You’ve waited all summer for answers to the simmering questions left by the feverish Grey’s Anatomy season finale, and now, as the show begins its third season on a brand-new night, it’s time to get some answers, STAT! Hollywood.com has the prognosis on all the potent plotlines, straight from the stars of the show.
Burning Question #1: Now that Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) and Derek “McDreamy” Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey) have once again succumbed to the irresistible attraction between them—at least physically—where will their relationship go from here?
“I was like, ‘Finally! Thank God we’re having sex!’” Dempsey told Hollywood.com of his controversial season-ending clinch with Dr. Grey. “I could never look at her again from across the room. I think that they should just go on a tear right now and just have sex everywhere in the hospital. That would make it interesting to watch. Then they get burned out, and they’ll have to talk to each other.”
Kate Walsh, who plays Shepherd’s wife and colleague Addison, insisted she didn’t flinch when she learned her TV hubby and her rival had given into temptation. “No, we just want it to be resolved,” she says, remaining convinced that ever if the Shepherds split for good, she’ll still be very much in the picture. “I have utter faith that Addison will find something to do around the hospital, someone to bother.”
Dempsey said he genuinely doesn’t know exactly which outcome of the romantic triangle with satisfy the most fans. “You’ll be surprised who says that he should stay with the wife and who doesn’t,” he explained. “Like, there’s a mother of 10 or whatever who says, ‘Go with Meredith. Leave your wife.’ And then the single woman is like, ‘Stay with the wife.’ And the husbands are like, ‘Stay with the wife. Work it out with the wife.’ So it’s really interesting to see how it affects people.”
Dempsey has his own solution, an unlikely door number three: “I think that he should just have some random girl who comes out of nowhere, some candy striper or something—just, like, ‘Where did you come from?’”
Don’t expect the writers to snap up that storyline. And for her part, Ellen Pompeo is hoping Meredith doesn’t take on any new romantic partners. “Oh, I’m happy with Patrick,” she told Hollywood.com. “Can you improve on him? I don’t think that you can.”
Burning Question #2: Now that Izzie Stevens (Katherine Heigl) has quit the intern program over the death of her beloved Denny, what will happen to the dishy model-turned-doctor?
“I got a lot of sympathy, a lot of people who were really involved in [the storyline] and really heartbroken when he died,” Heigl told Hollywood.com of the storyline that could be her character’s swansong as a surgical intern. “She quit, so she kind of pre-empted the firing. But I don’t know if she can ever get back into the program.”
“I personally don’t think that she should try to do this,” suggests Heigl, who admitted she had no idea how Izzie’s story arc would play out. “I don’t think she’s a good surgeon unless she can lose that thing in her that makes her so emotionally attached to people. I think she has to find a new direction…I think if she wants to be a doctor she needs to find another form, another way of doing that. And if she does decide to come back to surgery and keep up this mad race to become a surgeon, I think she needs to find a new heart to do that. She can’t be Izzie and do that. She has to be somebody else.”
Burning Question #3: Now that the surgical skills of Preston Burke (Isaiah Washington) may suffer in the aftermath of his shooting, what will become of his career, and how will it affect his relationship with Christina Yang (Sandra Oh) after melting her once indifferent heart?
“He’s coming back,” Washington told Hollywood.com. “The recovery is slow and intense, but it’s going to be very shocking to you how he gets his support and how that plays out. You’re going to be thoroughly, thoroughly gratified and surprised, I’m sure.” As for the Burke-Christina romance, Washington promised that “there’s a twist and a turn in there.”
Oh said she can’t wait to delve into the difficulties the couple is certain to confront. “I found it very challenging but interesting that they took that tack with her because ultimately, there’s drama in seeing someone fail someone and wanting to see them come through for them,” she said. “Also because she did have some sort of crisis, that changes her character. She’s struggling with it…I feel this year in some ways there were a lot of emotions going on with her in a very deep way, that by the end of the finale she did not understand why she was behaving the way she was yet it was emotions that were driving her, the connection with the rest of the interns that were causing that kind of behavior.”
“I don’t really want her to change that much,” Oh explained. “I love how blindly ambitious she is, and how she has such disregard for anyone who might not agree with her. I find those just wonderful characteristics to play, and I also like the fact that she’s exceptionally literal, which makes her a very funny character to play. She never thinks she’s really being funny but the real comedy moments are when she’s being very literal.”
More Percolating Plotlines
Hollywood.com asked Chandra Wilson if she hoped her character Dr. Bailey might indulge in a workplace affair herself: “What did you say? Romantic with any of those children?” she exclaimed incredulously. Instead she’d like to explore the intricacies of Bailey’s stable marriage. “It’d be really cute to see someone in a marriage making that thing work and having that going on. It’s something that’s not as nasty as everyone else. I don’t see her having to be that nasty. To be able to really look at that like, ‘This is their relationship and they’re making it work, and they’re making their professional life work.’”
“[Series creator] Shonda [Rhimes] and the writers are pretty good at springing stuff on you: ‘You’re doing this,’” James Pickens, Jr., said of the surprises in store for his character, Dr. Webber. “I know that they have something up their sleeves.” Does that include a hook-up with anyone else on the show? “I’m not going to tell you,” he laughed. “I’m going to leave you in suspense on that one.”
Justin Chambers revealed that his often immature character Alex Karev would be experiencing growing pains in season three. “He still has a lot of growing up to do,” he said. “I think that he falls off the horse, and so he’s got a lot of learning to do.” And Chambers also revealed his surprise pick for a future on-camera romance: “McDreamy, definitely.”
