I never thought of Ellis Grey as a bad woman. She's a flawed woman: She cheated on her husband; she was barely there for her daughter. But she was one of the best surgeons of her time, in a time when very few women were even doctors. She was a trailblazer. And sometimes trailblazers are difficult. That's not to say their awful behavior is justified. But given that we so easily forgive male TV characters for the terrible things they do — kind, gentle, unfaithful Richard Webber included — maybe we can forgive Ellis Grey?

That seemed to be the point of last night's episode of Grey's Anatomy, which humanized Ellis in a way she hadn't been humanized before. We learned that Richard broke up with her after she was nominated* for the Harper Avery Award (the fight that Little Meredith overheard from the carousel was Richard dumping Mommy) and that pregnant Ellis was devastated enough to attempt suicide in the aftermath.

It's interesting to think that this storyline has been in the works for something like eight seasons. The carousel flashback first appeared in the show's third season, and Kelly McCreary, who plays Ellis's secret daughter, told Cosmopolitan.com that Grey's writers came up with the idea for Maggie around that same time. Did creator Shonda Rhimes want her audience to dislike Ellis all along, just so she could drop the hammer and let everyone see that they were perhaps judging Ellis too harshly — just as Meredith had been for most of her life? I'd like to think so.

Richard isn't exactly the bad guy of the episode, but when he admits to present-day Meredith that he split from Ellis because he was jealous of her and that he knew he'd live in her shadow if he stayed with her, he's not exactly the good guy, either. He's just another flawed person.

That storyline mirrors Derek and Meredith's: Meredith wishes Derek moved to D.C. so his sacrifice wouldn't be hanging over her head; he wishes she'd step up and pursue the professional glory that supposedly tied her to Seattle. Meredith seems more threatened by Derek's success than he does by hers, but Derek is clearly lording his God Complex over Meredith in a way that stifles her and holds her back. When two ambitious people fall in love, they make perfect sense and zero sense together. Perfect sense in that they understand each other, zero sense in that they are sometimes going to resent each other and compete.

At the end of the episode, we see footage of Ellis accepting another Harper Avery Award. She jokes that she'd like to thank all the men who helped her along the way, the punchline being, No, actually, no men helped me along the way. Then she dedicates the award to "all the women surgeons who would come after me."

At least two of those women are now her daughters. Is that because of Ellis or in spite of her? Probably a little bit of both. But she wanted to see them succeed — and that's more than she can say for Richard, at least where her own career was concerned. Whether it's more than Meredith can say for Derek? Welcome to the rest of season 11.

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*An earlier version of this post said that Richard broke up with Ellis after she won the Harper Avery Award; it was after she was nominated for it.

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