Will Trent Season 2 Retrospective
Chickens Come Home to Roost…And Our Hero Chooses To Run
Warning: There will be spoilers for much of Season 2 of Will Trent.
Throughout Season 2 of Will Trent ABC’s incredible procedural based off Karin Slaughter’s novels Will seemed to be struggling with his demons in a way he really hadn’t in Season 1, Part of it was the incarceration of his birth father at the end of the first season but there was clearly a ghost hanging over him. Throughout the season he kept having images of his younger self appear to him and by the second half they had become so prominent he was barely able to function.
Finally in the eighth episode in the midst of the search for the killer of a long missing girl it came to the surface: Will had spent the last several episodes dealing with a long repressed memory of a former foster home with a caring mother and a violent abusive father. Will had known the thing to do was to call the police but he didn’t want to leave the mother behind. So he had hid a revolver in the flour can of the foster home and one night when things got worse, he went to it and searched for the gun — and pointed it at the foster father. But a ten year old child could not kill a man and he ended up dropping the gun. As a result the foster mother was murdered by her husband.
I don’t know if this event is canon for Slaughter’s work; I’ve read many of her Will Trent novels but I also know the series has been known to play loose with the source material. What I do know is that Ramon Rodriguez in the title role took his already outstanding work to a new level in that episode. Will has spent so much of the series putting up a brave professional front that its been the mask he wears all the time. Now he finally lost it — but someone was there to help him through it.
Earlier in the season Will learned that his uncle was alive and had spent the first half of the season working up the courage to call him. In a rare moment of good news, the two men instantly bonding not only over their dogs but because both of them are dyslexic. The superb character actor John Ortiz was well case as Will’s new uncle, the kind of father figure Will needed his whole life. And in that episode he came to his nephew’s side and told him exactly what he needed to hear: that he was in an impossible situation and he didn’t have to carry that burden.
In the penultimate episode Will went with his uncle to Puerto Rico where he had some family. Will was still struggling with his Spanish but it was clear that he was making progress. He had a scene with a ghost of his mother who told him to ‘let go’ and he walked into the surf and for the first time all season seemed at peace. Later that episode he put a marker on the memorial for the Morales family (his mothers’ real name) and he seems to have gotten closure for the first time in his life.
In the last couple of episodes Will had seemed more at peace for the first time in the whole series. He and Angie had been together due to a traumatic shooting but for the first time the two of them seemed on the same page. At the start of the season finale, he had bought a coffee table that was somewhat larger and asked Angie: “Do you see the vision?” It was clear he was thinking about a future with Angie — and Angie herself seemed open to it.
Throughout Season 2 Angie herself had been making progress in a way since the kidnapping that had left her injured at the hands of James Ulster. She had become a sponsor to a fellow addict, had become of value to her partner Michael Ormewood during this period, and when she was injured in the penultimate episode, she knew enough not to take morphine. Amanda actually came to her in the season finale and was willing to offer her a job at the GBI: a considerable step up from where she was at the Atlanta PD. It really looked like she and Will were headed for a happy ending — and that’s when the show gave us a kick in the teeth that is at the level of some of the better series on cable and streaming.
At the end of last week’s episode Ormewood and Faith had been working together to find the murder of a registered sex offender. They had realized that they had been chasing a serial killer going back several months, one who had a habit of leaving toys in the victim’s mouths. None of them were able to figure out how until Will realized that the victims had been drugged with a muscle relaxant and the killer had sat on their chests until they suffocated. He also realized the killer was a female.
While that was going on the reporter that Faith had been having a relationship with came to her with the story of a similar murder of a truck driver in Alabama that pre-dated all of the previous murders. Almost casually Faith mentioned “Maybe the killer’s a redhead.”
And at that point if you followed Slaughter’s novels, or even if you didn’t, you got a sinking feeling. Because Angie Polaski has red hair. Now the timing of the murders didn’t quite fit — another victim landed in the morgue the day after this and Angie had no knowledge of the investigation — but we knew about Angie’s personal history of sexual abuse in her childhood and this was the kind of thing you knew she was capable of. And when Will and Faith tracked down a website to the killer and found a soaked Angie there, we were gutted.
Then the writer’s threw us a curveball and revealed that they had a level of cleverness that many of today’s best shows lack. Because the killer had been hiding in plain sight the whole time but we — and critically Angie — had missed it.
At the end of Season 1 when Angie had learned that one of her former foster parents Lenny Broussard was out of prison and dating a mother with a young daughter she spent the better part of the second half trying to stalk him and planning to murder him. At the end of the season Crystal, the daughter in question, stabbed him in the throat and Angie took the blame saying she killed him.
Crystal’s shadow has hung over Season 2 since the start with her reappearing at the start of the season and Angie doing everything she could to take care of her from afar. There have been signs that she was troubled, starting when she was taking the number of a much older man at the coffee shop where she worked, her telling Angie she was in trouble and her decision to take her to a sexual abuse survivors meeting two episodes earlier after spending the season in denial of what happened to her.
The episode had unfolded first from Will’s perspective and halfway through it shifted to Angie’s. Angie had gone to Crystal sex abuse meeting and heard one of the most harrowing stories possible, including the fact that her mother had picked up another abusive boyfriend when they had relocated to North Carolina earlier and Crystal had runaway. She also mentioned all of the toys she got from the dentist that she used to use as protection and how she had wanted their help when Lenny had molested her.
Then Angie had come to the GBI office to look for Amanda to take the job — and wandered into the war room where all the clues for the murders had been put together. We saw Angie realize the truth in a horrifying fashion and then managed to figure out where Crystal was.
In a horrible moment Angie ran after Crystal who seemed utterly unrepentant: “They deserved it!” she shouted. She then ran across a river, slipped on a rock and hit her head. Despite Angie’s efforts Crystal died.
Worse was to follow as Will told Angie to go away — and as he realized that Angie hadn’t killed Lenny — Crystal had. Because of Angie’s impulse to protect a victim, four more people were dead as well as Crystal herself.
Will locked himself in his office and didn’t tell Faith what he was doing. He had a conversation with the young Angie in which he realized just what had happened. “Are you going to arrest me?” young Angie asked. “I don’t think I can.”
We then saw a scene which we very quickly realized was a fantasy: Will proposed to Angie, they started to have children, raised a family, had many dogs and had grandchildren. It was heartbreaking to see this because we knew it was a lie. Then came another scene where Will walked into Atlanta police headquarters following the same opening as the other, saying that he was arresting Angie for tampering with evidence and obstruction of justice. This seemed exactly like what was happening…
…until the episodes final scene which took place the day after. Amanda stormed into the Trent house, looking for Will to find that he had left. He’d given Nico money for utilities and rent, saying he was going to be gone. He didn’t say where or for how long.
Which begs the question: what did Will do? We know he didn’t tell Faith what he had learned because she clearly didn’t know in her final scene and given how Amanda stormed into his house, it’s clear she was looking for him for an explanation for what happened to Crystal. There’s also no clear sign of where Angie was in all this, which leads to several possibilities. Did Will run from his responsibilities? Did he take Angie with him? Is Angie still in Atlanta? Did he tell her to run away and he went in a different direction? His uncle Antonio is in Puerto Rico, so its possible he went there.
And even if he tells the truth, could Amanda and Faith be inclined to let it go? Earlier this season we learned that Amanda, who had spent her entire career ordering things to be done by the book, had first lied and then arranged things so that a man who assaulted her would go to prison for thirty years? Faith and Will were not happy about it but they agreed to cover it up because of their affection for her. Will has a very big chit in his pocket which he could use if he had to and Amanda is not exactly in a position to say no.
Of course the series could go closer to canon as at a certain point in the books Angie is drummed out of the Atlanta PD and essentially become a gadfly in Will’s life, popping up to torment him and just as often commit criminal acts on his behalf. This would not be keeping with the spirit of the show but the series had followed two books in the series faithfully already and it could do the same here.
What I do know is that the second season of Will Trent was at the exact same level of the first and just as deserving to contend for Emmys this year. I believe it has a better chance then last year. As I mentioned before most of the series that were contending last year either have ended their run or are ineligible. The only two series that seem likely to be dominant from year’s past are The Crown and The Morning Show. Shows like The Gilded Age and Slow Horses look very much like they will be formidable contenders this year but that leaves us with three vacancies with the shifting of Shogun to Best Drama (I’ll be covering this) that does leave some vacancies and a fair amount of shows that honestly have more negatives that Will Trent does. Ramon Rodriguez more than deserves an Emmy nomination as do Erike Christensen and Sonja Sohn (they’ve honestly both deserved ones for over a decade). I’ll be covering this show later but this is one of the great series of 2024 so far.
My score: 5 stars.