#Grey’s Anatomy: How Long Will Patrick Dempsey Stick Around?

Grey’s Anatomy did the unthinkable with its Season 17 premiere:

It brought Patrick Dempsey back as Derek Shepherd. 

If you watch Grey’s Anatomy online, you know Derek is still very much dead, so Dempsey will not be staging a full-time return, unfortunately. 

But he will be around for a few episodes yet, it seems. 

“We will see more of [Derek] this season,” showrunner Krisa Vernoff told the Los Angeles Times. “This was not just a cameo. He will appear three more times.”

Hooray, right? 

Derek appeared to Meredith as what appeared to be a figment of her imagination when she was found out cold in the hospital parking lot. 

In the same interview with the Los Angeles Times, Vernoff said that in order to pull off the big return, everything was kept under wraps. 

In fact, the scene was written to be a reunion between Meredith and her late mother Ellis Grey. 

While that would have still been a wild turn of events, we think we speak for just about every Grey’s Anatomy fan there is when we say that Derek’s return was better. 

“We didn’t tell the writers for the longest time. When she’s walking and she looks as someone is calling to her, and she goes, ‘Derek?’ In the script, I had it as Ellis Grey,” Vernoff said.

“And she goes, ‘Mom?’ We read it at the table that way.

“Nobody knew what we were doing — to the point that when the crew showed up on the day we shot the scene, nobody knew. It was top secret.”

Dempsey said that his return came about when Pompeo approached him with the idea of a return. 

“I’ve been tracking what Grey’s had been doing with giving masks, and making sure that people had the right equipment, and it came from that place,” the actor told Deadline. 

Eagle-eyed fans went back in Derek’s Instagram photos and found a photo of what looked to be Dempsey on the same beach with the same face mask as in the behind the scene photos. 

Could he have been trying to send a hint to fans?

Sure seems that way.

What did you think of the emotional revelation?

Hit the comments. 

Catch the next episode of Grey’s Anatomy on Thursday at 9/8c. 

Paul Dailly is the Associate Editor for TV Fanatic. Follow him on Twitter.