that she will turn down the job because he is “the only thing that makes me feel like home.” Owen tells her that she will take the job — because he and their kids will move to Paris for her. “We wanted to tell this story that beautifully answered what Teddy had done at the end of last season [by choosing herself],” showrunner Meg Marinis tells Variety. “She was presented with an opportunity, and for once, Owen follows Teddy.”

The finale — helmed by McKidd, who holds the record for directing most “Grey’s” episodes, at 49 — is filled with “a lot of Easter eggs” that “maybe only the most diehard Teddy/Owen fans will catch,” Marinis adds. “We really studied how each of their characters came onto the show, and what they came onto the show searching for, and we gave them the best ending that we could at this time.”

Owen was introduced in Season 5 as a rogue Army trauma surgeon who was honorably discharged following the death of his entire platoon. The following season, Owen enlisted his close friend Teddy, a cardiothoracic surgeon, to act as the new mentor of his love interest, Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh). This led to the first of multiple love triangles involving Owen and Teddy, with Owen marrying Cristina in Season 7 and Teddy departing at the end of Season 8 following the tragic death of her husband Henry (Scott Foley).

Shortly after Teddy returned in Season 14, she became pregnant with Owen’s child amid his separation from his second wife, Amelia Shepherd (Caterina Scorsone). Since then, Teddy and Owen found themselves in another love triangle with Tom Koracick (Greg Germann), got married and became parents to two children, and then grew apart after a failed attempt at an open marriage. But now, they will ride off into the sunset together. (For an interview with Kevin McKidd and Kim Raver, read this.)

In a wide-ranging chat, Marinis opens up below about the “painful” experience of saying goodbye to two characters who remain inextricably linked with the “Grey’s” legacy. She also unpacks protagonist Meredith Grey’s (Ellen Pompeo) surprising admission after nearly losing her partner Nick Marsh (Scott Speedman) in the same bridge collapse, and teases what to expect from the 23rd season. Despite reports that the show’s renewal in March will come with a significant budget cut or a reduced order, Marinis says that the exact number of episodes next season is still being worked out.

Can you walk me through your decision to write off Teddy and Owen this season?

It was a super painful decision, from the bottom of my heart. I’m very close to both of those characters and those actors. Kevin has directed double digits of episodes that I’ve written. So it was a very difficult episode to write, and it surprised me how difficult it was to even watch. But when we were faced with needing to exit [someone], it made the most sense for where their characters were in their lives. It felt like it was time. After the ups and downs of their relationship this season, I knew I wanted them to exit together. I thought they finally deserved to be happy, and it became clear to me that maybe they can’t be happy in Seattle — and that’s where the decision was made.

When did you make that decision?

Shortly after the new year. It’s no secret what’s happening with network shows, and we’re not an exception, unfortunately.

You have found some creative ways to keep “Grey’s” on the air for the last few years while facing the financial realities of the TV business — like not using every series regular in every episode — but it sounds like you reached a point where you had to let someone go.

Obviously, even though we do go through all of these budget conversations, we try to let the creative dictate the story. Some of our characters, even if they aren’t still married, have children together, so it’s very tricky how to exit characters and what the impact is going to be to the other. It is pretty tough to maintain a large ensemble, especially for 22 years, in today’s financial climate in the industry. If it were up to me solely, I wouldn’t be writing anybody off ever, but I have to see where the story goes and follow the story. Again, I can’t express how these have been some painful few months for the “Grey’s” family.

You once revealed that you, Kim and Kevin have a table at Joe’s Bar where you have story conversations while filming “Grey’s.” Was that also the case with their exits? Did you speak with them together?

Those conversations were all had separately. I didn’t want to have those as a group of three. It was important to me that the characters were also seen as separate characters, with their individual contributions to the show, and we all have separate relationships with each other. So those initial conversations were had between Kevin, Kate Aurthur Shonda [Rhimes] and I, and then Kim, Shonda and I. They were difficult conversations from the very beginning, because all of us love the characters so much, and it’s been such a long journey and it’s hard to say goodbye. But the nice thing on this show is that we always have room for people to come back and visit.

How involved was Shonda in their departures?

I pitched her the storylines of how to do it. Anything that is big, I pitch it to her first. It’s her show. She deserves to know big moves like that. But she was involved in those initial conversations with Kim and Kevin.

You mentioned that you and your writers thought about what Owen and Teddy were each searching for when they arrived at this hospital. What were they searching for?

I think that Owen was searching for a home. After he lost his entire squad in war and he had that PTSD of what it is like to be the sole survivor, he came to Seattle looking for connection and for a home. He found that through Grey Sloan and the people that work there.

Teddy came to Seattle for Owen. He called her, and she thought she was coming to be with him and it was a surprise that he was with Cristina. In that first episode, she says, “Oh, I misread this.” So when she says that in the scrub room, that’s a callback. Owen quickly corrects her in this finale and says, “No, no, no, I’m coming with you.” So there are little things like that that we snuck in there and that Kevin was fully aware of as the director. There’s even some musical cues in there that, again, unless you’re a diehard Teddy/Owen fan, you might not catch. But for those of us who work on the show and love those characters, it was very meaningful to us.

For two characters who spent so much of their lives at this hospital, Teddy and Owen leave Grey Sloan pretty abruptly. Did you ever write any scenes of them saying goodbye to colleagues?

Well, they don’t make their decision until very late in the episode. I wanted to celebrate them, and sometimes when you have a bunch of goodbyes, it also becomes about the other characters and it feels like you’re not really concentrating on the character that you’re trying to write the exit for. Even though they were leaving together, I really wanted to celebrate the two of them individually, so it was very important to me also to show their [montages] separately.

I was personally surprised to hear how open Meredith is to the idea of getting married again, especially since Derek (Patrick Dempsey) was the first true love of her life. How did she reach the conclusion that she was actually willing to take that next step with Nick, whom she even calls her husband in the ER?

This was something that we planned out from the beginning of the season. I told Ellen that I wanted to end with a proposal. She wanted to see how it played out, but in that middle episode in the season this year when his sister came to visit, we learned more about Nick — and so did Meredith. Meredith learned that he had had this dream of having this marriage and this happy home life, and it got taken away from him.

Obviously, she’s always had a complicated relationship with marriage, even with Derek. She didn’t want to get married in the traditional sense. And after losing her husband in such a horrific way, she was like, “No way am I going to go through that again.” And when it almost happens again, she realizes, “Oh, it doesn’t matter if we’re married or not. It still hurts. So why not do this thing that I know that he wants?” He’s done so much for her. He’s moved multiple times. When she makes these big career decisions, he is still by her side. This is her trying to show him the love is the same from her. She loves him; she doesn’t want to live without him. She doesn’t have to get married and he won’t make her get married. But she’s going to, because why not give it to him if it doesn’t make a difference based on what she just went through?

Will Meredith and Nick’s wedding happen on screen next season, or are they going to elope between seasons?

I don’t know, because I don’t know if he’ll be “RJ Decker” again or not. [The fate of Speedman’s ABC P.I. drama has not yet been announced.] But I don’t think Meredith is a big traditional wedding girl. She kind of said as much, but we’ll see.

Will Ellen’s involvement with the show remain the same next season?

We still haven’t quite figured that out yet, but ideally, yes.

Jo (Camilla Luddington) admits to Link (Chris Carmack) that she did not take the OB exam she was studying for, and she confides in him that she doesn’t know if she wants to be an OB or even a doctor anymore. What exactly is going through her head at this point for her to reach that conclusion?

She’s going through a little bit of a postpartum emotional journey based on what she went through midseason. There’s so many characters on this show who have gone through health scares that pretty quickly recover, and two episodes later, they’re back to normal. That is not the case with women who have difficult deliveries and almost lose their lives and their babies’ lives. I didn’t want to just brush everything under the rug. I thought that was a disservice to the reality.

We have a maternal mortality crisis in our country right now. Everyone thinks it’s a happy ending when the mother and the baby survive, but it’s much more complicated than that, and we really wanted to tell that story. We’ve gotten so much feedback on how powerful women find this story and that they’re seeing their own stories in Jo. The difference for Jo — the reason that it’s related and mixed in with her career — is because her actual career is her trigger right now. She’s having to watch women go through this over and over again before her eyes as their doctor. It’s [about] whether or not she can get the help that she needs to be able to return to that — or is it better not to return to it? That’s what she’s looking at right now.

Link will support whatever decision Jo makes, but he is also not-so-secretly taking pills to treat the shoulder injury that he suffered in last season’s hospital explosion. Does Link have a pill-popping problem now? Are you going to be exploring addiction through him next season?

We will in a more nuanced way than the stereotypical thing of seeing someone popping pills every five minutes. What he’s grappling with right now is — Link is a traditional guy, in that he doesn’t want to show any weakness and he wants to take care of his wife and children. He sees that she’s going through this, so in his mind, it’s like, “I can’t go through something that she’s going through. I got to be there for her. I got to take care of her.” He’s going to have to figure out: Is he going to tell her, or is he going to power through? There might be a little bit of powering through before he says something to her, so we’ll have to see where that takes him.

Blue is officially fired for injecting a patient with an unapproved drug, and in a devastating twist, he is humiliated by and forced to give his badge back to Richard in front of Catherine (Debbie Allen). Is this the last we have seen of Blue?

We will have to see, but I am glad that it was devastating because that was the intent. We’ve always seen Richard soften, but we wanted to show a different story this time. If you look at Catherine’s face, she has this face of, “Was that the right decision that Richard just made?” So we’ll definitely pick that up when we return.

Why was Richard harder on Blue here? Bailey (Chandra Wilson) injected a patient with an unapproved drug over a decade ago, and Richard was more forgiving.

Richard’s lost the residency program before, and that is not that far back into the past. We don’t really talk about this so much on the show, but this residency program has essentially just gotten back on its feet with the class of Simone [Alexis Floyd], Lucas [Niko Terho], Blue and everyone. So he’s trying to protect the residency program — that’s where it’s coming from. It comes out much sterner, but we’ll get more into that when we return.

Bailey will likely fight for Blue’s reinstatement, but for now, she has just made the decision to pursue a masters in public health. Why was that the next step you wanted to take in her evolution?

I was interested in what it would look like if Bailey — the teacher of all teachers — became a student again. I also think that it’s nice to see her take a little page out of Ben’s [Jason George] book that you can do things at any point in your career. It’s OK to want more. So it’s nice to see those roles reversed, and we’re just going to have to see: Does she have the bandwidth to be the student at the same time as being the teacher, and what kind of obstacles come from that?

Speaking of Ben, he was just accepted into a new plastics fellowship with new attending Toni Wright (Jen Landon). What did you want to accomplish with his arc this season, and what does this promotion mean for him going forward?

Putting Ben in navy scrubs was in my season pitch to Shonda and the studio/network at the beginning of this year. It was really important to me to see that character grow and be at the level where he deserves to be, especially out of the shadow of Bailey. [I wanted] to see him really stand on his two feet as a surgeon and be looked at as someone who could potentially have a leadership role in the hospital.

In doing that, we introduced this mentor for him, and I love their dynamic. She is someone who doesn’t know his history at the hospital. So it’s allowing him to be free and shed all of those past mistakes or things that he’s done and just concentrate on the medicine and on the patient care and really stand up for what he believes in. The moment when she tells him about the fellowship in the episode that aired last week — it’s one of my favorite moments in the season. That look on his face is great! She says, “Welcome to the team,” and then you see him in the navy scrubs, and it’s well-deserved. It was a long time coming.

I love plastic surgery cases. I love that it’s a specialty where we see a lot of healing and repair and transforming to feel more like the person they are on the inside. The stories can be harrowing, hopeful, devastating. We haven’t done a lot of them since Jackson [Jesse Williams] was on the show, so I’m really excited to show Ben in that aspect and, now that he’s a fellow, to see him more on the same playing field as a lot of our attendings.

“Grey’s” being “Grey’s,” you have a lot of romantic entanglements to untangle at the start of next season. Let’s start with unpacking the Simone-Lucas-Wes (Trevor Jackson) love triangle.

Last season, we left a lot of people in physical danger. This season, my goal was we would know that people were physically OK, but all of their emotional lives would be like a different kind of explosion. We saw Lucas have a lot of character growth this season in his taking care of Katie [a patient who died due to the cancellation of her clinical trial amid medical research funding cuts]. Nico had some of the best performances too, and going through that made him realize what is important in his life.

He and Simone sleeping together was a mistake. It was a drunk mistake. But over the course of the day, he’s realizing, “Does it have to be? I’m in a different place. She’s in a different place.” I don’t think Simone thought it was an option. I also don’t think she thought Wes being more than something casual was an option. She just thought she had an ex over here that she had drunk sex with, and someone that she is sleeping with on this [other] side. I don’t think she had any idea that both of these guys were going to come to her at the end of this episode expressing that they wanted more.

You wanted to explore a different kind of subordinate-superior relationship with Winston (Anthony Hill) and Jules (Adelaide Kane), but now they have truly crossed that professional line into personal territory. They have done a decent job of hiding the fact that they’re sleeping together… until the end of the finale.

I know that some people want them to be together, some people don’t want them to be together. I find that their chemistry is great. I find them so charming together. He resisted for two seasons, because he was so scared of what the power dynamic would do to their careers and each other. And finally, he decided to follow his heart. And now what he’s scared of could possibly happen, because Ben definitely saw them — and Ben is definitely going to tell his wife!

Toni shows up at Amelia’s (Caterina Scorsone) front door and confesses that she has fallen for her — only for Toni to realize that Amelia just hooked up with Cass (Sophia Bush). Are you trying to set up another love triangle here? Or was Amelia’s hook-up with Cass more of a one-night stand?

We’ll always have to wait and see. But, for me, Amelia truly believed that Toni was going back to her wife, and she was brokenhearted about it and trying to make herself feel better. We know Cass is in a happy marriage, but it’s an open marriage. So I think that after being in Amelia’s orbit today with the Meredith and Nick of it all and having a difficult day at work with the bridge collapse, [Cass] was also looking to feel a little bit better, and they went and had coffee that we didn’t see, and it turned into something else. I think Toni is just devastated. We’re going to have to figure out: Can Amelia dig her way out of this hole? I think she wants to be with Toni; she just thought it wasn’t an option.

Lastly, I loved getting to see some old clips of Cristina in those final montages, because she was such a key part of Teddy and Owen’s arcs back in the day. Assuming that Cristina is still in Switzerland, do you think that she would meet up with Teddy and Owen again in Europe?

Of course! Call me to write that show! I’m a diehard “Grey’s” fan. Any kind of scene with Cristina Yang — again, I would love to. I don’t know what the future holds, but the door is always open for returning characters here to come visit and have those episodes. We’ve done it with others, and we’ll do it again.

This interview has been edited and condensed.