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.
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Stabbing pigs for a skills lab
Image Credit: ©ABC/Courtesy Everett Collection
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.
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Breaking up with his fiance in a two-line email
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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.
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Choking Cristina (but mainly refusing to go to therapy for PTSD)
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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.
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Cheating on Cristina after shaming her for having an abortion (!)
Arguably the worst of his direct actions, Owen cheats on Cristina, his WIFE at the time, with a random woman at a bar in Season 8. At least he got what was coming to him, when an understandably pissed-off Cristina throws a bowl of cereal in his face, milk and all. Do it again! Who said that?
What makes things worse is the broader context of the fight. Cristina, famously anti-becoming a mother, got pregnant and decided to get an abortion at the end of Season 7. While her decision was hardly a surprise to any viewers, it somehow was one to Owen. After fighting over it and kicking her out of their house, Owen eventually shows up at her abortion appointment (after a stern talking to from Meredith, the true love of Cristina’s life) and even holds her hand during the procedure. The caring gesture is quickly ruined when in Season 8, Episode 12, he yells at Cristina, “You killed our baby!”
AT. A. CHILD’S. BIRTHDAY. PARTY. Where everyone they knew could hear them, btw!
Their relationship takes a turn for the worse, on the brink of divorce and then screaming at each other in therapy sessions, leading up to Owen’s one-night stand. Still doesn’t excuse cheating on your wife Owen!
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Didn’t check the plane’s crash history that killed Lexie and Mark
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At the end of Season 8, Owen, then chief of surgery, put six of his colleagues (Lexie, Mark, Derek, Cristina, Meredith and Arizona) on a charter plane to Boise. What he apparently did not think to do — before signing off on the flight, waving them off and going about his day — was check that the plane had a well-documented history of mechanical problems. The result was one of the most devastating and shocking moments in TV history. The plane crash killed Lexie Grey and Mark Sloan, cost Arizona Robbins her leg and detonated the Callie-Arizona marriage. A basic Google search. That’s all it would have taken.
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Owen’s entire relationship with Amelia Shepherd
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From their whirlwind wedding to their messy post-divorce antics, Amelia and Owen were not a match made in heaven. Similarly to his relationship with Cristina, things took a steep downturn in Season 13 after Amelia confessed that she wasn’t sure she wants to have children with him — which, by now, we know is a dealbreaker for Owen. Our question is this: What does Owen even talk about with his girlfriends before deciding to get married? You’d think the kids conversation would happen pre-proposal, or at least pre-walking down the aisle, given his track record.
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Owen’s entire relationship with Teddy Altman
Image Credit: Courtesy of Disney
While the Season 22 finale may have ended with a dramatic rekindling between a just-divorced Teddy and Owen, the couple’s happy ending does not rectify the past 16 seasons of their tumultuous relationship. There are too many moments to call back to, but an especially low moment for Owen comes in Season 14 when he flies to Germany to confess his love for Teddy — but only because Amelia (his ex-wife whom he was still sleeping with) encouraged him to do so. I mean, Owen. Why would you even tell Teddy that?
Even more unforgivable, though, were his 11th-hour attempts to break up Teddy and her neurosurgeon boyfriend Tom Koracick in the weeks leading up to her giving birth. (When Owen flew to Germany, he’d impregnated her.) Owen ultimately succeeded, but we’re still thinking about how happy Teddy could have been in the apartment Koracick found for them to share.
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