Will Trent Season 3 Recap
The Family You’re Born Into, The Family You Make
SPOILERS FOR SEASON 3 OF Will Trent AHEAD
If Season 2 of Will Trent was about the title character discovering both his origin and birth family he has, Season 3 has been about dealing with the family he built, both when he was growing up and his current work family. It’s been clear the two have been clashing ever since Will’s foster brother Rafael (Antwayn Hopper) surfaced in the season premiere and Will has been working ever since to try and bring him down. And it didn’t help that halfway through the season Faith’s teenage son Jeremy ended up becoming caught in the web of Rafael and in order to get him out Will had to make him a CI.
When that hit the fan halfway through the season Faith and Will’s partnership predictably combusted and it didn’t help that while this was going on Will would be involved in an accidental shooting that led to the death of a ten year old boy. Will would spend much of the second half of the season trying to deal with the two by throwing himself into a level of self-loathing that nearly made him susceptible to the teachings of a cult, destroying his impending romance with Marion (I really hope we haven’t seen the last of Gina Rodriguez) and finally found him confront with the young boy’s brother who wanted to kill him. It’s amazing that Will got to the end of the season in a slightly better place before things went to hell again in the season finale.
Things have been going badly for just about everyone else in Will’s orbit, though very little of this has to do with Will himself. The biggest blowup, as you might expect given how Season 2 ended, was when Angie, who he was planning a future with before he learned of how she had been indirectly responsible for a series of deaths came back to work at the Atlanta PD. The scene where Angie and Will finally faced off about what had happened was a punch in the stomach and the heart of every fan who might have been shipping them. (If you read Slaughter’s books, the two of them ended up breaking up is not a shock: what is shocking is that Angie has realized how toxic their relationship was, something that she never did in the novels.)
Angie has spent much of Season 3 trying to move on with a relationship with Dr. Seth McDale (Scott Foley finally gets to play a heartthrob with morals!). It’s clear this relationship is good for Angie in a way the one she had with Will just wasn’t in their scenes together the two of them show an openness and warmth that we just never saw between those of Will and Angie. I actually hope Foley is promoted to a series regular in Season 4; he’s been a good addition to the ensemble this year and considering how the season ended, we’re going to need more of him in the future.
At the end of the season Angie (the always brilliant Erika Christensen) came to her own familial crisis: her mother who has been in a coma for more than a decade opened her eyes and it wasn’t clear if she was heading towards death or revival. In the flashbacks we saw just how horrible a mother Dinah Pulaski was to Angie over the years (as if we needed any more evidence based on what we’d heard about her) but we also saw how much Angie needed her approval even now. I’m not sure if the final scene between the two actually happened or was a figment of Angie’s imagination before her mother died but considering how she spiraled during this period afterwards, I’m inclined to think it was in her head. The final scene, when Angie flushed her mother’s remains down a toilet in a bar, was horrifying as we saw Angie vow to end the cycle — only to learn in the first part of the season finale, that she was pregnant herself.
Every other character has been dealing with the struggles of being a parent: Faith did everything to protect Jeremy and when she learned how deep he was in, her mamma bear drive went into effect. Her first instinct was to get her son as far from the country as possible and Jeremy had to talk her out of it. Ormewood has spent the season trying to be the best father he can to his children and has been doing a superb job — and that in the final third of the season, learned he had a brain tumor and has spent much of that period preparing himself and everyone else for it. In some cases this has been hysterical — all the paperwork he had to do, the fact that he was the subject of the VA bureaucracy — in some cases, it was tragic such as when he chose his family. Even Amanda has been trying to be a mother during the period she found herself parenting Rafael’s teenage daughter to protect her, even while Will was trying to throw him in prison. (In keeping with the show, Rafael and his daughter got a happy ending.)
All of this came crashing against each other in the two part season finale. The viewers were told when we were introduced to Sheriff Broussard (Yul Vazquez) that he was one of those constitutional sheriffs who felt he was the ruler of his small Georgia town. The leadup seemed to be that this would be an adversarial relationship. What none of us were expected was the revelation half way through the penultimate episode that Broussard was actually Will’s birth father. This is against canon; in the books James Ulster, the man who killed Will’s sex worker mother, is Will’s biological father but for the purposes of the series, it is a stroke of genius. Ulster has been essentially gone from the series since the Season 2 premiere, and honestly the idea of having a killer for a father has been done to death by TV. But to have Will’s father also be in law enforcement — and a completely different kind of peace officer than the one that Will is — is potentially a more interesting one.
The final two episodes of the third season brought many of the conflicts of the last few episodes into effect in the middle of a very relevant storyline. The GBI was called into investigate a double homicide that turned out in to being a lead to a Georgia militia gang of domestic terrorists. That this happened completely under the nose of Broussard came as a shock even to him as he realized he never knew many of the men and women he swore to protect. When he found other that the father of one of the victims (a chilling Kevin Dunn) had arranged to have his son murdered to protect the cause, it was horrifying; when the viewer learned that this was just the start of the attack, it became all too relevant.
During the chilling season finale, the effects of a bioweapon had been released in Atlanta and Will was dealing with the fact that is was food spread first. Ormewood was in the hospital dealing with his own surgery as was Nico, Will’s caregiver — and Nico became a victim of it himself. Ormewood, Faith and Franklin went to pick up the antidote for the toxin only to be bushwhacked by the militia and while this was going on the force themselves took the floor of the GBI and Amanda hostage demanding Vince in exchange. Will was forced to go in search of the lab for the antidote against his extreme will and with Broussard as his guide. It didn’t help when he learned that Angie was also on the floor; when Captain Heller called him the first words out of his mouth were: “Don’t turn around.”
Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a shock that Broussard and Will managed to bond while they were busting the lab in one of the episode few humorous points. (The other major one came when the besieged cops found that they now had a bunch of teenage girls as citizens — and the teenage girls were upset about losing a tournament. Their mood change when they learned this was a team of archery players.) While this was going on Angie was being called into save the day while dealing with the possibility she might be having a miscarriage.
And in the final moments we had triumph and tragedy in equal measure. Angie managed to help save the hostages but in order to save Angie, Amanda pushed out of the way — and took a bullet in the chest. Ormewood managed to save the day while risking his life to help his fellow survivors, was saved by Will — only to collapse and have a seizure in the final moments of the episode. And Will got to stand over Angie while she learned that her baby was alive — and then had to step back when Seth ran into the room and learned that Angie had planned to keep it. The final scene of Season 3 shows Will preparing to wait by Amanda’s bedside, telling a comatose and critical Amanda that “You’re my family.”
I honestly don’t know if this is a cliffhanger for the sake of it or if some of these characters really are doomed. I do know that in the original books Ormewood’s character does end up dying in the first book (of course, he’s a completely different kind of cop in ‘Triptych’) but anyone who as a passing knowledge of Slaughter’s work knows that the showrunners are using the books as a guidepost rather than canon. I think Amanda’s relatively safe (after all Sonja Sohn has a history of her characters surviving what should be fatal gunshots as The Wire fans do know) if for no other reason than Amanda’s still alive in the latest Slaughter novel.
What I do know in what has been the first full season of Will Trent, the showrunners have officially cemented this series as one of the best dramas of the 2020s. So far this decade network television has seen a remarkable creative revival after spending far too much of the 2010s in relative stasis. ABC has been one of the forerunners of that rebirth, most notably with Abbott Elementary but also a series of superb dramas. Quite a few ended up being victims of the 2023 creative strike but they’ve been fighting back ever since, particularly with this season’s marvelous High Potential.
Will Trent has been at the vanguard of a series of brilliant variations on the procedural, most brilliantly seen in CBS’s Thursday night lineup of Matlock and Elsbeth. For much of the 21st century so much television has been centered around the more traditional CSI based procedural and while that still is the dominant feature on so many networks (ABC itself is picking up the gauntlet with 9–1–1 in that respect) in recent years character has been allowed to take center stage in a way it hasn’t in these kinds of dramas. Character driven procedurals have been the sole province of cable and streaming for the last decade that until fairly recently I thought network TV had just thrown in the towel on that. Will Trent is one of those shows that has led me to be glad of my chosen profession.
Interestingly more and more people are starting to respect what network television did, even in the streaming era. This may be an effect of both the lockdown and the strike in which many Gen Z and millennials watched a lot of old dramas and have been astonished that so many showrunners used to do twenty-two episodes a season, which is incredible when they grew up with 13 and now it’s a shock if you get 10. This gives me hope in a strange way as well. Network television will never be the force it was even ten years ago. But shows like Will Trent prove there is still an audience for quality TV, even if you have to stay home and watch it when it originally airs.
My score: 5 stars.
