Everyone’s worried about Meredith Grey, who’s near death in the hospital where she works. The staff’s two top doctors, Richard Webber and Miranda Bailey, flank her bedside, arguing about how far to go to save her, how risky to get. Meredith, meanwhile, is on her own journey, presumably inside her mind: She is visiting with ghosts, people she has known who have died spectacular deaths, and now have plenty of advice to dispense to her. Go back, they urge her. Go back to life. You still have a chance.

This has, of course, been the scenario stretching across the first several episodes of this season of Grey’s Anatomy as our heroine fights a devastating case of COVID-19. It has allowed Meredith to frolic on the beach of near-death while having beautifully satisfying conversations with ghosts of fan favorites past — the love of her life, Derek, and original intern and friend George — all of them clad like a dreamy Gap commercial.

It was a true (and joyful) shock for fans when Patrick Dempsey showed up on that beach, looking as fine as ever, at the beginning of this season. But the entire scenario itself is a ghost of early Grey’s Anatomy, an echo of the two-episode sequence from 2007’s third season in which Meredith nearly drowns while providing on-site triage at a ferry boat accident. This has all happened before. It’s a perfect extension of Grey’s mythology.