Grey’s Anatomy teaser reveals Chyler Leigh’s Lexie Grey will return next week

Ellen Pompeo’s Meredith Grey will get yet another inexplicable visitor on her mysterious ‘beach’ in next week’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy.

After Thursday night’s episode, a teaser for the April 1 episode, Breathe, revealed Meredith will take another trip to the magical beach she’s been visiting in her head, while laid up battling COVID-19 on a ventilator.

The show has brought back multiple stars from the show’s earlier seasons this year, continuing that tradition next week with Chyler Leigh’s Lexie Grey.

Lexie Grey made her debut in the Season 3 finale of Grey’s Anatomy in 2007, the half-sister of Meredith Grey, who was a surgical resident at Seattle Grace Hospital.

She starred on the show for four seasons before Lexie was tragically killed in a plane crash in the Season 8 finale.

The trailer for next week’s episode shows Meredith on the beach, when she’s handed a towel, looking over to see the surprise beach guest is Lexie.

The brief trailer also features another scene where they’re sitting on the beach, and Meredith says, ‘I like it here.

The trailer ends with Lexie asking her, ‘Are you going to stay?’ though she doesn’t answer as the trailer comes to a close.

Lexie is the third deceased character to surface on this mysterious beach, following Derek ‘McDreamy’ Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey) and George O’Malley (T.R. Knight).

There have also been those among the living to ‘visit’ the beach, including Dr. Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson) and Dr. Richard Webber (James Pickens Jr.). 

Grey’s Anatomy showrunner Krista Vernoff explains that the beach is an ‘in between place’ for Meredith while she remains on a ventilator, fighting COVID-19.

‘We’ve carefully designed that beach so that whatever your belief system is, that beach fits into it,’ Vernoff said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

‘For me, that is a real place that exists in between; it’s an in between place where Meredith can hang out and the dead people she loves can visit her. That’s where it started. But not everybody believes in a life beyond this body,’ she added.

As for who can appear on the beach, Vernoff added there are a stringent set of rules in play that govern the beach, so to speak.

‘Those scenes are carefully designed so that any time anyone appears on that beach, they are also in Meredith’s [hospital] room and/or the information that Meredith would need to imagine them on that beach has happened in Meredith’s room or earshot,’ Vernoff said.

‘When you saw Bailey and Richard join Meredith and George on that beach, they were in her hospital room with her talking. The idea is if you don’t believe in this magical place, you can imagine that Meredith is creating this space in her own imagination based on the information that she has in that hospital room that she’s hearing,’ she added.

Grey’s Anatomy continues its 17th season with Breathe on Thursday, April 1 at 9 PM ET on ABC.