‘The Resident’ Boss Breaks Down Where Everyone Is After That Major Twist
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Resident Season 5, Episode 5 “The Thinnest Veil.”]
Happy Halloween! There’s a murderous hitchhiker forcing Bell (Bruce Greenwood) to confront his past, Conrad (Matt Czuchry) taking a tradition from his high priestess patient to pay tribute to Nic, and Devon (Manish Dayal) wondering about the existence of ghosts in this spooky Resident. And then it all culminates in a time jump!
The last scene picks up three years later, which “allows us to inject new and different into the show,” co-showrunner and executive producer Andrew Chapman tells TV Insider. “How is everything different? That’s very liberating.”
Chapman tells us where everyone is three years later. (Plus, check out the new art above for the jump.)
Why three years?
Andrew Chapman: To be able to play lots of changes in 506 to our cast, where they are in their lives, to allow some of our people to move from residents to attendings, to allow Conrad to move past grief and into another phase of his life, which we really felt was important. The audience wants to grieve with Conrad and they do, but we felt like Episode 5 gave us closure on it, and that final scene around the dinner table gave us this wonderful closure on Nic. Three to four years allotted us to get Gigi to an age where she could really become somebody, really act. We have, as you saw, the most fantastic Gigi.
Why use that dinner to honor Nic before the jump?
We always try to have our doctors learn things from our patients and we always are interested in the way that our patients change our doctors’ lives. [It] allowed Conrad to come full circle to really get closure on the loss of Nic, and then the time jump allowed us to move past that. It’s not like he doesn’t think about Nic anymore. He does, but we didn’t want to live in eternal grief.
Tom Griscom/FOX
I was going to say there’s a lightness to Conrad in that last scene we hadn’t really seen this season. Is that the Conrad we’ll see moving forward?
Exactly. We’ve noticed now in episodes that Matt Czuchry plays Conrad [as] a different Conrad. He’s the Conrad of Season 1, a little bit of Season 2 before his and Nic’s relationship really got solidified. He’s a little bit more badass. He’s a little bit more of the renegade he used to be. It’s the Conrad we first fell in love with, not that we didn’t fall in love with his relationship with Nic — it was everything, it was the anchor of the show, but she’s gone. We have to find a new anchor. His attitude towards medicine, towards patients is going to be that. You and I talked about this, how we want to play the idea of work-life balance. He’s a single dad, and he has to make sure he’s a good dad.
Bell had quite the experience with that hitchhiker. Why have him face his past like that before the time jump?
Bell has made a really interesting shift over the course of five seasons of The Resident. He really was the villain of the show and we redeemed him. He moved past his past, his indiscretions — he got arrested for picking up a hooker, he killed a person with an appendectomy. He never really answered for them fully. This season is about Bell coming to grips with who he was and who he is now. It’s a redemption season, but it’s not all redemption. It’s gotta be facing the past fully and firmly. The hitchhiker story was part of that, that idea that you really have to talk about the things you’ve done, admit that they were not great, so you can move past them. You’ll see in some way, shape or form, he’s going to have to talk to Kit [Jane Leeves] about what he was, the man he was before he knew her. After the time jump, they will be in a relationship. Kit and Bell will be the thing that everyone’s been asking for, our fun, loving older couple, the power couple of the hospital.
Tom Griscom/FOX
That was my next question: Please tell me they got that dinner in those three years.
They did. They got that dinner. It’s so funny because we track what people say on TV Insider and different websites and Twitter, and they love Kit and Bell. They love the sophisticated back and forth, the will they, won’t they, and now they’re going to be a full-blown couple, but they’ll be a full-blown couple in a way that is not dissimilar to the way they’ve been for the past season or so. They still deal with each other’s foibles and issues. There’s still that sophisticated, fun, back and forth dialogue where they’re teasing and not always on the same side. We love that part of their relationship and don’t want to lose that.
Before the time jump, there were two established couples — Devon and Leela (Anuja Joshi), Jessica (Jessica Miesel) and Feldman (Tasso Feldman) — and Kit and Bell were undefined. So three established relationships now?
Yeah. Devon and Leela are hot and heavy and in a way our central relationship because they’re young and trying to figure out how to be in love and a couple while also working crazy hours at a hospital and saving lives. It’s not a done deal that they’re going to ride off into the sunset as the perfect couple. Jessica and Feldman will also have a big storyline about children. How will that play out? Will they be able to do that?
Tom Griscom/FOX
What’s going on Chastain? Kit’s still CEO, right?
Kit’s still CEO. It’s still a public hospital. She’s still fighting to reform the system and make it better. Bell will be trying to help her be a better CEO. There are plenty of big moral, ethical issues that she’ll tackle. Bell, as I said, will face a redemption story and have to deal with that. He’s gonna play a big part in the rest of the season. He’s going to face obstacles in his life and his work.
Leela’s in her final year of residency. Devon goes from resident to full-blown attending and is going to both work in the ER and start doing clinical trials of drugs and procedures. He’s going to be the scientist doctor in the hospital. Billie [Jessica Lucas], I’m not going to give away what she becomes, but she’s full-blown attending and a badass neurosurgeon. Raptor [Malcolm-Jamal Warner] will be dealing with his mom because she’s not all the way cured. That’s going to be a constant source of heartbreak for him and concern and worry. He’ll be diving back into the romance world. There’s a great romantic surprise for Raptor, and it plays right at the beginning of Episode 6. But he also is going to be a big star in the world of medical media people. He writes a book and gets really famous and he’ll have to deal with that and the repercussions of that.
Conrad will start Episode 6 not working at Chastain anymore. He’s given up the hospital gig because he needs more flexibility to be with Gigi, to have his life in order. At the same time, he desperately misses Chastain, and Chastain desperately misses him and wants him back. It’s super interesting and fun and really lets us delve into what he’s been doing for those three years.
Tom Griscom/FOX
I had a feeling, since the Episode 6 logline says he brings a patient to the hospital.
He’s moved on to become what we call a concierge doctor. He’s on call to help people in various places, but he always has a relationship with the hospital. He can still come in and has privileges at the hospital and can still work as a doctor there, but he’s not full-time. Part of Episode 6 is people at the hospital going, “Hey, you need to come back and work here. This is your calling. This is where you belong.”
What can you say about Billie and Trevor’s relationship?
After the time jump, you’ll see that Billie and Trevor have moved to a whole new place and Billie is more at peace about Trevor and what he is to her. He’s gone to medical school, and you’ll see that in Episode 7, he’s an intern at Chastain. Now he and Billie have to work out how they’re going to have a relationship because they both work at the same hospital. As we say, s**t gets real and people have to come to terms with that
Is AJ going to be in the middle of that?
Absolutely, 100 percent. He’s Trevor’s mentor. He helped him go through medical school. He helped him get into Chastain. That’s really a great triangle.
Tom Griscom/FOX
Leela’s sister is visiting in the next episode. What can you tease?
It’s very much [about that] work-life balance. Her sister is a free spirit, and Leela believes in hard work and the calling of being a doctor, and so the two of them are very much in conflict about that. It’s really two sides of what it is to be a doctor in the hospital. She’s definitely the opposite of Leela and yet very much similar to Leela. How do you live your life fully? And how do you come to terms with working 24/7 saving lives and having a calling in life? We explore that very deeply between the two of them.
Bell and AJ are also going to be going after the same position at the hospital. I imagine that’ll be so much fun to watch.
Oh my God, those two guys have a bunch of storylines going forward and they are so fun together. They’re just such great actors. They’re so experienced. They’re so confident. They’re such alpha males, wanting to be top dog, and seeing the two of them go at each other, it’s fabulous.
What is that position?
It’s chief of surgery.
The Resident, Tuesdays, 8/7c, Fox
