5 Essential Episodes Of Grey's Anatomy Everyone Should Watch At Least Once

I know that, for literal decades now, "Grey's Anatomy" has been sort of a punchline among avid TV watchers, and I'm the first to admit that the show isn't perfect. Especially in the later seasons, every character becomes a walking exposition dump. At one point, a female doctor yells about how she understands a patient's botched Brazilian butt lift because it's so hard for women to exist in society, and I wish that was a joke. But in the show's early seasons, showrunner and writer Shonda Rhimes was really cooking with gas. Throughout the series, we follow Dr. Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo), who begins the show as a lowly surgical intern — albeit with a pedigree, as her mother, Dr. Ellis Grey (Kate Burton), was a pioneering general surgeon in her own right — as Meredith learns, loves, and loses a farcical amount of loved ones, including fellow doctors, at a Seattle hospital. So if you're intimidated by the sheer number of seasons contained within "Grey's Anatomy," where should you start?

I'll be the first to tell you to just watch the damn show and then stop around season 14 — things get murky after that and never truly recover after the dreadful 17th season, which puts Meredith in a coma thanks to a severe case of COVID-19 — but if you're really desperate, there are five episodes you absolutely have to watch to understand why "Grey's Anatomy" drew in so many viewers and what does make it great. A bit of housekeeping, though: Two entries on this list are two-part episodes, which, for any younger readers, used to be a big thing on network TV. These stories are two halves of a whole, so it was necessary to include both "episodes," especially because one of them might be the all-time best installment of "Grey's Anatomy" to ever air. So with that said, here are five "Grey's Anatomy" episodes essential for any new or returning fan.

I've heard that starting at the very beginning is a very good place to start, and this is definitely true of "Grey's Anatomy," which actually has a really great pilot. Soundtracked by songs like "Portions for Foxes" by Rilo Kiley and "Somewhere Only We Know" by Keane, the episode opens on Meredith's first day of work as a surgical intern at Seattle Grace Hospital, but there's one big problem: There's a naked guy asleep on her living room floor. After hastily kicking him out, Meredith arrives at work and meets her fellow intern class — Dr. George O'Malley (T.R. Knight), Dr. Isobel "Izzie" Stevens (Katherine Heigl), Dr. Alex Karev (Justin Chambers), and her future best friend Dr. Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh) — only to discover that the naked guy from her living room floor is Dr. Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey), the hospital's new chief of neurosurgery. Naturally, Meredith ends up working on Derek's service when a young woman named Katie Bryce (Skyler Shaye), a rhythmic gymnastics champion, arrives via helicopter while experiencing life-threatening seizures which have no clear cause.

As Meredith and Cristina vie for the chance to correctly diagnose Katie and scrub in on her presumably groundbreaking surgery, Izzie is stuck performing enemas, Alex establishes himself as sort of a jerk, and George gets chosen to scrub in on an appendectomy with the intimidating chief of cardiothoracic surgery, Dr. Preston Burke (Isaiah Washington). (George botches the surgery, earning the nickname "007" — "License to Kill"). We also meet chief of surgery Dr. Richard Webber (James Pickens Jr.), whose past relationship with Meredith's mother will soon be cause for concern, and the interns' chief resident Dr. Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson), who's referred to as "the Nazi" and tells her interns to memorize five rules right off the bat. (One is that if you wake her from a nap to tend to a dying patient, said patient better not be dead by the time she gets there, or she will have been woken up for no good reason.) Add in the final shot of Meredith visiting her mom, Ellis, which reveals that the venerated surgeon is suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's, and you've got a great pilot.

Okay, yes, this is the "bomb in a body cavity" episode, but also, give it a chance! It's really fun! At the start of the episode, Meredith refuses to go to work, still reeling from the revelation that Derek has a wife (Kate Walsh's eminently fabulous Dr. Addison Montgomery-Shepherd) and insisting that she "knows" she's going to die that day. After Cristina talks her out of it, all of the interns get to the hospital and are met by an ambulance containing a man who, it turns out, has unexploded homemade ammunition — specifically, a bazooka missile — in his chest. The paramedic whose hand is inside the patient and preventing him from bleeding out, Hannah (guest star Christina Ricci), is rushed to the operating room with Meredith and Burke while the rest of the hospital is put on "code black," referring to a bomb. In the midst of all of this, bomb squad leader Dylan Young (guest star Kyle Chandler) shows up and starts antagonizing Meredith, who remains certain that she's going to die.

Elsewhere in the hospital, an extremely pregnant Bailey is ready to give birth to her first child, only to discover that her husband Tucker Jones (Cress Williams) got in a car accident rushing to Seattle Grace. While Derek tries to save Tucker's life, Addison tries to convince Bailey to go through with labor, only to find an unlikely ally in George, who gets through to Bailey and helps her through a particularly terrifying childbirth process. (Also, Izzie and Alex keep having frantic sex in supply closets, which is its own thing and not really related to anything else.) "It's The End of the World" and "As We Know It" are, for better and for worse, two defining episodes of "Grey's Anatomy" that make an astounding whole, and whether you think the show is silly or extraordinary, this two-part episode is a must-watch.

To fully understand the one-two punch of "Sanctuary" and "Death and All His Friends," the double-episode finale of season 6 of "Grey's Anatomy," here's a tiny bit of background. At the beginning of the season, another Seattle hospital, Mercy West, merges with Seattle Grace, bringing some new residents into the mix. The four you need to know about now are Dr. Jackson Avery (Jesse Williams), Dr. April Kepner (Sarah Drew), Dr. Charles Percy (Robert Baker), and Dr. Reed Adamson (Nora Zehetner). The other important point here is that, previously in season 6, a man named Gary Clark (Michael O'Neill) brought his wife into the hospital, only for her to suffer complications during surgery. Per her wishes, Derek, Richard, and Meredith's half-sister Dr. Lexie Grey (Chyler Leigh) removed her from life support, leading to a lawsuit waged by Gary.

Okay, let's get rolling. At the beginning of the episode, Meredith, who's now married to Derek and experiencing some fertility issues, discovers she's newly pregnant, but before she can tell Derek, the hospital enters a lockdown thanks to Gary. As he arrives at the hospital, he asks Reed to direct him to Derek's office, but is rebuffed — she's busy and tells him she's "not a tour guide," but a surgeon — and he shoots her in the head. After then shooting Alex, who stumbles on the crime scene, Gary goes on a spree, fatally wounding Charles and leaving Miranda and her patient Mary Portman (Mandy Moore) to try and save him. April discovers Reed's body and, ultimately, leads Gary directly to Derek; after Gary shoots Derek, Meredith and Cristina rush him to the operating room, only to meet Jackson en route and discover that no attendings are available to save Derek's life.

Cristina, who has a particular talent for cardiothoracic surgery, is left to save Derek — and is thwarted when Gary enters her operating room and demands that she stop surgery and let Derek die. As Meredith begs for Gary to kill her instead and spare Derek, she watches as her husband flatlines on Cristina's table ... only to realize, when a somewhat mollified Gary leaves the room, that Jackson and Cristina had the brilliant idea to unplug Derek's leads and fake his death. Meredith, now experiencing a stress-induced miscarriage, operates on Cristina's boyfriend Dr. Owen Hunt (Kevin McKidd), who was shot during the fracas over Derek, and both men are ultimately saved as Gary takes his life with his final bullet. "Sanctuary" and "Death and All His Friends" make up the all-time best "Grey's Anatomy" episode when paired together, and frankly? I'd rank it as one of the best dramatic episodes of TV I've seen, period.

"Grey's Anatomy" is historically weird about writing off major characters. Some, like Alex Karev, vanish into thin air because their actors (in that case, Justin Chambers) simply want to leave the show. Others, like Chyler Leigh's Lexie Grey, T.R. Knight's George O'Malley, and Patrick Dempsey's Dr. Derek Shepherd, are brutally killed (plane crash, bus crash, car crash, in that order). With that in mind, Sandra Oh's Cristina Yang got really, really lucky.

By the time season 10 of "Grey's Anatomy" rolled around, Cristina's story seemed like it was reaching a natural conclusion. After losing the Harper Avery Award, an award for surgical innovation that she was widely expected to win after creating a 3D-printed heart conduit for an infant, Cristina finds out that because she works at a hospital now owned by the Harper Avery foundation itself, she can never win the award if she stays there. (This entire problem magically resolves itself later on when Meredith wins a Harper Avery, but whatever. We'll get to that momentarily.) In the wake of her shocking loss, Cristina accepts an invitation to do a presentation about her conduit at a high-end cardiac research hospital in Zürich, only to discover that the doctor who invited her is Preston Burke ... her former mentor and fiancé who once left her at the altar.

As it turns out, Burke wants to retire and spend more time with his wife and children and simply hand the reins of this massive, groundbreaking, and unbelievably well-funded research hospital to Cristina, the only one he trusts to continue his game-changing work. Cristina actually accepts this offer in the penultimate episode of season 10, and in the finale, "Fear (Of the Unknown)," she leaves Seattle for Switzerland. Throughout a touching episode that begins with a fake-out (Cristina heads to the mall to buy a phone charger, and then there's an explosion at said mall), Cristina bids farewell to everyone she loves and even brings her star intern Dr. Shane Ross (Gaius Charles) with her. It's her last moments with Meredith, though, that make this episode a must-watch. After they "dance it out" one last time, Cristina reminds Meredith to not let Derek's professional dreams eclipse her own. "He's not the sun," Cristina tells her best friend. "You are." It's a fitting farewell for such a vital character, and truly, the show is never really the same without Cristina's presence. 

I'm not saying "Grey's Anatomy" was perfect by the time it got to its 14th season, but I am saying that, in its best moments, the show still had the juice — which it proved in its 300th episode "Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story." (Creator Shonda Rhimes is a famously huge fan of "Hamilton.") As Meredith and Jackson prepare to fly to Boston for the Harper Avery award ceremony, where Meredith is the frontrunner to receive the award thanks to her recent abdominal wall transplant, she notices something strange. When patients arrive at the hospital after a rollercoaster derailment at a local fair, Meredith and Alex are unsettled by the fact that the two people stuck in the railcar, Cleo Kim and Gregory Williams (Jackie Chun and Brandon Tyler Russell), look and act almost exactly like Cristina Yang and George O'Malley, both of whom are long gone at this point. This only gets weirder when their friend Liza Simmons (Eryn Rea), who's pregnant and looks and acts like Izzie Stevens, shows up ... to reveal that all three of them are second-year residents at Seattle Presbyterian.

Despite pleas from Jackson, his mother Catherine Avery (Debbie Allen), and all of her colleagues, Meredith stays in Seattle and skips the Harper Avery ceremony to help Gregory, whose neck needs to be held in traction, and Cleo, who is rushed into surgery when it's discovered that she has a massive puncture wound in her stomach. As her successful operation on Cleo concludes, Meredith, still in the operating room — and wearing Derek's signature scrub cap, which is adorned with ferry boats — finds out via a live telecast run by Jackson and Catherine that she won the award. (Again, it's really not clear how the Harper Avery's ownership of what's now named Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital affects Meredith's win, but whatever!) Standing in the OR, Meredith looks up at her half-sister Dr. Maggie Pierce (Kelly McCreary) — who happens to be the secret daughter of Meredith's late mother Ellis — and her own daughter Zola Grey Shepherd (Aniela Gumbs), and sees a vision of Ellis, proudly clapping for her daughter. I actually can't imagine a better hour for the 300th episode of "Grey's Anatomy" than "Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story."

"Grey's Anatomy" is streaming on Netflix and Hulu now.