After 18 seasons, Dr. Owen Hunt is finally leaving Grey Sloan Memorial, and honestly, the hospital will probably be fine.
Kevin McKidd, who joined “Grey’s Anatomy” in Season 5 in 2008, departed the ABC medical drama alongside Kim Raver in the Season 22 finale, which aired on May 7. Over his run, McKidd directed 49 episodes of the show and shaped one of the series’ most enduring and polarizing characters. To put it simply, Owen Hunt has never been a fan favorite.
In McKidd’s defense, none of this has to do with him. The Scottish actor gave nearly two decades to the role, and a silver lining to Owen’s exit is that he’s now free to play someone fans might actually root for. But he doesn’t take any of the online chatter personally; when Shonda Rhimes created the character, her goal was to add “a male character to the show who doesn’t care what people think and just does his own thing,” McKidd told Variety when discussing his exit from the series. “He was designed to be polarizing and provocative and kind of an antagonist at times. So it makes me laugh when people are like, ‘He annoys me.’ Yeah, that’s the point!”
But in honor of Owen Hunt, the Army trauma surgeon with a hero complex, a communication problem and an apparently bottomless capacity for emotional damage, who has tested the patience of “Grey’s” fans for 17 seasons, we’re looking back at the moments — in chronological order — that made him the show’s most reliably unlikeable presence, from pig-stabbing to plane crashes to the long list of women he managed to make miserable along the way. A send-off befitting the man himself.
In Season 5’s “Life During Wartime,” Owen introduced himself to the residents by pulling back a curtain to reveal four anesthetized pigs, stabbing them one by one, and then ordering everyone in the room to save their lives — as if this were a completely normal way to spend a Tuesday. It was not. Izzie Stevens walked out on the spot and called him a monster, which, in fairness, was also a completely normal reaction. To cap things off, once the lab was done, Owen had Cristina euthanize all four pigs. “Do no harm” was apparently more of a loose guideline than a founding principle. Great first week, buddy.
In Season 5’s “Beat Your Heart Out” Owen’s ex-fiancée Beth Whitman rushes her father to the hospital after he collapses at dinner — where she’s stunned to find Owen, very much alive and stateside, having never told her he’d come home from Iraq. While she’d spent his entire deployment praying for him on her knees every night and calling him in tears every time she found a spider in her apartment, Owen had ended their engagement in a two-line email and apparently figured that was that. For context, Alex Karev, a man who once gave a nurse syphilis and spent the better part of a decade being genuinely terrible, still managed to write his wife Jo a multi-page goodbye letter when he left. To Beth’s credit, though, she was genuinely happy to see Owen. Which he did not deserve.
This one is more sad than it is shitty.
In one of the show’s darker moments, Owen chokes a sleeping Cristina in a PTSD-induced sleep trance in Season 5.
Owen, a former army medic, has PTSD and while that isn’t his fault, his refusal to get treatment for it is frustrating, especially when it puts those he loves in actual, physical danger. Owen even snaps at Derek, and basically tells him to look in the mirror at his own problems when McDreamy tells McArmy he should consider therapy.
To his credit (a rare sentence), he does eventually begin seeing Dr. Wyatt after the incident and his guilt over hurting Cristina.