The 5 Worst Grey's Anatomy Episodes, Ranked

In March of 2005, a new medical drama hit ABC as a mid-season replacement ... and it went on to become the longest-running medical drama in television history. Shonda Rhimes' landmark series "Grey's Anatomy" has, since its inception, centered around a fictional Seattle medical facility called Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital (née Seattle Grace Hospital) and, for the most part, on one of its surgeons, Dr. Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo). Meredith, who begins her surgical residency with big shoes to fill — because her mother Dr. Ellis Grey (Kate Burton) was a pioneering surgical innovator who won two prestigious in-universe Harper Avery Awards before receiving an early-onset Alzheimer's diagnosis — ends up becoming a powerhouse in her own right. Through it all, she's supported by fellow interns like her best friend Dr. Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh, who left the show in season 10), her boss-turned-husband Dr. Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey, who exited in season 11 when Derek was killed off), and friends and colleagues like Dr. Alex Karev (Justin Chambers, whose own departure came in season 16).

This leads me to an important question. Though there are many genuinely excellent episodes of "Grey's Anatomy," which episodes are the worst? As I compiled this short list, I thought about which ones I always skip during a rewatch, but did cut some contenders that fall into that category; a perfect example is the season 8 finale "Flight," which features the show's infamous plane crash and is a well-made episode but is also deeply disturbing and simply hard to experience multiple times. "The Sound of Silence," an episode directed by Denzel Washington where Meredith is grievously injured by a patient? Same problem. Those are examples of good episodes that are hard to revisit. The episodes on the list below? Well, they just ... suck, which is bound to happen when a show runs past 20 seasons. From standalone episodes about crappy characters to one of the show's most notorious hours, here are the five worst episodes of "Grey's Anatomy," ranked.

"Grey's Anatomy" fans know that there are some characters that just flat-out stink. Chief among them is trauma surgeon Dr. Owen Hunt (Kevin McKidd), a hot-tempered and often irrational guy who makes a habit out of being really awful to his romantic partners (Caterina Scorsone's Dr. Amelia Shepherd, Kim Raver's Dr. Teddy Altman, and Cristina all suffer while they're involved with him). As of this writing, Owen is, unfortunately, still on the show. Thankfully, pretty much everybody else involved with the season 14 episode "Danger Zone" is no longer involved with "Grey's Anatomy," but the choice to focus an entire hour on a bunch of characters that never proved that popular is, frankly, baffling.

"Danger Zone" takes place across two timelines. In the present, Owen is helping his sister, Dr. Megan Hunt (Abigail Spencer) — who was presumed dead in Iraq while the siblings served as Army medics, only to re-emerge needing an abdominal-wall transplant from Meredith — as she moves to Los Angeles to settle down with her adopted son Farouk (Bardia Seiri). Megan will be joined by Dr. Nathan Riggs (Martin Henderson, who marked his departure from "Grey's Anatomy" with this exact episode), her former fiancé with whom she reconnects when she returns from "the dead." The past timeline takes place during Owen, Megan, Teddy, and Nathan's deployment and explains how Megan was kidnapped by enemy forces. 

Frankly, the episode is an interesting idea, but even though Spencer and Raver are particularly good in their roles as Megan and Teddy, being stuck with unpopular characters Nathan and Owen is just unbelievably dour. Plus, Megan is such a new character by this point — she only even enters the narrative in the season 13 finale — that it's hard to feel that connected to her, making this episode feel empty when all is said and done. Thankfully, "Danger Zone" was a blip in season 14; two episodes later, the series' 300th installment "Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story" proved to be pretty excellent.

I would call season 8 a pretty good era for "Grey's Anatomy," which makes the season's 13th episode "If/Then" an even bigger outlier than normal. With Meredith's voiceover musing, as the episode begins, about what her life would be like if all of it was completely different, we enter an alternate universe where her mother Ellis never developed Alzheimer's and died from complications of the insidious disease. So what exactly does this alternate universe look like? Folks, it is weird.

First of all, Meredith isn't married to Derek, but newly engaged to her normally platonic friend Alex (who's an over-eager nerd instead of an often impatient and irascible pediatric surgeon). She has no relationship with Cristina, who's a loner that everyone avoids, but her best friend is now Dr. April Kepner (Sarah Drew), whom the "real" Meredith often finds irritating. A very alive Ellis is the chief of surgery at Seattle Grace Hospital and is married to Dr. Richard Webber (James Pickens Jr.) — revealing a different timeline where, during their affair during their own residences, Ellis and Richard left their respective spouses and ended up together. (This didn't happen in the show's actual storyline; Ellis left her husband, but Richard stayed with his wife.) 

There are a ton of other weird differences, too. An absolutely miserable Derek is still married to his first wife Dr. Addison Montgomery-Shepherd (Kate Walsh), Owen isn't involved with Cristina but is married to Dr. Callie Torres (Sara Ramirez), and Callie isn't romantically involved with the woman who ultimately becomes her wife, Dr. Arizona Robbins (Jessica Capshaw). Perhaps the most jarring change is that the forceful, brilliant Dr. Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson) is a complete wallflower who submits to Ellis no matter what, though that's tied with the choice to make Dr. Lexie Grey (Chyler Leigh) a downtrodden unhoused woman. Also, for some reason, a bunch of them have different specialties; instead of orthopedic surgery, Callie is a cardiothoracic surgeon for some reason. Why? Doesn't matter!

I respect that "If/Then" is a fun experiment for "Grey's Anatomy," but honestly, it's not a successful one. By the end of the episode, Callie and Arizona are drifting together, as are Meredith and Derek and Owen and Cristina, which I guess proves that some things in life are inevitable. This episode isn't the show's absolute worst, but it's weird and, ultimately, pointless.

Just like "If/Then," the season 13 episode "The Room Where It Happens" is a neat idea, but it's a lot better on paper than it is in practice. (In case you were wondering, yes; Shonda Rhimes is a huge fan of the Broadway musical "Hamilton" and frequently references it, even naming Marika Domińczyk's Dr. Eliza Minnick after Eliza Hamilton herself.) The only regular characters who appear in this episode are Meredith, Richard, Owen, and then-resident Dr. Stephanie Edwards (Jerrika Hinton), who are all performing a life-saving surgery on a patient that was in an extremely destructive car accident. Meredith, Owen, and Stephanie are already tired — Meredith, in particular, complains that she hasn't slept for a whopping 48 hours — and ultimately Richard, who's just beginning his shift after a good night's sleep, joins them to lend an extra set of hands. The four doctors don't necessarily agree on the right course of treatment, adding more stress and drama to the situation ... but as they navigate the tricky procedure, they all start talking about impactful moments in their lives and careers.

This all sounds cool, right? Here's the problem. As Meredith, Owen, and Richard reminisce, we're treated to the clunkiest possible narrative device: re-enactments of their memories. Owen flashes back to working with his sister Megan during their deployment — Abigail Spencer hadn't been officially cast yet, so Bridget Regan is forced to deliver some particularly awkward dialogue — while Richard tells the story of a woman who was a cellist and hated going to see doctors who ultimately died from cancer. (It's his mother, Gail, played by Monique Cash.) Meredith dwells on the moment after Derek died, and Stephanie is just ... also there. Again, this concept is sort of interesting, but the way they keep sticking Cash and Regan "in" the operating room as weird, ghost-like figures is just distracting and strange, and the episode attempts to be huge and epic but, at the end of the day, falls completely flat.

When Justin Chambers decided to step away from "Grey's Anatomy" after a whopping 16 seasons, he temporarily vanished from the series after season 16's eighth episode "My Shot," which is ... odd, to say the least. So how does "Grey's Anatomy" rationalize Alex's departure within the narrative? The worst way possible, that's how!

By this point in the show, Alex, who was once married to his and Meredith's fellow original surgical intern Dr. Isobel "Izzie" Stevens (Katherine Heigl), is seemingly happy with his life in Seattle, his close friendship with Meredith, and his marriage to Dr. Jo Wilson (Camilla Luddington). Apparently, though, a piece of news about Izzie changes his entire life. In "My Shot," Meredith assembles colleagues and patients so she can argue to keep her medical license after committing insurance fraud to help a young patient, and Alex is in charge of corralling the team. As he explains in a letter to Meredith at the end of his "final" episode "Leave a Light On," he contacted Izzie and learned something so shocking that he abandoned his entire life. (He also writes letters to Jo and Bailey, the latter of whom is the chief of surgery at what's now called Grey Sloan Memorial.)

"This is not the way I wanted to do this," Alex's letter to Meredith, read in voiceover by Chambers, begins. It continues: 

"The last thing on Earth I want to do is hurt you, but I'm leaving. I already left, actually. I'm gone. This is not the way I wanted to do this, but you know me. Any chance to take the easy way out. Or maybe that used to be true. I don't know. What I do know is I owe you the truth, and I don't know how else to tell you."

What Alex has to tell Meredith (and Jo and Bailey) is that he found out that Izzie is the mother of his children. See, in season 5 — when Izzie is suffering from cancer — she freezes her eggs after Alex fertilizes them, and apparently, she kept them and had twins. After Alex calls her to ask her to testify at Meredith's hearing, he learns about those kids and moves to Kansas to be with her. Alex tells Meredith that he still loves Jo, but basically says it all comes down to the kids: "And if it was just about two women I love, I'd choose my wife. You know I would. But it's not just her. Izzie made our kids."

This ending sucks. I'm not sure what else I can say here. If you've seen this episode, you get it. If you haven't, please don't put yourself through this viewing experience.

Anyone who's ever watched season 7 of "Grey's Anatomy" knows, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the show's musical episode "Song Beneath a Song" is the worst episode of the series, and it's not close. Other shows like "Scrubs" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" have successfully pulled off musical episodes, but thanks to original songs and irreverent attitudes, those worked. "Song Beneath a Song" makes the unbelievably bizarre choice to have the "Grey's Anatomy" doctors sing songs previously featured on the series, like "Chasing Cars" by Snow Patrol, "Breathe (2 A.M.)" by Anna Nalick, and "How to Save a Life" by The Fray.

If that sounds awful in theory, it's somehow worse on screen. The conceit is that, after a devastating car accident, a pregnant Callie is watching her colleagues try to save her life — and the life of her unborn baby — in the operating room, and not only does Callie sing her way through the experience, all the other doctors burst into song at random intervals. Sara Ramirez is a literal Tony-winner who made their mark on Broadway by originating the role of The Lady in the Lake in "Spamalot," so to be super fair to Ramirez, they sound great. The other actors don't fare quite as well. (If you ever need to torment someone, see if you can find a clip of Kevin McKidd poorly crooning "How We Operate" by Gomez.) The only "reason" for this episode to exist is because Ramirez's cover of Brandi Carlisle's song "The Story" is legitimately great, but I feel pretty certain that they could have done that in their own time so that audiences didn't have to sit through the entirety of "Song Beneath a Song." If you can make it through five seconds of this episode without cringing so hard that your shoulders start to hurt, you're stronger than I am.

"Grey's Anatomy" is streaming on Netflix and Hulu, but you might want to skip this selection of episodes.