Why I agree with Shonda Rhimes and McDreamy’s death
There are many TV shows that continue to live on for a very long time. And Grey’s Anatomy is one of them. The drama series is a medical based one, which concentrates on a group of doctors at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital in Seattle, United States.
The 11-season long show recently witnessed a major heart-break with the death of Derek “McDreamy” Shepherd (played by Patrick Dempsey), which left fans unnerved and distraught.
There have been many deaths and departures of main characters on the show but the death of McDreamy forced the fans question the show-runner Shonda Rhimes’s decision and show their aggression through social media. After months of being bombarded with angry tweets, Instagram pictures and Facebook posts, Rhimes finally decided to let out the truth as to why she had no choice but to kill off McDreamy’s character.
Rhimes recently reported that she was not at all sorry for having to kill him from the show. Her one sole reason which she firmly stands by is that in order for Meredith’s love to live on and be true, Derek had to die, in order for the relation to be eternal. This doesn’t really make much sense so Rhimes continues to explain.
She asks her fans,
“What could have the options been? Either Derek was going to walk out on Meredith and leave her high and dry; what was that going to mean? That would suggest that their love wasn’t true, the thing we had said for 11 years was a lie and McDreamy wasn’t McDreamy. For me, that was untenable.”
One could easily come to the conclusion that when she means to say Derek abandoned Meredith, she means that Dempsey’s contract (which was only valid for another year) was over and the character had to be dealt with anyhow. Thus, this ending of Mcdreamy had to be plotted for the couple of the show to portray that they were madly, truly and deeply in love. Rhimes also says that had she written the ending to be a break-up between the two, which would actually have torn the hearts of fans even deeper.
“Meredith and Derek’s love had to remain Meredith and Derek’s love,” she said. “As painful as it was for me as a storyteller, because I had never really thought that was going to happen, it preserved what felt true to me, that Derek was going to have to die in order for that love to remain honest. Because I really couldn’t have the idea that he just turned out to be a bad guy who walked out on his wife and kids be a true story. To me, it felt like that was the only way to make Meredith and Derek’s magic remain true and forever frozen in time,” concluded Rhimes.
Hopefully, this will make sense to the die-hard fans of Grey’s Anatomy. If I actually come to think of it, truly there could have been no other option than to make it everlasting love through mortality.