‘Grey’s Anatomy’: Meredith’s House Goes up in Flames in Fall Finale

Grey’s Anatomy showed that Meredith Grey will be walking away from the Grey Sloan halls on its return from winter break. That doesn’t mean she didn’t get a strong message that she should head out of town in the midseason finale.

As fans saw play out during the episode, Grey’s home went up in flames after being struck by lightning. It’s the home she shared with her late husband, Dr. Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey), but it also happened with Maggie, Winston and Meredith Grey’s kids inside. Nobody was hurt but it did seem to cut a tether for the character.

“It’s just stuff,” Grey tells her kids at the moment. All of their stuff is going up in ashes, with the only surviving item seeming to be the Post-It note that Grey and Shepherd were married with years prior.

“I think the general rule should always be that if we have a midseason finale, you should not be at work the [next] day. It should just be an automatic call out sick,” Camilla Luddington said about the midseason finale. “Just call out sick. When have we ever had a midseason finale that’s gone swimmingly well? It’s not gonna happen. No.”

Having your home burn down as you’re set to leave town seems to be the definition of not going “swimmingly,” opening the path for Grey and her family to head to Boston to hunt a cure for Alzheimer’s with the Catherine Fox Foundation. That means Grey Sloan will need a new chief surgeon in the hospital, though it won’t be the end of Ellen Pompeo’s time on the show.

“It’s still Grey’s, she’s still there in spirit and that’s the house that Grey built, so she’s always there,” the actress told Entertainment Tonight about her new limited role in the series. “She just has to step away for a little bit to do a Hulu show. It’s a great company to work for and I’m really, really lucky that they’ve given me the opportunity to do both, and so I had to take it.”

Pompeo is set for an untitled series on Hulu telling the story of a couple who adopt what they believe to be an 8-year-old girl with dwarfism, but soon realize things aren’t as they seem across eight episodes. “As they begin to raise her alongside their three biological children, they slowly start to believe she may not be who she says she is,” a synopsis for the story reads, according to Us Weekly. “As they question her story, they’re confronted with hard questions of their own about the lengths they’re willing to go to defend themselves, falling into a battle that’s fought in the tabloids, the courtroom, and ultimately their marriage.”