"I wanted to see his last day [alive] really badly," she says. "What I thought was interesting was the idea of, we now know it's the last day of someone's life, [so we’re] looking at it differently than [we] would any other time."
Viewers would have also seen firsthand how George's split-second decision to save that girl's life cost him his own. "I wanted to see the moment he leapt in front of the bus," Rhimes confirms. "I wanted to bookend the episode [so that] the first time you see him leap in front of the bus, it's really scary. But the second time you see it, he's a hero.
"I thought it would have been a beautiful episode," she continues, adding that, had we seen those missing hours, "We might have learned something new about George."