[Warning: The following post contains MAJOR spoilers for Will Trent Season 3’s finale, “Listening to a Heartbeat.”]

Things got very, very hectic on multiple fronts on Tuesday’s (May 13) Season 3 finale for Will Trent. The episode picked up where the penultimate episode left off — with the hospital being overrun by sick patients after a bioterrorism attack — and among the many ill patients was Nico (Cora Lu Tran).

Will (Ramón Rodríguez) raced to find the source of the outbreak — with the help of newfound father Caleb (Yul Vazquez), above work mom Amanda’s (Sonja Sohn) protective concerns — and he tracked it down to a container that’d been widely disseminated and used by people across the city.

The good news? The CDC, which just so happens to be in the same city, had a supply of anti-toxins for this exact purpose. The bad news? It’d need to be transported through potentially hostile territory with some police muscle.

Faith (Iantha Richardson) volunteered to join Michael Ormewood (Jake McLaughlin) on that mission so that Angie (Erika Christensen) wouldn’t jeopardize her baby. But lo, they all found themselves in hot water soon enough.

The GBI’s headquarters was soon stormed by gunmen who took Amanda hostage and demanded their leader’s release from jail in exchange for her safety. Though Will wanted to save Amanda first, she instructed him to carry on finding the disease-laden aerosol canisters before they could harm the whole city’s population. That entailed him and Caleb infiltrating a country home and building an impromptu blockade to stop a group of backwoods terrorists from escaping their storage room, during which the two got to know each other a little bit better.

Angie, who feared she was having a miscarriage due to some unexpected bleeding, took to the vents to save Amanda. Along the way, she told her baby — whom she decided is a girl — that if she could just make it through the day staying put in her belly, she would do her best to give the child a good life. Although she was able to dispense with most of the hostage-takers, one managed to get a bullet into Amanda’s chest before being taken down. Her fate is still very much up in the air.

With Faith and Michael, it was an officer’s sabotage that left them surrounded by armed assailants in a spot where the GPS was jammed, and they were forced to protect a van full of preteen girls. Luckily for everyone involved, those girls just so happened to be a team of champion archers who were willing to shoot off some fire arrows to blow up a fuel tank and take out those shooters Faith and Michael couldn’t get to. For the last sniper in hiding, Michael had to pull out some truly courageous moves and put himself in harm’s way to protect everyone else. With an unexpected assist from Will arriving in his van, the team was saved and the anti-toxin was delivered.

Back at the hospital, Angie revealed her decision to Seth, who was overjoyed, while Will looked on with a bit of heartbreak over seeing her fully moving on.

Amanda’s life wasn’t the only one left in jeopardy by the finale, either. After returning home from the deadly field mission, Ormewood tried to celebrate with a beer but collapsed with dizziness on the floor. Looks like that brain tumor is catching up with him sooner than he might’ve expected.

To break down this very eventful finale — and to find out a bit about what might be ahead with some of these cliffhangers — TV Insider caught up with co-creators Liz Heldens and Daniel T. Thomsen.

Can you just talk about bringing all these different elements together in the finale? We’ve got shootouts, we’ve got a firebomb, we’ve got a hospital overrun, and we’ve got a Die Hard moment in the vent. There’s so much going on. 

Liz Heldens: We knew that Will’s scene partner was gonna be mostly Yul Vazquez, and we just wanted a lot going on with different pairings, but we also wanted to make sure that we still felt the emotion of the personal stories. An example of that is Angie thinks she might be losing this baby, and she’s talking to it in the air vents, and the clarity of having the pregnancy be in jeopardy, giving her the clarity of, “Oh wow, I do want this.” And having Ormewood’s tumor story thread through, that convoy being attacked, and then Will with his dad — and so we knew we wanted a big all-play and to see if we could dance at a big event episode.

Daniel T. Thomsen: One of the things that I think was really kind of cool is we turned Ormewood into an action hero in this episode, which is kind of like showing [him] at his best. It’s like he’s always thinking, he is incredibly physical, he is brave and willing to throw himself into danger and sacrifice himself. He’s a soldier. And then at the very end, all of that gets thrown into question. And I think that what we’re excited about going forward is if all the stuff that we just saw as Ormewood’s brightest moments goes away, or it changes in some way, how does he react to that? What does he discover about himself that can be new, that can make him feel special going forward?

As you mentioned, Ormewood’s health is a cliffhanger, but there’s another character whose health is in question — you guys aren’t gonna deprive us of the fashion and zinger queen Amanda, are you? 

Heldens: I mean, we’re still creatively figuring everything out, but it did seem there was a nice symmetry to Will’s biological father coming into his life and then threatening his surrogate mother.

Thomsen: The only thing I’d add to that is that I think one thing that’s special about that juxtaposition is that we’re playing a lot with the idea of found family versus biological family, and I think that what became very important is that we weren’t playing them against each other. And so I think what’s kind of cool is that it’s Amanda will never be diminished by the presence of Caleb in Will’s life, and boy does that come across.

There are so many parenting themes that play throughout the season, not just in this episode. I mean, with Angie’s mom dying and then her pregnancy, Faith protecting Jeremy from Rafael, Rafael and Sunny, and then Amanda losing Sunny, and like you said, her mama-bearing over Will, even Michael like getting closer to his kids. Can you talk about pulling all those threads together and making this a really family-centric season? 

Heldens: Well, I think that every show I’ve ever done is about family, whether found family or family that you get, it’s just I think all shows succeed or fail on the relationships. I’m sure that’s not true. I shouldn’t say all shows, but a lot of I think what’s interesting is all the points of connection that we have in our lives and in this world, and that’s what we recognize on television, and I think that’s a lot of times what we connect to and so. I think that’s something that we just did. I’m not sure we made a decision to do it. It just sort of happened.

Thomsen: I mean, I think that just kind of happened that way. Yeah, it was not like an overall, “Every character this year will have [family issues].” But one thing that I think is kind of cool about this partnership between Liz and I is that I’m not a parent yet. I’m approaching that phase of my life, but I have a close relationship with my parents, and so even though I am an old fella, I still — there’s some stuff that’s happened in my life recently with my parents that’s reminded me of child toll in it, and so I think we do kind of come at it from both sides. And there was that question when Amanda took in Sunny — I remember at the very beginning of that, we were talking about it, and I was approaching it a little bit more instinctively from Sunny’s point of view, and Liz was like, “No, this is a story about this woman who’s set in her ways, and suddenly there’s this creature that’s walking around her apartment, getting things sticky.” So I think one thing that’s so kind of cool is that we come from both angles and kind of create this really messy family. A lot of stuff is going to be changing as we go into next season.

With Angie’s decision to keep her baby, she’s making a decision at the same time about her relationship with Seth. Is that the end of Will and Angie’s romantic possibility or is that always on the table? 

Heldens: I think it’s always on the table. I think it’s interesting that Angie [is the one moving on]. Will had this relationship with Marion, Gina Rodriguez‘s character, and I think the smart money would have been on that for working out and having some longevity, and I think it was a little bit of a fun surprise — or tragic, depending on how you look at it — that you kind of thought maybe that Angie was gonna sabotage her relationship with Seth. I think casting Scott Foley was another [surprise]. When we were sort of going over lists, and I know Scott from a previous show that we worked on together, and he just is solid. First of all, he’s wonderful to work with, and he’s great, and he came in and it was like he’d always been on the show. But also that he does seem like a really [stable guy, and], oh, she could just have that.

I don’t think that Angie and Will will ever not be there for each other. I don’t think we found the thing that is gonna drive a permanent wedge between them. I think anybody who dates either of them is gonna have to deal with the fact that there’s this really strong relationship that both of those characters have, and it’s with each other … but we don’t know. What we do know is that life is happening to both of these characters. People get into relationships and get pregnant too soon. That happens. That happened to Angie, and we’ll figure out where that takes her, but I don’t think these two are ever gonna be, at some level, not each other’s person. It’s one of the things that I think is that works so well on our show, and it is a real beating heart on the show, that relationship.

Where she started in the season being barely employed, working at the golf course, and now she’s really grown up this season. What does it say about her arc as a character that she’s willing to hear words like, “You could be a good mother”?

Thomsen: To me, what we were trying to accomplish was just the idea that Angie needs to see what I think a lot of us see — speaking as viewers — that she is worthy of whatever she wants out of life, and if that’s your baby, she can do it. And I think that she just has taken longer to catch up to that reality than some of the rest of us who kind of watch her a little bit more objectively.

Do you think the story of her complex feelings about her mother is over now that she has kind of made peace? 

Heldens: Well, I love that her mother is in the Atlanta sewer system and that anytime she wants to talk to her, she can go into any restroom and open up the toilet lid. So, I think it’s fun to use that. I don’t think we ever get over our parents. I think there’s things that we just don’t get over. I don’t think Will’s ever gonna get over shooting and killing Marco. I think he’s gonna maybe find a way to be a little more tender with himself and a little bit more kind about it, but I think there are just things that stay with us, and we have to just figure out a way to coexist with them.

I really believe in what Margaret Cho‘s character said to Will about like these feelings are gonna come up, you have to look at them, give it a hug, give it a high five or whatever. It doesn’t want to stay in your body… That’s kind of my own little woo woo sh**, but I do believe that these things don’t leave you. You just figure out a way to live with them. So yeah, I think that feels more honest than saying there’s such a thing as closure.

Disney / Zac Popik

Speaking of parents, next season, Will has a chance now to know his father, and that last conversation they had when they were trying to do the barricade was a real fun conversation.  What are you looking forward to from that relationship as, as the show goes on? 

Thomsen: Well, one of the reasons why we decided to go this route with bringing in a new character rather than — we’d always had the idea out there that James Ulster could be the father. But what’s exciting here is that if it had been James Ulster, it’s like, okay, well that’s a very, very bad guy who we cannot redeem, and their relationship is always going to be a little playful but ultimately adversarial and disappointing. So we do want James Ulster back on the show to be a complication of things, but what’s exciting is you’ve got this guy who’s more nuanced, who lives in the gray, who, by design, we really wanted him to share a lot of DNA with Will — no pun intended, I guess. But he is in law enforcement, but he’s kind of a different kind of law enforcement guy. He has different beliefs in what his responsibilities are to a community, and we hope that that will put them in conflict going forward, that they’re gonna have to figure some things out about each other and maybe change each other a little bit. But also he’s just a good guy, and when we got you in there, he became even more good.

I have to tell you when we were conceiving of this character, and when you say things like “constitutional sheriff,” and you start talking about like the broad strokes of who that is, in my mind, I’m picturing somebody that’s gonna take me a while to warm up to. And then Yul Vazquez gets in there, and you’re like, “Aw, I want Will to find some satisfaction with his dad because they’re so good together, and they’re kind of patching up his wall…” I want more moments like that. And so the challenge for us in Season 4 really is going to be how to find those moments like them patching up the wall together or sitting down breaking bread at the table, Will meeting the extended family. And we just have to make sure to honor the fact that they’re very different and that Caleb has carved out a career that’s very different and just make sure that they get conflict that way.

Have we seen the last of Gina Rodriguez as Marion Alba?

Heldens: She is spectacular. She was great on the show.  She had great chemistry with Will. We all love them together. We knew we had her for 10 episodes, so were trying to get everything we could out of her. … Will still has things he wants to say to her, and I think he has a lot of regret about how that relationship ended. And so I think that door is 100% open.

Have you guys started dream-casting the next celebrity cameo yet? 

Thomsen: We haven’t. I mean, we still have a list. I mean, look, I love that. The idea where that came from was there’s that Seth Rogen movie This Is the End, where it’s all the celebrities [playing themselves]. I love that movie. It’s one of my favorites. And so we were kind of looking for a standalone episode this year, and I was like, “What if we did that? What if we had somebody come in and play like a really heightened version of themselves?” And for whatever reason, the first person that I chose is like my example who I wanted to see was Kiernan Shipka. I wanted to see a really crazy bratty version of Kiernan Shipka, ’cause I know her in real life, and she’s the nicest person in the world. And one of our writers actually had a relationship with Ariana Madix and was like, “Well, you should see her.” And so that episode was great, and we loved working with her. She came in, and she was really game to play, and she loved the idea of the super version of herself that can do all these super agent things. So yeah, that, that was fun. I’d love to do it again.

Will Trent, Season 4, 2026, ABC