Have we seen the last of the proverbial devil on Will Trent’s shoulder?
We’re of course talking about the notorious James Ulster, played on and off since Season 1 by Greg Germann. In Season 1, the serial killer was thrown in prison for his myriad crimes against humanity, including the years-ago murder of Will’s mother, Lucy Morales. He escaped in the Season 4 premiere, then took a bullet for Will that ended his life.
But that wasn’t the last we saw of him. Ulster continued to haunt Will throughout the season, serving, as another famed TV serial killer might put it, as his dark passenger.
He was last seen in Season 4, Episode 12, after Will was left for dead in Puerto Rico by Ulster’s previously unknown daughter, Adelaide Clemens (played by Mallory Jansen), who kidnapped Antonio and later orchestrated the murder of Will’s longtime mentor, GBI Deputy Director Amanda Wagner (Sonja Sohn).
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Is James Ulster Gone for Good?
Adelaide was eventually shot and killed by Will, and Antonio was rescued, seemingly bringing the Ulster arc to a definitive close. But when TVLine spoke with “Will Trent” co-showrunners Liz Heldens, Karine Rosenthal, and Daniel Thomsen late last week to post-mortem Tuesday’s Season 4 finale (ABC, 8/7c), we had to ask: Has Will truly put the murderer who shaped his life behind him?
“It’s a tough thing to answer,” Thomsen admitted. “I’ve said before that Ulster is one of those characters that, we’ll have an idea for him, and then when we see [him in action], we want more of it because it’s just so fun. But I definitely think that as we were ending the story this season, we all kind of had the feeling that we were turning the page.
“It’s not to say that we won’t find a scenario in which there’s a fresh way that Ulster could reappear on Will’s shoulder and bring something to the story that is unexpected,” Thomsen continued. “If we could find something like that, I would always love to bring Ulster back — but it did, to us, feel like Adelaide’s death and recovering Antonio, and the closure that Will got emotionally from all of that, felt like it added up to him making some progress, and that he wouldn’t necessarily be haunted as acutely as he has been.”