‘Will Trent’ Bosses Explain That Heartbreaking New Death & What’s Next for Season 5

Tragedy struck again in Will Trent‘s Season 4 finale. Warning: Spoilers for Will Trent Season 4 Episode 18, “Be of Service,” ahead!

As the team continued to reel from the death of their boss, they faced the unthinkable once more. While Will (Ramón Rodríguez), Faith (Iantha Richardson), Michael Ormewood (Jake McLaughlin), and Franklin (Kevin Daniels) investigated a kidnapping that had major implications for the sex trafficking case they’d grappled with before — and could implicate some very powerful people even in their own organizations — Angie (Erika Christensen) finally went into labor.

As she and Dr. Seth (Scott Foley) headed to the hospital, they were both completely blissed out over their bundle on the way and very much in love with one another. But that’s when they were T-boned by a careless driver who struck the passenger side. Seth appeared to be uninjured, assisting both Angie and the other driver, but after Angie was taken back, he discovered the massive bruising on his ribs that indicated internal bleeding. Though Angie delivered a healthy baby girl named Edie, she was simply too depressed by Seth’s death to care for the child. (We were hoping Scott Foley’s grim prediction earlier this season that Seth wouldn’t “get the girl” was just a for-fun misdirect, but it appears he was telling the truth there. Sob.)

Immediately, “Uncle” Will took a leave of absence and spent months — with Nico’s help (Cora Lu Tran) — caring for the baby until Angie was ready. Once she recovered from her depression, she and Will became something of a family unit, taking walks together through the park, sharing a Christmas tree, and working together to raise little Edie. It’s a very bittersweet moment for the two, who’d always wanted to have a family together somehow.

All the while, back at headquarters, Faith continued to lead the charge on tracking down connections to the trafficking case, and, thanks to a new program, Will and Ormewood became cross-departmental partners. The episode ended with the five heroes, including Will and Angie, finally returning, looking at their clue board and ready to take on this mountain of a case together.

So with that, the season concluded with another shocking death, a beautiful new addition, a great leap forward in time, a shakeup in the office dynamics ahead, and a case that will cross over seasons. To break down all of this and get a sense of what’s ahead in Season 5, TV Insider caught up with coshowrunners Liz Heldens, Daniel T. Thomsen, and Karine Rosenthal.

This season had not one, but two major tragedies. What are you trying to do to us?!

Liz Heldens: Going into Season 5, it just really felt like we needed a reset and some new energy, and some new dynamics… These were really hard and emotional decisions for the writers. There was a lot of back and forth in the room, but, eventually, we did what we thought was best for the future of the show. But yeah, both of them are heartbreakers for sure.

Poor Angie. With Seth, she was really in a place where she was happy and confident for the first time, it seemed like. We do get to see in the epilogue, the look-ahead that she does kind of bounce back from that. But going to Season 5, do you think that trauma is going to stick with her?

Heldens: What I hope sticks with her is the experience and the maturity that she gained from being in a relationship that was functioning. It was really two adults, give and take. I don’t think she’s going to carry the trauma with her in terms of — none of it was her fault. It wasn’t anything she brought on. I hope she looks at Seth as a gift that she got and that it will bring her closer with Will in the future, eventually. So that’s what I hope.

Disney / Daniel Delgado Jr.

With Will — since, in the many months that passed by after the baby’s birth, we don’t get to find out whether he’s still getting those ghostly visits from Ulster — is that just a product of Season 4, or do you think that’s something that he’ll continue to struggle with?

Heldens: I think Will’s creativity as a detective is his ability to put himself in the shoes of victims and killers and all of that stuff. And I think that James Ulster escaping prison at the top of this past season brought up a lot of trauma for him, but … it feels like we’re gonna leave that in the past…

Daniel Thomsen: I mean, with the caveat that frequently, what happens is we have an idea for James Ulster, and then we see him on screen again, and we realize we want to make the idea bigger and have it go on for longer because it’s just a delightful character, and it brings out a side of Will that we don’t really get from anybody else. But, yeah, I mean, I think as we were trying to land this season, our feeling was very much that we had an end point for that story, where he was going to get his uncle back, and Adelaide was gonna die, and that kind of really resolved that chapter of his life so that then we could move on for the remainder of the season and kind of launch a new, forward-looking direction. And I think right now, our plan would be to kind of keep looking in the forward.

I liked the paralleling a lot, with the Adelaide case and then with Amanda’s death, of Will processing that trauma of him being left behind as a baby, and then kind of dovetailing into him taking Angie’s baby when she needed the help. Was that parallel intentional? And do you think that kind of was a healing point for Will?

Heldens: Yeah, I mean, it was always meant to be that there was this new life in the world and there’s hope. And when you have children, you get a chance to have a do-over. And I think he was probably always going to be in that baby’s life in some capacity. But I think he thought he was going to like, “I’ll just come to the birthday party and stay for 15 minutes and then leave.” [Laughs] And then he ended up taking such a bigger role. And I think in doing that, he found hope, and he found joy, and he found a little peace for himself. So that was always the intention.

And it seemed like he warmed up to it, too. Because at first he’s giving that awkward little handshake to the baby and introducing himself as “Uncle Will,” but then he’s a natural.

Heldens: Yeah. That was something we came into the room with at the beginning of the season. Didn’t know any of the details of all the tragedy, but we sort of had an idea that maybe that would be a place we could head.

The question that’s always on every fan’s mind is, “Is there a romantic future between Angie and Will?” Now that Seth is gone and they’re kind of having this pseudo-family relationship, do you have any thoughts on that? Or is it possible that Season 5, maybe we’ll see Sara Linton, who some book fans have been looking forward to?

Heldens: I mean, I think that Angie and Will are the beating heart of this show. And I don’t know what the future is going to bring — we’re still all trying to take a little break, but we’ll get into it. But it is nice to have them close again. And, I mean, I have friends who were like, “I miss Will and Angie having scenes together. I miss them.” And it is nice to get them really, really in each other’s orbit and helping each other and pulling each other through like they have been.

Karine Rosenthal: Yeah, I think it’ll be really nice to see them… We don’t need to rush to have the two of them be romantically involved anymore because they get to be together in a new way that we haven’t seen before. That’s kind of been the exciting thing about those two. They’re such a special relationship, but at each stage of the series, we’ve seen them in very different configurations. And so this end of the season, into next season, is a whole new way, where it’s like healthy friends, co-parenting, very special people. And so we’ll see whether another person comes into that mix and then they have to navigate that again, or if it slowly leads to them trying again at some point, we’ll see. We’ll see how the series progresses.

Disney / Daniel Delgado Jr.

I also enjoyed what you guys did with the changes in the personnel dynamic, with APD and GBI kind of coming together now. And that shot of the five of them at the end looking at the board, it’s like the Avengers assemble. Is that the vibe we’re going for, to bring them closer together — especially Will and Ormewood getting to pair up? We haven’t seen much of that.  

Heldens: I think it was in Episode 5, “Nice to Meet You, Malcolm,” when Ormewood and Will are sitting in his Porsche, and they’re kind of talking and bonding and giving each other s**t, and we were just like, “More of that, more of that, let’s do that!” And I always love when Angie and Faith work together or have scenes together. I mean, it’s not forever, but it just seemed like a fun [idea] going into Season 5: “Let’s just do a little shuffle and see how that feels.”

I also like that you took the trafficking case across seasons, too, because that’s so topical and relevant to the current day. You kind of hinted at Epstein without saying it and not delving too far into that. Can you talk about walking that line with the politics and then also just making a cross-season story that’s clearly going to be huge?

Thomsen: I think, for us, this is a story we’ve been wanting to do since Season 1… I mean, it feels very timely now because of the release of the Epstein thing. But I think what helps take it out of the realm of politics and put it just into the realm of being human is, at the end of the day, it’s just about power dynamics and abuse of power dynamics. And one of the things it’s like we’re getting this Avengers assembling thing. But I also really love the vibe of, “We’re going to be in this little storage room, we’re going to stay off the grid, we’re going to bend some of the rules of what the APD is going to get into because it keeps us off the radar of people who might be compromised at the GBI.” I like telling a story that’s just about power corrupts, and we’ve got these good guys who aren’t going to let that hold them back. And I think that that’s kind of timeless, but also it’s not lost on any of us that this is a great time to keep it fresh in people’s minds that we can’t excuse this kind of behavior.

This season’s caseload was totally very different. There were so many different things going on… Which case and which adventure for these guys was the most fun for you to explore this season?

Thomsen: For me, it was undoubtedly the orchestra episode…. My reasons for that are a little bit inside baseball, in the sense that it was a new challenge as a producer. We worked very closely with our show’s composer, Joe Wong, who actually created original music for that. It was the first time on Will Trent we had a chance to record live with musicians in an orchestra setting, and just the whole challenge of it was really fresh and unique. And I thought our show wore it really well. I remember when we were getting ready to make that episode, a reference that Liz throws out there was, “This should be like our Only Murders in the Building episode,” and kind of trying to find a way to kind of squish that tone into what we do, I think it turned out great. So it was a lot of fun to make, and I thought the results were really amazing.

Heldens: Yeah, Natalia Anderson directed that, and she just knocked it out of the park. And, yeah, we just wanted to have really specific, odd characters that are artists, and I remember Dan saying in the casting concept, “These people take what they do very seriously. They take themselves very seriously, and that’s what we’re doing.” And so I like the little two-parter with Faith and Malcolm. I really thought that turned out great. I thought I actually loved the season opener, that was really fun, and Ramon directed that. I mean, there is all kinds of — the fun thing about our show is that somebody wants to do like, “I want to do a noir thing,” if somebody wants to do kind of an episode that starts out funny, like, it looks like it’s an alien abduction, but then that turns into the sex-trafficking case… I like how many tones our show can hold, and that’s a credit to the cast. We’re all just outstanding, our supporting players, the casting in Atlanta is really great.

Thomsen: We can have a very dangerous serial killer in James Ulster, and then we can also have him be kidnapped and held inside a canned goods warehouse by Michaela Watkins, pretty impressive.

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Heldens: But it helps us kind of stay creatively focused, too, that it’s not the same every week, but my favorite episodes, time and time again, are the episodes where the whole cast is working on the same thing. Same cake. Yeah, we can’t do it all the time because it gets unwieldy. But those, I think, are fan favorites, and they’re our favorites, too.

One of the things that I was excited to see this season was a return to the dream Will. Granted, it was in the morgue this time, and he was solving a case along the way, but he still had that chance to kind of do some subconscious exploration. Last year was a disco dream, and he has this kind of revelation that he doesn’t love Gina Rodriguez‘s character; this time, he’s having these little jabs at Seth and taking the jabs from Seth and exploring his true feelings there. So can you just talk about that device and playing with that, how fun that must be? 

Rosenthal: Yeah, it was very fun. We kind of had an idea for this episode where he — Kath Lingenfelter, one of our writers, had the idea of him being trapped in a morgue drawer and doing something like a Jacob’s Ladder kind of thing. And we weren’t sure where it was going to go … When we first started playing with it, we weren’t sure if it was going to be part of the Ulster story, or what, and then it became clear, “This will be a good thing post-Amanda.” So it was kind of a way to give Will the space to say things to Amanda, experience things with Amanda, remember things that we couldn’t do ahead of time. We couldn’t have some special scene before she dies, where he says, “Amanda, I’ve never told you before that I love you” because then the audience is like, “Oh, she’s gonna die,” that kind of thing. So once we realized that, it was really a special thing to get to play with.

And then also just kind of looking at how we can keep it our show, and we have to be solving a crime at the same time. Otherwise, if we’re just in Will’s personal story, we’re not going to be caring about what’s happening on the outside world. Finding the way that they balanced and getting to let him solve one last crime with Amanda, while kind of grappling with his feelings about what’s happening on the outside, it was really great. It was really fun to do.

Heldens: One of the hallmarks of Will and Amanda’s relationship is that neither one of these people are comfortable saying their feelings. They’re not going to look at each other and say the subtext. They just can’t. And I remember, I think I was pretty strict about not allowing a hug. I just was like, “That’s not what these people do. They don’t know how to say their emotions.” And so it was this chance that they got to say things to each other that they we couldn’t stomach in real life.

Season 5, I know you said you’re taking a break right now, but have you got any overarching hopes or anything that you want to tell fans to look forward to and what’s next?

Rosenthal: Well, we will have a new deputy director of the GBI coming in. So, for the fans who assumed that we were grooming Appleyard for the position, he was more of a stepping stone. He might be back to help with some transition, but there will be a new person with a new dynamic for Will and Faith, and that’ll be interesting, and hopefully set up some new types of conflict. And then, we’re excited about having the big trafficking story that really kind of centers Faith and Angie and is there as kind of a touchstone, but it’s not like the whole show will be about that every week. It just kind of will be nice to have that ongoing case and the new fun partner dynamics that we set up.

Will Trent, ABC & Hulu