Izzie Stevens Hate Club

I can hate women too!

Rare Sighting: A Siyyan Inaas newsletter that’s not defending a female character but instead, joining in on the dog pile. This is very out of character for this creature.

Izzie Stevens, played by the incredible Katherine Heigl, would be one of my most beloved female characters in theory. She’s sweet with a really tough and gritty past, and trauma that she masks with a positive attitude. She is a mother figure to those around her who is hellbent on keeping the family together because she didn’t have a real one growing up.

It’s all the ingredients for me to be writing a newsletter in defense of her laced with Bojack Horseman references. Except, she sucks.

And here’s the thing. I don’t hate Izzie Stevens for the same reasons other people hate Izzie Stevens. Nobody cares about her being a home wrecker, I’m not here to accuse her of being the ring leader in her and George’s affair and claim that she manipulated him because girl bye.

I find her deplorable because of how she treated Callie before she slept with her husband. I find her nasty because of how she used to slut shame Meredith. I find her selfish because of how she used to think the world revolved around her and her very minuscule issues (relationship with George). But I think one thing that we all as a collective need to reassess is her relationship with Denny Duquette.

When I first started watching Grey’s Anatomy, I was fifteen years old and I was obsessed. My mom suggested it to me, but warned me that I’m going to love Cristina Yang and if I was smart I would stop watching at Season 10. (I kick myself everyday for not listening to her).

At fifteen, I was not the brilliant and media literate mind that you’re reading from right now. So, obviously, I let a lot of things slide. George assaulting Meredith, Derek calling Meredith a whore and generally being really awful to her, Richard being a manipulative boss, Izzie being racist to Callie, and the thing that I really let pass me by was Izzie using her power as a doctor to convince her dying boyfriend to allow her to cut his LVAD wire to move him up on the heart transplant list.

To me, Denny was the one who got away. Their story was so romantic and beautiful and tragic. You couldn’t convince me that wasn’t the man she was supposed to be with. To me, she was the victim here. The love of her life was dead.

Because of her.

If you’re not familiar with the story, Denny was a patient who came in with a bad heart and needed to get a transplant in order to live. They attempted to do many preventive surgeries on him that eventually failed or stopped putting off the inevitable. When they got the call that he was eligible for the new heart, it then came to their attention that another patient needed it more and was input onto the list 17 seconds before Denny. Izzie, who is frantic about losing the man (and patient!) she has fallen in love with, then gets the idea to cut his LVAD wire (the machine currently pumping his heart) to make his condition critical and move him up on the transplant list.

Here’s the thing — I’m all for love. Grey’s Anatomy’s appeal (besides the found family of it all) is the love stories and I think they do it the best of any show I’ve ever watched. There’s something so raw about the relationships that were depicted throughout the 1st-10th seasons. But I have to draw the line here.

(Actually with Grey’s Anatomy I draw the line in many places but that’s besides the point)

Izzie’s speech to him at his beside was the first monologue I ever memorized and it still makes me a little teary. But on my most recent rewatch, after I wiped the tears away, I was very upset about what I was watching.

While Izzie’s speech to Denny is very well acted and does evoke emotion, we have to take a closer look to what she is saying. While she is begging him to “do this for her” the “this” in question is allow her to cut his LVAD wire and momentarily die until Burke returns with the heart and can perform his heart transplant surgery.

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This is a man who has been in and out of the hospital long before he met Izzie, and is tired. And he wasn’t looking to fall in love with Izzie, he did, but it still doesn’t change the fact that he’s exhausted with hoping, with surgeries, with getting let down. So he’s ready to be done with it, and he makes the decision that if he this heart doesn’t work— he will not be trying again.

Let’s be real here, if someone you were in love with that you wanted to be with for the rest of your life told you that they no longer wanted to fight through their illness or whatever was keeping them in a hospital bed, selfishly— you would want them to keep fighting right?

That’s right — selfishly.

There’s nothing wrong with Izzie loving Denny, there’s nothing wrong with her feeling desperate to convince him to continue to live, and it is sad that he ended up dying regardless. But Izzie Stevens manipulated that man using her status as both his doctor and the woman he loved to quite literally play Russian Roulette with his life.

I just rewatched this episode last month and when I say the anger I felt was unbelievable, it’s like my TV watching frontal lobe had finally developed. Watching her hand pump Denny’s heart, literally having his life in her hands, telling him it was all going to be okay because Burke was going to come and fix it. But little did she know, she had put Burke’s life in danger too because had she just sit tight and not be an idiot he wouldn’t have come back to check on her and get his ass shot.

Not to mention Erica Hahn’s patient who had two young children and a wife died too, because he had lost the heart since Izzie cheated the system.

The reason I started writing this is because I had a very interesting back and forth with someone on Tiktok trying desperately to convince me that Izzie isn’t a bad person for loving Denny and wanting him to live. And she isn’t manipulative because she didn’t have malicious intent.

Here’s what I have to say about that — I find Izzie to be a bad person for a number of reasons. Do I think this is one of them? I have to ponder on that. I do agree that I don’t think she was rubbing her hands together that she was about to ruin her medical career, put multiple lives in danger and end up losing the love of her life so she could receive an 8 million dollar check in the mail. But I do think that what she did was awful— and she should’ve gotten fired and arrested. I do think that she didn’t consider what Denny wanted, she was focused on what she wanted for Denny, and she used her power and her position and her tears to make him concede to her. He said no, and she begged until he said yes. Is that not coercion?

manipulate

control or influence (a person or situation) cleverly, unfairly, or unscrupulously.

Do you have to have malicious intent to manipulate? I don’t believe so. I think so many people can be selfish and have tunnel vision and not even realize it and unintentionally have people suffer at the hands of what they do because they are only thinking of the ways they benefit. I guess in a TV watcher’s eyes, because Izzie was doing it in the name of love it’s a wholesome enough reason to kill your boyfriend. And how can anyone be mad at her for that?

This person on TikTok also asked me what she should’ve done instead, which made me laugh because… just about anything. They seemed to think that it was perfectly reasonable for her to make that speech to him (you know, the one where she’s begging him to let her kill him) and if she would’ve done it as his girlfriend I would be fine with it.

The truth is no, I wouldn’t have been fine with her trying to make Denny live regardless of how she planned to. I still find it selfish to beg a person in pain to stay alive for you, but maybe that’s just me.

But I do believe that once Izzie started having feelings for Denny she should’ve excused herself from his case, the way she involved herself and had a heavy hand in all of his medical decisions from the beginning was dangerous in the first place. If someone would’ve reported her then, the LVAD wire could’ve been prevented.

Both Meredith and Bailey clocked it but never said anything.

That’s another thing! Bring back snitching. If I walked in that room, she would be fired in the next 20 seconds.

Anyway, I have a lot of female characters that I genuinely dislike. The thing about disliking female characters is that you are on either sides of a spectrum, you’re either misogynistic and your hate for that female character stems from a lot of things you hate about women generally. A lot of people say they hate Izzie because she’s perky and annoying and stupid. Which I don’t think is true. Whenever she’s being “perky” I find myself more endeared to her. For first season of the show, me and her were locked in. The other end of the female character hating spectrum is where the reasonable people are, like me! The side where you can recognize that the writing is a little surface level, or maybe misogynistic itself and that the character may have deserved better writers. But still, even with that knowledge, you can’t stand her. And that’s okay! That is my problem with Izzie Stevens. I would love to love her. She’s a very interesting character, and I could sit here and dissect that it’s interesting (misogynistic) that the pretty model girly girl doctor was the one who was written to be constantly screwing up, getting too emotional and too involved — but she gets on my nerves so bad I can’t even pretend that I care enough to do that.

She’s a very interesting character, she should just be in jail and off my screen.

(And no, I don’t think Alex would’ve left Jo for her.)

#RIPJOLEX