Grey’s Anatomy season 18, episode 9 said goodbye to beloved Irish doctor, Cormac Hayes and his departure is familiar, as other Meredith love interests have suffered the same fate. This isn’t the first time that the writers have discarded a character that Meredith was no longer interested in; the same thing happened to Nathan Riggs at the end of season 13. Both characters had sudden and poorly plotted exits from the show.
After Owen confessed to providing Noah drugs to kill him while trapped in the car on the cliff, he asks Hayes to provide the same drugs to three other veterans with similar conditions if Owen ends up dying in the fall. Hayes returns to the hospital with a new conundrum: is he okay with helping Owen? Ultimately, the answer is no, and when an alive Owen returns to the hospital, he asks Hayes to forget the confession. Hayes doesn’t believe he can in good faith allow Owen to continue. He goes to Miranda to tell her what Owen did, but when she sings praises about him, Hayes decides to resign instead of turn in Owen.
Hayes’s exit is very similar to one of Meredith’s other love interests, Riggs. After Riggs and Meredith got together, the relationship went stale, and there wasn’t much the writers could do in terms of storylines. So they decided to bring back Megan, Riggs’s lost fiancée, which gave Riggs an out as he resigned and moved to Malibu with her. Both Hayes and Riggs were written into Grey's Anatomy to act as Meredith Grey’s love interests, and the writers didn’t have anything planned for them beyond that. This fact was made clear from how little viewers know about both characters outside of their relationships with Meredith. The two were written off the show once they no longer served their original purpose.
Additionally, both departures were very sudden, random, and poorly planned out. When Riggs heard of Megan’s return, he and Meredith made the mutual and sudden decision to end their relationship, so he could be with Megan. Hayes and Meredith vaguely ended their relationship early in Grey's Anatomy season 18 due to his son’s panic attacks (although later it’s revealed that Hayes broke it off with Meredith because of his own struggles). Riggs left soon after Megan’s return, and Hayes left suddenly after admitting to the same Megan that he broke up with Meredith for his own reasons. It’s clear that the writers didn’t really see either character as valuable on their own, so they were haphazardly discarded, leading to some awkward exits.
At the end of the Grey's Anatomy episode, Meredith laments to her current love interest about how hard her day was as Owen was in surgery and another one of her friends is resigning, showing that Meredith no longer really cares about her relationship with Hayes. Given Riggs' and Hayes’s departures, it begs the question of what the plan is for Meredith’s current love interest, Nick Marsh. He was on the show originally for a few episodes, again as Meredith’s love interest, but exited when Meredith rejected him. It’s safe to assume the same fate might be in the cards for Nick once Meredith moves on from him, as well.
Grey's Anatomy releases new episodes Thursdays on ABC.