‘Grey’s Anatomy’ season 12 spoilers: Shonda Rhimes on reason for big leap forward

“Grey’s Anatomy” has used the time jump in a wide variety of different ways ever since the final stretch of season 11. First, she used it in order to jump forward a year following the death of Derek; moving into season 12, she’s moving forward another stretch of time. This does give Meredith Grey and the other characters time to move forward with their lives, but the memory of what happened is still there.

So why make this move, and rush over so much of the heavy grieving? Shonda Rhimes does everything on her show for a reason, and she describes her process as such when chatting with TVLine:

“I couldn’t imagine a world in which Meredith could go a month and be able to speak or breathe — or [even] six months … I needed time to pass for her to even be in a place where I felt like she could have a conversation.

“It was brutal … I found it incredibly painful to write and incredibly painful to watch. I didn’t go to a single moment of the filming because I was like, ‘I’m just going to stand there and cry like an idiot.’”

Obviously, we know that there is an instinctive response to just sit here and be like “why did you write in Derek’s death in the first place,” but the reality is that we still don’t know every bit of information there and probably never well. The safe assumption to make is that there was probably something that happened in here that caused it necessary to kill off Derek; otherwise, you just have the character gone from the show, and him abandoning his wife and family would be a terrible direction for him.

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