Grey’s Anatomy said goodbye to Kevin McKidd’s Owen Hunt in the Season 22 finale that aired May 7, ending an 18-season run for one of the show’s most divisive characters. Kim Raver also departed in the same finale.
McKidd joined the ABC medical drama in Season 5 in 2008 and went on to direct 49 episodes, but Owen Hunt was never written as a man meant to be easily loved. Shonda Rhimes created him to add, in her words, a male character who did not care what people thought and did his own thing. McKidd later said the role was built to be “polarizing and provocative and kind of an antagonist at times,” and he was honest about how the character landed: “He annoys me.”
That friction showed up early and often. In Season 5’s “Life During Wartime,” Owen pulled back a curtain to reveal four anesthetized pigs, stabbed them one by one and ordered everyone in the room to save their lives. Izzie Stevens walked out and called him a monster. In the same season, he had Cristina euthanize all four pigs after the lab work was done. He also choked a sleeping Cristina in a PTSD-induced sleep trance, a moment that made clear that Owen was not just prickly, but dangerous. As a former army medic with PTSD, he was written with trauma baked into the character, and even his personal life carried the same blunt force: in “Beat Your Heart Out,” Beth Whitman rushed her father to the hospital after he collapsed at dinner, only to be stunned to find Owen alive and stateside after his Iraq deployment. He ended their engagement with a two-line email.
There was no mystery about why so many viewers bristled at him. Rhimes plainly made him to be a disruption, and the show kept returning to that design choice, from his clashes with Derek, whom he told to look in the mirror at his own problems when therapy came up, to the scenes that turned him into a shorthand for Grey’s Anatomy at its most abrasive. After nearly two decades, McKidd’s exit and Raver’s departure close a chapter that the series spent years building around conflict. The question now is not whether Owen Hunt was meant to be liked. It is whether Grey’s Anatomy can replace the kind of volatility he brought to the screen.
