Ellen Pompeo Tells Kimmel About Grey's Surprise and the Invention of 'Va-Jay-Jay'

Ellen Pompeo went on Jimmy Kimmel Live! after Thursday night's season premiere of Grey's Anatomy and talked about that surprise ending. (Needless to say, here there be spoilers). 

It seems Meredith Grey collapsed from an undetermined medical issue, and started hallucinating about Dr. Derek Shepherd, aka McDreamy (Patrick Dempsey), who hasn't been on the show since 2015 since, well, dying.

Pompeo was tight-lipped about what exactly is going on — is she dying and going to heaven, is she in a coma? — but Kimmel kept asking, noting "It's kinda like Lost really, in a way. You've dabbled with Lost territory here."

She responded matter-of-factly with "17 seasons, we've dabbled with everything there is to dabble." 

While she couldn't say much about where the plot was going, she said did love creating that surprise. "It was so fun," she said. "Because we know that people are going to freak out, and we all know 2020 has been a really long, ugly road, and we were so happy just to be able to film these scenes and know how much joy it was going to bring people. We definitely had a ball." 

They also recallied the episode where Meredith had to carry around a penis in a cooler (Season 1, Episode 2), which Pompeo credits with coining a slang term for female genitalia.

"There was a big fight with Standards & Practices," she explained. "You could say 'penis,' but you couldn't say 'vagina' at the time... so that's where the term 'va-jay-jay' came from. Shonda [Rhimes] made up va-jay-jay because Standards & Practices... would not let us say 'vagina,' and Shonda's argument was, like 'we said 'penis' in that episode 97 times! You can say 'penis' 97 times but you can't say vagina?' And they were like 'yep, yep, that's it, you can't say vagina.' So she came up with va-jay-jay and that's how that problem was solved."

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Andy Hunsaker has a head full of sitcom gags and nerd-genre lore, and can be followed @AndyHunsaker if you're into that sort of thing.