The first footage from Season 16 of Grey's Anatomy has arrived and there's a lot of information to process in the 30-second teaser posted to the Grey's Anatomy Twitter account on Friday morning.
The most pressing issue is: Did Jackson (Jesse Williams) survive the fog? The end of the promo features Maggie (Kelly McCreary) bringing in reinforcements from Station 19 to find her boyfriend, or potentially ex-boyfriend, considering how they left things before he wandered off. The trailer confirms that Jackson has fallen off the road into a ravine, but his condition was not revealed. Is he alive? What condition is he in if he is alive? Sept. 26 can't get here soon enough!
Elsewhere, Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) is already doing her community service penance for committing insurance fraud last season. Trash duty is just the beginning of the hard road Meredith and DeLuca (Giacomo Gianniotti), along with Karev (Justin Chambers) and Webber (James Pickens Jr.), will have to travel in the wake of last season's scandal.
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"What I can tell you is that we did not backpedal," Grey's showrunner Krista Vernoff teased to TV Guide at the Television Critics Association summer press tour. "We did not take a quick easy way out. We are playing that through with real consequences. We have real stakes, real ramifications and real questions [in] regards to Meredith's future."
As embarrassing as it is for a Harper Avery Catherine Fox Award-winning surgeon to be caught cleaning up trash on the side of the road, Meredith is actually not having the worst time when it comes to fallout from the scandal. That honor belongs to Bailey (Chandra Wilson), who has to run a hospital after firing three of her top surgeons and having her best resident arrested.
"That was a big decision she made to fire those three doctors. It was a big decision, personally. Just as Meredith did not think the insurance fraud decision all the way through, I don't think Bailey thought that decision all the way through," Vernoff explained. "What's exciting to me about Season 16 is that everybody is shaken up. It's a real shakeup at Grey Sloan... It's dramatic and exciting to have this kind of story to play 16 seasons in."
Grey's Anatomy premieres Thursday, Sept. 26 at 8/7c on ABC.
