A quick review of the “Grey’s Anatomy” season finale – and season 7 as a whole – coming up just as soon as I get weirdly paternalistic with you…
Though I only review “Grey’s” occasionally these days, season 7 overall has been one of the show’s strongest ever. It’s not the show it was in the first couple of years, but it’s been to the series’ benefit that the writers acknowledge that. Meredith, Cristina and company are older(*), and at times wiser, and the show has grown up with them. It still does goofy things from time to time, but for the most part this was a year about taking the characters and their problems very seriously, from the way that the shooting’s aftermath lingered on for more than half the season to the way Meredith and Cristina’s marriages hit major roadblocks last night.
(*) Albeit not 7 years older, as Shonda and company continue to use a really weird sliding timeline that’s left me completely baffled about how long Meredith, Cristina and Alex have been residents now.
You can debate about who’s right and who’s wrong in each of those arguments, but what those were were genuine, adult arguments. Cristina has deeply-held, well-articulated beliefs about why she doesn’t want children, while Owen has a point that they should at least spend more than a few hours discussing it. Meredith jeopardized the trial, and all its patients, and her career(**), and she had an understandable reason for doing it, just as Derek is completely reasonable to want to take a step away from her to process what she did and what it means for their future.
(**) The chief’s reasons for not firing her didn’t really make sense, but I’d rather they not go through the pretense of Meredith being fired for 3 or 4 episodes and then returning, like Izzie and April before her.
There was a time when “Grey’s Anatomy” was this show where I suffered through a lot of stuff that made me cringe to get to those genius melodrama moments Shonda and company could do so well. Over the last couple of years, it’s evolved into a show that’s much more consistent in tone, where it may not move me as often as it did in the early years but also very rarely makes me question my reasons for watching.
So what did everybody else think, of both the finale, and where “Grey’s” as a whole finds itself heading into the eighth season?