‘Grey’s Anatomy’: The Most Devastating Character Deaths, Ranked
This show has left us crying on the cold hard ground many, many times.
When Grey’s Anatomy kicked off during mid-season 2005, no one could ever imagine it would become as big as it did, and fans had no idea they were about to enter a decades-long emotional rollercoaster. Created by Shonda Rhimes, the show has had its ups and downs and has been in every territory, from impressive TV to downright embarrassing.
One element that is a constant cause of this emotional joyride is the deaths that have left their marks on the series. Because the show takes place inside a hospital, one would expect to see patients die every now and then. The thing is, it’s not only patients who have died throughout Grey’s Anatomy’s run, and some deaths hit us to our very core. Here are 19 of the most devastating deaths in the history of Grey’s Anatomy.
19.Doc the Dog
Season 2, Episode 27
Most people remember this episode for Denny’s death, who has a much higher ranking on this list, but another crucial death happened in the episode “Losing My Religion” and that’s the death of Doc the dog. Known for being a bit of a menace (especially to Izzie), Doc was a good boy and found a home with Addison (Kate Walsh) and Derek (Patrick Dempsey) and was very close with Meredith (Ellen Pompeo). While his death might seem to be just a blip in the grand cosmos of Grey’s deaths, Doc’s effect is still felt many years later. Even up to Season 15, Doc made an appearance among Meredith’s deceased loved ones in “Flowers Grow Out of My Grave.”
18.Dylan Young
Season 2, Episode 17
This was the first time that Grey’s Anatomy caught us off-guard. It was all the way back in Season 2, when a piece of unexploded ammunition was found inside a patient’s stomach and a bomb squad had to be called in. Enter Dylan Young (Kyle Chandler), an easy-going officer who made sure everyone’s nerves were calm while trying to retrieve the dangerous piece of ammo.
Tensions were high during the episode, which became an audience record-breaker after being aired as a lead-out for the Superbowl. As the story moved on to its second part, it started to feel like everyone was going to be okay. Meredith’s was out of the patient’s stomach. The bomb was secured. Dylan was walking away as carefully as possible. We’re all thinking: “He’s such a nice guy, I hope he comes back.” And then… BOOM.
17.Bonnie Crasnoff
Season 2, Episode 6
This was one of the early lose-lose scenarios that Grey’s Anatomy presented to us. After a trainwreck, surviving passengers are taken to the hospital and two of them are stuck together after a metal rod sliced through them. As the two-part episode progressed, Bonnie Crasnoff (Monica Keena) and Tom Maynard (Bruce A. Young) were evaluated by a team of doctors who reached the conclusion that Bonnie had the least chance of survival.
Of course, that happened after Bonnie and Tom talked at length and reached the conclusion that she deserved to survive because she was a lot younger and had her whole life ahead of her. But there was no saving Bonnie. As soon as the rod was removed, she crashed and died. And we broke down as well.
16.Heather Brooks
Season 10, Episode 2
Even though Heather (Tina Majorino) didn’t make a strong impression during her short time in the series, we all know that Grey’s Anatomy has a habit of making us fall in love with many characters in the long run, even if they start out as annoying or irrelevant. Heather didn’t have that chance, as she got written out of the series with a tragic death.
The intern inadvertently stepped on a puddle that had an electric current going through it, got electrocuted, fell, and hit her head. She could be fine but ended up coding as her brain swelled up. This is the type of death that Grey’s Anatomy sometimes throws at us to remind us that life can turn on a dime, and it works every time. In the story, the silver lining of Heather’s death was making the new interns realize they were being bad friends and colleagues and they all needed to start looking out for each other.
15.Craig Thomas
Season 9, Episode 5
Very few people could hold a strong influence over someone like Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh), one of the most ambitious and memorable members of the original gang at Grey Sloan. But when she went to take up a fellowship at the Mayo Clinic, Craig Thomas (William Daniels) was the mentor that she never had at her previous hospital. There was no complicated romantic relationship, and Craig treated her with respect and empathy, he offered her life advice that stuck with her long after his untimely demise.
After one of the most tragic experiences in Cristina’s life – surviving the deadly plane crash that left nearly all the main group permanently traumatized – Craig was a surprising breath of fresh air in the form of a mild curmudgeon. His sudden death in the operating room while working alongside Cristina was a devastating moment, but he left Cristina with lessons to become the brilliant surgeon she was destined to be.
14.Thatcher Grey
Season 15, Episode 11
The death of Thatcher (Jeff Perry) is devastating not because it meant the end of a beloved character, but because it mirrors some circumstances that many of us have in life. Meredith had to deal with the fact that Thatcher abandoned her as a kid, and failed to ever fully reconnect with him in her adult life. To add insult to injury, she also discovered that in his second family, he started over as a good father, providing for his other daughter all the attention and love Meredith was denied.
However, his death still hits hard. On his deathbed, Thatcher confesses he regrets being the way he was, and that he tried to reach out to Meredith but she would no longer listen. When they finally meet for the last time, Meredith elevates herself as a human being and grants Thatcher the ultimate gift: forgiveness, which leads to this beautiful moment.
13.Mary Portman
Season 7, Episode 7
People who don’t watch Grey’s Anatomy think that the show kills off only its main cast on a regular basis – which is kind of true – but they don’t realize how cruel the show can be to the story’s patients. More often than not, patients are used by the series to illustrate how unpredictable a treatment can be, and just like in real life, death can hit us like a curveball. Mary (Mandy Moore) did the impossible: She survived a mass shooting that happened inside the hospital in Season 6 and lived through traumatic moments with Dr. Bailey. We thought we’d seen the last of her, but then she comes back in Season 7 for a relatively simple colostomy bag reversal procedure and… goes into a coma. Then, her organs start to fail one by one. It was no one’s fault, it simply happened, and it still makes us sad to think about it.
12.Adele Webber
Season 9, Episode 10
Fans of Grey’s Anatomy know that Adele Webber (Loretta Devine) didn’t have it easy. On top of marrying a chief surgeon (meaning he almost never had time for her), she had to stand her ground when she found out her husband had cheated on her. She decided to forgive him but still had to settle for Richard (James Pickens, Jr.) not being the best spouse.
Adele’s death was hard to watch because it was dragged out. She first showed symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in Season 7, and it consumed her until the middle of Season 9. During this time, we witnessed her losing track of herself and not being able to recognize the people she loved, until she finally succumbed to a heart attack after a surgery. It was a sad ending for a character who’d already gone through so much heartbreak.
11.Henry Burton
Season 8, Episode 10
Even though initially this felt like a repeat Denny Duquette arc (you know he’s coming), the story of Henry Burton (Scott Foley) managed to stand on its own well enough that we rooted for him. And so did Teddy (Kim Raver): after getting to know his case and empathizing with his story, she decided to marry him so he’d get health insurance to treat his Von-Hippel-Lindau syndrome (a disease that increases the risk of kidney and pancreatic cancer).
What started as a business decision evolved into a relationship as Teddy realized that Henry was a good guy with a terrible condition. Tragically, he loses his battle with the disease. The most gut-wrenching part of his death was that Teddy didn’t get to say goodbye to him, and only found out that he had died after she finished surgery.
10.Diane Pierce
Season 13, Episode 18
The more you stick with Grey’s Anatomy, the more you realize that the death of a parent is one of the series’ recurring themes, and many characters have had to deal with it at some point. One of them was Maggie (Kelly McCreary), who had to witness her adoptive mother battle cancer and then lose.
Diane’s (LaTanya Richardson Jackson) death was hard to watch because she represented something we’d rarely seen on the show: a supportive parent who roots for their kid, has been proud of them every step of the way, and isn’t embarrassed to show their love. This is the kind of parent you don’t ever, ever want to lose, especially this way. Maggie did absolutely everything she could to save her mother, and now she has to live with the fact that her best wasn’t enough.
9.Samuel Norbert Avery
Season 11, Episode 11
Samuel was very much present throughout Season 11, even though he never made it past a few minutes old. Before he was even born, the son of Jackson Avery (Jesse Williams) and April Kepner (Sarah Drew) developed a rare lethal bone disease that essentially meant he wouldn’t survive long.
After the diagnosis came the part no parent should go through: watching their baby be born, witnessing his few precious moments of life, and then having to say goodbye. It’s no surprise that after this event April started to question her religious beliefs, went into a downward spiral, and turned to alcohol. We were heartbroken, too.
8.Ellis Grey
Season 3, Episode 17
Ellis Grey (Kate Burton) worked hard to become the very best surgeon in the world, but she didn’t realize that expecting the same of her daughter Meredith poisoned their relationship. As she made herself into the perfect professional role model for her kid, she ended up letting her child grow up without both parents around, as Meredith’s father Thatcher left when she was a kid.
The death of Ellis Grey, even if it’s not a huge emotional impact, is tragic because Alzheimer’s disease hit her before she had a chance to properly convey she was proud of her kid. Meredith had to watch her mother deteriorate through her final days, without being able to have meaningful conversations. It made us realize we put off resolving many issues in our relationships, thinking that we’ll have time to address them and make amends later. But what if later never comes?
7.Reed Adamson and Charles Percy
Season 6, Episodes 23 and 24
One of the most memorable episodes of Grey’s Anatomy saw a man go on a shooting spree through the hospital after doctors failed to save his wife’s life. Three of the shooter’s victims were Alex Karev (Justin Chambers), Reed Adamson (Nora Zehetner), and Charles Percy (Robert Baker).
The show used them to illustrate the sheer desperation and horrible trauma that shooting victims go through, and it worked. Even though Alex survived, we were pretty sure he wouldn’t make it. Sadly, Reed never had a shot at survival, and Dr. Bailey (Chandra Wilson) had to watch Charles die in her arms because the lifts were turned off during the emergency and she couldn’t get into an operating room in time to save him. So cruel.
6.Mark Sloan
Season 9, Episode 2
Mark Sloan (Eric Dane) started off as kind of a dick, but over time he evolved to form a buddy relationship with Jackson Avery that was always fun to watch. What’s cruel about Sloan’s death is that we had a whole hiatus to believe it wouldn’t happen. The plastic surgeon survived a plane crash at the end of Season 8 and managed to make it to the hospital and even recovered. But in Season 9 his injuries got the best of him. He ended up making his friends promise that if he was put on life support and showed no signs of waking up in 30 days, they had to turn off the machines, so they did. And we still miss him.
5.Andrew DeLuca
Season 17, Episode 7
The death of Andrew DeLuca (Giacomo Giannotti) was the tragic endpoint of a storyline that made us pity him almost as much as we rooted for him. The more he treated patients, the more frustrated he got at the fact that it wasn’t possible to save everyone, which meant DeLuca started pulling some extreme stunts to save a patient.
At the same time, he started showing signs of obsession that could be interpreted as symptoms of bipolar disease. So when he became convinced that a certain patient was a victim of human trafficking, no one would listen. DeLuca finally managed to prove he was right, but he was stabbed by the human trafficker and succumbed to his injuries. Another lesson from the Grey’s Anatomy handbook: no good deed goes unpunished.
4.Lexie Grey
Season 8, Episode 24
A bitter end to an otherwise good season, Grey’s Anatomy decided to throw half of its main cast into a forest in the middle of nowhere after a plane crash. Trapped beneath the airplane debris, Lexie (Chyler Leigh) doesn’t even make it to the end of the episode: she dies in the first fifteen minutes.
Much like other characters in Grey’s Anatomy, we got to meet and fall in love with Lexie, empathize with her insecurities, and get surprised by her whip-smart knowledge of medicine. Her loss felt like an abrupt ending to a character that had a lot more to show and could have evolved into a great surgeon.
3.George O’Malley
Season 5, Episode 24
George’s (T.R. Knight) death hit us hard because he was the first of the original five main cast members to go. Up until that point, we had gotten used to seeing George, Meredith, Alex, Cristina, and Izzie (Katherine Heigl) as interns fighting over good cases and studying hard as hell to pass medical exams, and we had established a deep connection with the group.
To make things worse, for a long time we didn’t even know George’s life was at risk: he was checked into Seattle Grace as a John Doe after being hit by a bus and dragged for several blocks, which made his face unrecognizable. He only managed to be “discovered” after drawing the number 007 on Meredith’s hand – a nickname he earned in prior seasons. Even though Knight’s exit was surrounded by controversy, it was still hard to say goodbye to a character that many of us loved so much.
2.Derek Shepherd
Season 11, Episode 21
Sometimes Grey’s Anatomy is like a stern parent: it hits us hard with a difficult situation in order to teach us something about life. There were tons of other characters they could use to illustrate how a doctor’s mistake could cost someone their life. But, no, they decided to use none other than McDreamy himself, Derek Shepherd, to tell that story.
After rescuing a family in the middle of a road, Derek is hit by a truck and gets sent to a hospital that is understaffed and under-equipped. We get to see his agonizing final minutes in which he realizes mistakes in his treatment are being made and there’s nothing he can do to save himself. This was also the last episode written by series creator Shonda Rhimes, so, in all fairness, she more than earned the right to finish her character’s story the way she wanted.
1.Denny Duquette
Season 2, Episode 27
You knew it was coming. Denny (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) was perfect. A quick-witted, loveable guy on a waitlist for a heart transplant, the endless queue he was stuck in made him a regular fixture at the hospital. But as it started to become clear he wouldn’t make it, we started to suffer just as much as Izzie, who risked her entire career to save him and made us think we’d probably do the same.
It made perfect sense to kill Denny off from a story perspective, as we had all been mesmerized by his charm and took a hit whenever he got bad news about his long-awaited transplant. Killing a character the audience is invested in is a great way to make compelling TV. But boy was it cruel. We all mourned him, but at least he left a legacy of being one of the most devastating deaths in TV history. Well done, Shonda Rhimes. Well done.
Grey’s Anatomy is currently available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.