Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-96.58.140.224-20140723205101/@comment-5278765-20140723223234

Grey's is timeywimey. Shonda has always maintained that. Trying to nail down a specific date is almost never going to happen. The best we can do is approximate using dates mentioned within the show, even if they contradict each other (which happens). We try to rely mostly on passage of time when we're doing the timeline. There are very few characters for whom we know a date of birth or an age.

We don't actually know for sure that Richard and Ellis were interns in that year that was showed. Given that they operated on a patient solo, they actually probably weren't. And it seemed as if their affair had been going for a while. But again, Grey's is super timeywimey, so no, we're never going to have a definitive timeline. The timeline page is just to give you an idea of the passage of time and we put dates in there only when they're explicitly stated on screen. Like we know that Mark was born in 1968 and died in 2012 because it was written on screen.