The Ghost of Grey's Past...

Grey's Anatomy: These Ties That Bind

In the past two episode of Grey's Anatomy, Dr. Izzie has been besieged by the hauntings of the incessant ghost of her dead fiance Denny Duquette. Now I love Denny as much as the next person (and people do still like him a lot, considering he was killed off three seasons ago), but seriously?

The unrelenting haunting story is certainly causing a ruckus (examples one and two), but my objection to it is not so much that Denny's back as a ghost, but that Denny's back as a ghost AGAIN.

It's hard to not get the feeling that when the Grey's writers are sitting around and brainstorming ideas, invariably someone says, "Hey, remember Denny? He was great." And then someone else says, "Yeah, I love Denny and Jeffrey Dean Morgan is adorable." And then Shonda says, "I also love Denny and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and it stinks that I was never able to finish working on that pilot about foreign correspondents that I was writing for him before the network made me devote all my attention to Addison's spin-off/character assassination." And then they all decide to write an episode (or, better yet, a multi-episode arc) where Denny comes back as a ghost.

So far, my hypothesis to explain the whole Izzie-sees-hears-and-touches-a-ghost thing is that Izzie has a brain tumor (I learned from previous episodes of Grey's that brain tumors can cause hallucinations) or aneurysm (a la Eli Stone). Which conveniently feeds into the Izzie-is-getting-killed-off rumor that's been floating around out there since Katherine Heigl ticked off the show's writers by taking her name out of Emmy consideration. I'm okay with giving Katherine something more important to do than performing CPR on a deer, but I don't want to see her killed off. I firmly believe that there's more story to tell about Isobel Stevens; the writers just have to find it.

I'm also a bit annoyed with the timing of this whole incident. Why do all of Alex's girlfriends end up crazy? That hardly seems fair; the poor guy's been through enough. Also, there's already precedent for this: the first time Alex finally manned up and admitted he wanted a relationship with Izzie, Denny showed up and derailed the whole thing. Now, three years later, Alex and Izzie are finally making another go of it, and darned if it isn't Denny showing up to ruin it again.

Where the heck was Denny during the debacle that was Gizzie (George and Izzie)? I would have gladly welcomed undead Denny showing up to ruin that disastrous coupling (preferably before that bathtub scene).

Speaking of Gizzie: what has happened to George? He used to be a main character, but I don't think he has had a darn thing to do all season (I guess he did get to retake a test...fascinating). Wasn't one of Isaiah Washington's weird post-firing assertions that T.R. Knight leveraged his gayness into juicier story lines? Seems like it's time for T.R. to gay himself into something more interesting than one line asking someone to fill out some paper work.

(photo: abc.com)