[Spoilers for “The Blank Expanse of Nothing”]
It’s been a minute since I’ve had a good, old-fashioned rant about a TV series, so I’m overdue. If you’ve followed me on IG the last few years (hi!), you know that I yell often and loud about my love for Will Trent. Well, last night they made a choice that can’t walk back, and I really wish they could. I had a good WTAF screed ready to roll on my stories when my phone died and saved me from the post-sleep-oops cycle. But then today I was still salty about it, so here goes. Settle in.
I adore Will Trent. I love the cast. I love the characters. I love the camaraderie that bleeds through both sides. They all seem to really like and enjoy each other. And they’re a big group that’s grown from the initial collection of GBI and APD members who freely wander in and out of each other’s crime scenes to now include their assorted friends and situationships.
The last couple of seasons have veered hella dark, and into places that typically have me picking up and finding my entertainment elsewhere. Breaking up the on-again/off-again lifelong pairing of Will and Angie, then having her meet someone else, someone solid (Dr. Seth, played by Scott Foley), then lose her mom and have all that trauma resurface, and then fall off the wagon and discover she was pregnant was A LOT. It was a fantastic landscape to show people who’ve slept on Erika Christensen just how good she is, but it was a hard watch.
On the titular character side of the house, Will’s been through it, too. He turned Angie in for concealing a murderer, losing his BFF and life partner to date in the process, met someone else who experienced her own trauma and left, accidentally shot a child, reconnected with an uncle who has now been kidnapped by the serial killer daughter of the man he thought was his father, who killed his mother while he was in utero, and with whom he himself was abducted before that man was killed by their abductor, and then met his actual father, a local sheriff. See what I mean?
At certain points this season, we’ve watched his psyche fracture into a dream quest of reality vs. imagination. Series star and producer Ramón Rodrìguez campaigned HARD for an Emmy last year after delivering an extraordinary performance and was denied. I hope someone is paying attention this year, because I have a feeling he’s about to go off. More on that in a minute.
And that’s just the trauma for TWO of the leads across three and three-quarter seasons.
Which brings me to GBI Director Amanda Wagner. Played by the fierce Sonja Sohn, Amanda has been Will’s guardian angel from afar. She was an Atlanta uniformed patrol officer and friendly with his mom, who was murdered. She found him as a newborn in a trash can afterward and placed him in foster care, with the name Wilbur Trent after her father. Unaware of what that foster system was inflicting on him, she saved him again when he entered the legal system as a juvenile and she changed his path, bringing him into the GBI and finally becoming the mother figure to him she regretted not being years earlier.
They’ve been each other’s family and rock. He nearly lost her in the Season 3 finale when she took a bullet. The last moment of that episode is Will settling his beloved dog Betty on the couch in Amanda’s hospital room and pulling a chair alongside the bed to sit beside her and wait for her to wake up. Without formal confirmation until filming started, we wondered whether she’d survive. She did, and this season explored the PTSD of her shooting, her physical recovery, and her vulnerability about that recovery that allowed her to be conned by a romantic partner.
Last night, we lost her for real. In the final moments of the episode, Will’s S4 Moriarty, the aforementioned daughter, Adelaide (Mallory Jansen, whose casting was always a tell), dangled the carrot of recovering his uncle in front of him while she had one of her disciples murder Amanda and leave her body on the sidewalk for him to find.
I’ve talked before about how time slows for me when I see something coming, and I could sense this was looming when Amanda, very much against type, said a prayer out loud, exited her car, and walked down an alley alone. In theory, she was helping Will look for Adelaide, but both neglected to share key intel – she had a source and he’d already been contacted by her. Regardless, she 100% would not have gone down that alley without her hand on her holster, and she wouldn’t have been taken by surprise.
So, my first issue is that anyone got the jump on her. And if the argument is she wasn’t as sharp as she had been, that was disproven earlier this season when she disarmed a gunman during a holdup, after a short hesitation that she’d since been in therapy for.
My second issue is that the show is continuing to compound trauma on a central character who is, at the end of the day, already not handling his current (already compounded) trauma very well. So, is the goal to break him? He’s never been portrayed as indestructible. He is a man. As his doctor (the fantastic Margaret Cho) tells him, he is human. I have zero doubt that whatever is to come for Will, Rodrìguez will be exquisite. But I want him to catch a lingering break. I want him to have hope and joy and a little peace. Preferably before the series finale in a few years. Conflict is interesting. Cruelty is not.
Since the beginning, the show has been a careful balance of the absurd and the traumatic and the sad and the heartfelt and the funny. Sometimes within the same episode. Gallows humor prevails because of the subject matter, but there are limits. Now it feels like there aren’t. If we’re trafficking in “anything goes” terrain, where anyone can go at any time, I’m not sure this will continue to be my show. It hits different, as the kids say.
I am very, very clear that I am owed nothing. I am promised nothing. But it feels a bit like a betrayal of what I love about the show. It’s not a comfort watch anymore. And the progressive shift in tone is seeping into how I watch it.
Last week’s bottle episode seriously had me thinking Angie was about to lose Seth and then somehow her eventual widowed, single motherhood would drive her back to Will. That’s a terrible idea. Thankfully, they didn’t do that. But it crossed my mind. And it would have been an additional sucker punch because the show found a nerdy, sweet way to make Seth and Will friends, bonding over their macabre love of forensic insects. And until that baby is safely here, I have my doubts that it and Angie are safe.
Losing Amanda now after the near-miss last season is a double insult. And losing her this way, and leaving characters who already exist within and to variable degrees have already surmounted deep, deep trauma feels cruel and unnecessary. Earlier in last night’s episode, there’s a throwaway remark from Faith about surviving abuse, and Angie smiles sadly and says “Sometimes, we do.”
Aside from Will, Amanda is Faith’s Aunt Mandy, her mom’s BFF and former beat cop partner. She’s her work mom, her confidante, her kick in the pants when she needs it. They love and fight fiercely. Faith (Iantha Richardson) has had her own reset, moving in with Ormewood after her mom was kidnapped from her apartment, and breaking for a while with Will when he enlisted her son as a UC and didn’t tell her. And this season, she had her own complicated romantic relationship with a man who’s now imprisoned.
Amanda had a complex relationship with Angie, too. Sometimes fractious, as when she had to pull her GBI offer after Angie’s arrest. They were also a formidable duo when they teamed up. Last season, when Amanda was shot during the attempt to flip the script on a police station hostage situation, which Angie made happen by hiding in and signaling Amanda from the ceiling, Angie kept her alive til the paramedics arrived.
In a surprising new friendship that was just getting started, Amanda and recent cancer survivor Ormewood (Jake McLaughlin) found solace in each other when she confided she was having anxiety issues about her shooting and he recommended group therapy. And when he overstepped on demands to reopen a death row case, she immediately checked him on barging into her office before softly asking him what he needed. There was so much more to come with that relationship that we won’t get to see.
All of these characters are chosen, found family to one another. They are all survivors. We’ve watched them do it already. Yes, they can do it again. I just didn’t want them to have to.
If this had been a personal choice by Sohn to leave, I wouldn’t have written this. Based on the comments last night from showrunners Liz Heldens, Daniel T. Thomsen, and Karine Rosenthal, it wasn’t so, I did. My last nit, related to that, is a sneaking but unproven suspicion that this might have been a budget play since the show was renewed for Season 5 on Monday.
Cast trims are common as later seasons get more expensive, but that’s more typical among license-to-play arrangements. Will Trent is produced by 20th Television, which is part of Disney, so it’s essentially an in-house production airing on Disney-owned ABC and then Disney-owned Hulu. So, in theory, they’re paying each other for it.
However, if there’s still some increased expense on a series past a certain point, that can manifest as a limited deal for series regulars, where they wander in and out from episode to episode, something Will Trent already does, or a show can decrease the cast list from the jump, or swap someone out to swap someone in without a significant line-item change. It’s gross and commoditizes craft, but here we are.
I don’t know that was the case with this decision, but I do wonder about it. I’d also have thought the Atlanta shoot vs. LA or NYC, on top of the Disney grouping, would keep those tactics to a minimum. Apologies if that line of thinking taints things further for anyone who’s upset about the departure. Again, I know nothing definitive. That’s just my tinfoil hat thought about it.
The silver lining is that Amanda could still appear now and again as another of Will’s self-reflective figments dispensing tough-love advice, but I’d much rather her be doing that from down the hall.
Thank you, Sonja. I loved, loved, loved your Amanda. I wanted more of her story. I’ll follow you wherever you go next.
Will Trent airs Tuesdays at 8 pm/7c on ABC and streams the next day on Hulu.
