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Katherine Heigl and the killing of Izzie Stevens

Let’s talk about Katherine Heigl. After all, everyone else is. Unless you’ve been in seclusion, you’re probably familiar with the Katherine Heigl brouhaha. (Isn’t brouhaha a great word?) Heigl withdrew her name from Emmy consideration – even though we’ll never know if she was in consideration in the first place – saying that she just didn’t have any Emmy-worthy material on Grey’s Anatomy last season. Let me pause here to give you some wisdom that you can carry with you the rest of your life: never, ever piss off a writer. We’ve got words; we know how to use ’em. The interwebs have been ablaze with talk that Grey’s showrunner/writer Shonda Rhimes has decided to kill off Heigl’s character, Izzie, as a result of Heigl’s comment. At TCA last week, Rhimes said that she was surprised at Heigl’s remarks, but not insulted, and that they have a great story planned for Izzie. (I just bet they do.)

Meanwhile, US magazine reports that two sources close to Grey’s revealed that the “great story” just might be that Izzie gets a brain tumor. We know that Denny (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) will appear this coming season – perhaps to greet Izzie at the pearly gates? In any case, bloggers have been having a field day planning Izzie’s demise. Here are some of my favorites.

New York magazine calls for Heigl to be struck by a meteor, pulled apart by a pack of lions right in the middle of the ER or to simply explode for no reason – any of which could easily happen in the wacky world of Seattle Grace. The Greek Prospectus suggests several scenarios outrageous enough to fit Grey’s modus operandi. My favorite is this description of Izzie’s death by terminal disease:

As the hospital deals with the tragedy of the news, Izzie begins to learn acceptance of her fate, and a desire to do good with the time she has left in the world. As she stands at the window contemplating her life and the little time she has left, a shark jumps through the window and eats her.
Land shark!

That led to a couple of ideas of my own: In a callback to an earlier story, Izzie falls off of the pier in the middle of an emergency as a little girl watches. When George notices her missing, the little girl leads him to the pier, just in time to see Izzie sink into the water for the last time. George shrugs and walks away. Or, in a gracious nod to Katherine Heigl’s previous series (in which her name was Isabel – weird, huh?), aliens come to earth to reclaim their own. It happens away from the hospital, so her colleagues think she simply disappeared. The season’s first catchphrase comes from Bailey, who asks throughout the episode, “Where’s Stevens?”

In Nerve’s “Top 10 Ways ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Should Kill Off Izzie,” Ben suggests that Izzie jump out of a moving car to avoid having to listen one more time to Meredith whine about McDreamy. Or that she gets a dramatic, three-episode death scene like Jimmy Smits on NYPD Blue – and regrets offending the Emmy folks. Of course, I saved the best for last, also from Nerve:

She has a threesome with Callie and Erica Hahn, then expires from exhaustion.
What a way to go.

Photo credit: Randy Holmes/ABC

Can you, um, top that? What’s the best fate for Izzie?

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