A Catastrophic Day in the Grey's Anatomy Finale Leaves Grey Sloan in Jeopardy

Grey's Anatomy ended Season 18 with a two-part finale, and it was a landmark episode to boot. The final installment of the season was the series' 400th episode, and tensions were extremely high at Grey Sloan Memorial. While the first hour caught fans up with some old and new patients at the hospital — including bone cancer patient Simon who was trying to hold on to meet his newborn son — until the final minutes revealed that the Grey Sloan Memorial emergency blood supply was trashed in a car accident. 

Would you believe that wasn't Bailey's (Chandra Wilson) only crisis? Owen's (Kevin McKidd) former sins came to haunt him when the husband of a dying veteran showed up demanding that Owen give him the same drugs he gave the other marines in his clinical trial to help them "die with dignity." When Owen and Teddy (Kim Raver) refused to help him, he went straight to Bailey and informed her that her chief of trauma was committing medical murder. 

So there was an acute blood shortage and two of the attendings were discovered to have committed felonies (since Teddy abetted Owen with the entire situation) on the day the hospital was being evaluated by the accreditation committee to determine whether the hospital could keep its teaching status. 

Bailey ultimately decided to call the police, but she allowed Owen and Teddy to turn in their resignations and gave them a few hours to make a plan. The couple collected their kids and hopped on a plane, but it wasn't clear exactly where they were heading to. 

On the bright side, Jackson (Jesse Williams) and April (Sarah Drew) arrived in the second half of the finale to visit Catherine (Debbie Allen), and then were on hand to charm the accreditation council and in April's case, cover the pit in the midst of the blood shortage. And Simon was able to meet his son after his wife went into emergency labor. Winston (Anthony Hill) rushed the baby from the operating room to Simon's bed and laid the infant on his chest only moments before Simon finally succumbed to his illness. 

Ultimately though, the residency program did not survive the episode when the accreditation chair decided that the attendings did not respect authority, and things only got "messier" when the students became involved. Bailey finally decided she had enough and she quit, leaving the hospital in a state of flux. 

Jackson offered Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) the job, but it's still up in the air of whether she's going to take it, and whether she and Nick (Scott Speedman) are going to make it through the indecision. The ending of the residency program, losing two attendings, and Bailey leaving the hospital put Grey Sloan Memorial and Grey's Anatomy in completely uncharted territory when the show returns in the fall. It is the end of an era, as Meredith says in her voice over at the very end of the episode, and it's very unclear what's next. 

Grey's Anatomy returns in the fall on ABC.