‘Will Trent’ Finale Bioweapons Attack: Amanda Coma, Ormewood Seizure

SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains major spoilers from “Listening to a Heartbeat,” the Season 3 finale of ABC’s “Will Trent,” streaming on Hulu on May 14.

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 marked 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.

“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 tells 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 takeout containers in the area had been deliberately contaminated with Clostridium botulinum, a toxic 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 was being aerosolized. Thankfully, Angie (Erika Christensen), the detective who was hidden in the bathroom at the time of the attack, hatched a plan to successfully kill the terrorists in the offices — 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 hospitals. 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 says. “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 felt 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 see him really say what she means in his life and that he understands 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 tells 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 dramatically 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.

You introduced Greg Germann as James Ulster, the convicted serial killer who claimed he was Will’s biological father, at the end of Season 1, but you then introduced Sheriff Caleb Broussard as Will’s real biological father in Season 3. Did you always know that you were going to play out a different kind of father-son story than what you had initially presented to viewers? What inspired that change?

Thomsen: We did introduce Ulster first, and his story is much closer to how it unfolds in the books. I think at a certain point, we were feeling like that option was just laying there and it felt a little expected, so we were leaning away from it for that reason. But also, there’s no redemption for Ulster. We enjoy him when he is in scenes with Will; when we’re writing for him, it’s so much fun. We want him back on the show, but there’s no emotional territory that could rival introducing a new character who is closer to him.

We wanted to make sure to introduce Caleb as a different kind of law enforcement officer, somebody who had a different approach to the job and some different philosophies for what justice is and what his responsibilities are. But you can see that they are a little bit like two peas in a pod. One of the things about Yul that took me by surprise is when we originally conceived of the character, I thought that there would be even more friction between them. As Yul inhabited the character, I just wanted to see them together so much more. So, if anything, I think our challenge next season is just trying to find a way to make sure that there’s tension and that they don’t completely fall in love with each other.

Heldens: I think James Ulster will probably have a point of view on Will finding his actual biological father, and that’ll be a story well for us.

Angie being pregnant with Seth’s baby will certainly throw a wrench in her on-again, off-again relationship with Will, who, despite being thrown for a loop by the news, still agrees to accompany Angie for her first ultrasound. At the same time, becoming a mother could be an opportunity for Angie to heal some of the childhood trauma that she had suffered at the hands of her own late mother. Why did you decide to proceed with this storyline, knowing that it will completely shift Will and Angie’s dynamic forever?

Heldens: I think that relationship is the beating heart of our show. They’ve known each other since they were children. They are, in many ways, the only person that really, truly understands the other one. In [their] last scene when they’re looking at the ultrasound, Will has a lot of feelings about it, Angie has a lot of feelings about it, and they have that conversation where they’re finishing each other’s sentences. They don’t have to speak in full sentences to each other; they both know what the other one’s feeling right now.

We haven’t found the thing that will drive a wedge between them yet. Even when he arrested her [at the end of Season 2], they didn’t talk for a long time, and then they started working a case together. We really wanted them to, without thinking about it, joke around a little bit before Angie remembered how angry she was. So I think that will always be true. We all love writing scenes with them; we all love the two of them together. We don’t know where it’s going to land. But having Angie embark on that journey seemed like a good story for her, and having Will have to see it and still find himself showing up for her — it’s that delicious awkwardness that we all really love to find in life in our writings, so it just seemed like it would bear fruit for us.

Is your writers’ room as divided as the audience when it comes to whom Angie should end up with?

Heldens: It’s a good question. I think for us, life is happening to these characters. You just change. You’re not frozen in amber. So everybody loves them together; everybody loves them separately. I think we all just want to see growth and change, and see them continue to have friction. So I don’t know. We’ve never taken a poll, have we, Dan?

Thomsen: I don’t think we have. But I’ll pick a moment this season. When they’re making the plans to send Will off to the cult to go undercover [in Episode 12], there was a really great scene where Angie is just like, “This is a bad idea. I’m the only person saying this. Amanda, you’re his mom. Step in here.” Despite all the shit that they’ve gone through and all that she has vocalized in previous episodes about how “you blew up this relationship,” there’s still that love. So there’s been a lot of questions about: Does that become an endgame, romantic love? I would be shocked if we could find something that breaks them up as two humans who go through life together, but I don’t know exactly what the final form of their relationship looks like yet.

Looking ahead, what are you hoping to accomplish with Season 4?

Heldens: You are catching us in our time to rest and try to get inspired, but we have set some things in motion. Will has this chosen family, and he’s going to find out what it feels like to deal with the family that the universe gives you. Angie’s going to be on this journey with being pregnant. I’m excited to see her out to here [gestures a big belly] pregnant and being a badass.

Thomsen: Liz and I love broadcast TV. We grew up watching broadcast, so we know what the assignment is. We know that this is a show where the ecosystem’s gotta stay a little bit the same, but we love trying to find the most amount of metamorphosis within that where you don’t break apart what people love about the show. We’ve been talking about that scene between Will and Amanda, and what Will’s able to say to Amanda while she is under anesthesia. But if that had happened in the middle of Season 1, even with Amanda out, I don’t think he would’ve been able to say that. I think that he has changed so much, and this was the right time for this event to happen because we’ve experienced, along with Will, a great amount of change already. I do think that in Season 4, we’re looking for new ways to kick that change even further for everybody on the show.

Gina Rodriguez’s District Attorney Marion Alba was a welcome addition to the cast, and I found myself genuinely rooting for her and Will before they decided to hit pause on their tender romance. Is the door open for her to return next season?

Heldens: We love her. She’s a spectacular actor and human. I don’t know the answer to that, but the door absolutely could be open. There’s no story reason why she couldn’t come back.

Thomsen: I think Will has stuff that he wants to say to her, and we just hope we get a shot. She’s busy! She’s a star.

Sara Linton is a really important character in the “Will Trent” book series, and you have presumably had conversation about whether to introduce that character into your screen adaptation at some point down the line. How are you navigating those creative conversations about what you would like to incorporate from the books into the show and what changes you feel need to be made to serve the story that you want to tell?

Heldens: Part of what happened for us is that we cast Erika Christensen as Angie, and then once you see how much range and depth you have in that character, it’s a little bit hard to not start putting your money on that character. I guess my answer to that is, I don’t know.

Thomsen: I do feel like our Angie on the show has become kind of a hybrid of Angie and Sarah, just in terms of what the emotional relationship with Will is capable of. Angie in the books is a harsher character who isn’t as good for Will and doesn’t stand on her own as well, and we made a decision very early on that our Angie had to be able to do more. We wanted the audience to really invest in that character on her own, not just as Will’s girlfriend. So I don’t have anything concrete to add about Sara, other than I feel like the show wasn’t calling out for it this season. Between the really complicated state of this relationship with Angie, and Gina being able to do 10 episodes with us, I don’t think we felt like that was a piece that we needed to add.

This interview has been edited and condensed.