Grey's Anatomy Season 5
Overview
This is the season Grey's Anatomy aims straight at your chest and doesn't miss. Izzie Stevens (Katherine Heigl) starts seeing Denny again — wonderful, romantic, and a five-alarm warning sign, because Denny is dead, and what her visions really mean drives the season's bravest storyline. Derek and Meredith try to build a marriage out of a vow scribbled on a Post-it note. Trauma surgeon Owen Hunt (Kevin McKidd) storms in fresh from Iraq and knocks Cristina completely sideways. Sunny pediatric surgeon Arizona Robbins (Jessica Capshaw) skates into Callie's life. And Mark Sloan, of all people, falls properly in love — with Lexie, which goes down exactly as well with Meredith as you'd expect. By season five the cast is fully lived-in; nobody's posing anymore, and Ellen Pompeo and Sandra Oh in particular do career-level work. Shonda Rhimes loads the year with big swings: a death-row killer on the ward, interns running a reckless side practice of their own, a flood in the hospital. Then the finale wraps a wedding that isn't around a closing stretch so shocking that 2009 audiences were left genuinely stunned. Peak-era Grey's, at its most fearless.
