For the Season 3 finale of their hit ABC crime drama, “Will Trent” creators and showrunners Liz Heldens and Daniel Thomsen wanted to create an epic two-part event, in the vein of “ER,” which would put all of its main characters in jeopardy. They have certainly delivered on that promise, leaving the lives of two beloved characters hanging in the balance.
Tuesday’s season finale marks the conclusion of a bioweapons attack on the city of Atlanta, orchestrated by a domestic terrorist group known as the Founder’s Front.
As protagonist Will Trent (Ramón Rodríguez) and the rest of his team at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Atlanta Police Department raced to contain the threat and save hundreds of thousands of lives, Will was forced to confront the complex dynamics of his own biological family — namely his connection to Caleb Broussard (Yul Vazquez), a sheriff who had been revealed in the penultimate episode to be Will’s biological father.
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“It felt like a fun challenge for us to do a really big episode with a lot going on, with Will having to go against his instincts and move away from his found family in jeopardy,” Heldens told Variety.
After Will’s dog sitter Nico (Cora Lu Tran) began to fall ill at a hospital, Will and Caleb went to investigate the encampment of a deceased homeless man, and they discovered that plastic toxic takeout containers in the area had been secretly contaminated with Clostridium botulinum, a bacteria that attacks the central nervous system.
Ormewood (Jake McLaughlin), Faith (Iantha Richardson) and Franklin (Kevin Daniels) were tasked with escorting the first batch of CDC-approved antitoxin from a warehouse to the hospital, but a corrupt cop, who was part of the Founder’s Front, led them directly into an ambush in an area without a GPS or radio signal.
To make matters worse, the terrorists then took Deputy Director Amanda Wagner (Sonja Sohn) hostage in her own office at the GBI and demanded the release of another member from police custody in exchange for her life. Despite the threat to Amanda’s life, Will was forced to leave with Caleb to find the lab where the bacteria were being aerosolized.
Thankfully, Angie (Erika Christensen), the detective who was hiding in the bathroom at the time of the attack, hatched a plan to successfully kill the terrorists in the office — but she was unable to react in time to stop one of them from shooting Amanda in the chest.
Meanwhile, Ormewood, Faith and Franklin successfully fought off a bunch of Founder’s Front members, with the help of a van full of junior national archery champions at the crime scene (!) who were able to shoot flaming arrows into enemy territory. And just when it appeared that one last gunman was going to shoot Ormewood point blank, Will, who had forced a worker in the makeshift lab to reveal the location of the ambush, hit the terrorist with his car and saved the day.
The antitoxin was then successfully transported to the hospital. But later that evening, Ormewood, who had recently been diagnosed with a brain tumor, unexpectedly collapsed in his kitchen.
“The biggest challenge for us was making sure that we didn’t lose the emotions that we have come to really love from this show,” Thomsen said. “It was all about teeing up all of these character stories that would be blossoming — or wilting — at the same time, so that you could have a bio attack and then, in the midst of it, all of this stuff going on that still keeps you really tethered to the individual character journeys.”
As they prepare to reopen the writers’ room for Season 4, which will premiere in early 2026, Heldens and Thomsen break down those two emotional cliffhangers, what Angie’s pregnancy with Dr. Seth McDale (Scott Foley) will mean for her future with Will — and why they have chosen to introduce a brand new character as Will’s father but not a pivotal one from executive producer Karin Slaughter’s novels.
In the final minutes of the finale, Amanda is left in a coma after barely making it through her surgery, with Will pleading with her to wake up, and Ormewood suffers a seizure at the home he shares with Faith. How did you settle on these two cliffhangers?
Liz Heldens: For Will, I think that having his father come into his life and having his surrogate mother be threatened feels right to us. I was on set when that [final] hospital scene was being shot, and I was so moved. It was 2:00 in the morning, but he’s never said any of these things to her. They’re both so weird about feelings and a lot of stuff is left unsaid with them, which, as a writer, I really like.
But it was the first time you saw him really say what she means in his life and that he understood that she’s a stabilizing force for him, and there’s so much change happening in his life right now and he can’t lose her. So it just seemed like a real, emotional cliffhanger — and hopefully, he can say those things to her when she gets better and she can hear him.
Daniel Thomsen: On the Ormewood side of things, because the big revelation of his tumor happens at the end of Episode 14, we wanted to try and thread the needle of, on the one hand, he’s taking steps [to get his affairs in order].
But on the other hand, he’s a little bit in denial and he’s not quite ready to get the surgery because he’s not ready to go. He’s not ready for the surgery to have an unexpected complication. He’s not ready to get potentially really bad news about what the tumor is.
So we thought that it would be interesting that when he told his kids — which was a really powerful moment for me — there’s a little pre-scene that was Liz’s idea, that I thought was incredibly well-done. As he’s psyching himself up to go in to talk to his kids about his tumor, he’s in the other room listening to them play and give each other shit, and he’s like, “These are my kids.
I love them so much. They’re a part of me. And I have to go change their world right now.” So all of that stuff is really tough. But I think there’s something dramatic very interesting about how this entire crew has just saved the world, and now he deserves a beer and then … clunk. He can’t avoid his fate any longer.
