Transplant is pitting exes Bash (Hamza Haq) and Mags (Laurence Leboeuf) against each other in the fourth and final season over one residency position. But might that ultimately be good for their relationship?
This all arises due to budget cuts, leaving Devi (Rekha Sharma) to shift course from the original plan (multiple spots for residents in the emergency department). Bash and Mags “are the two best,” creator Joseph Kay tells TV Insider ahead of the Thursday, May 22, premiere. “Dr. Devi has a kind of graceful form of radical honesty sometimes, and rather than hide this fact from them, she just tells them that Bash and Megs are the two people who she’s looking at, and it’s going to be one of them and not both. She wants them to know that in fairness.”
This “resets their chemistry,” he continues. After the breakup, “there’s not really tension between them, but there’s a kind of limbo feeling when the season begins, a tentativeness. And being in direct competition at work allows them to put all of the other stuff aside and just kind of find a little bit of playful friction in this competition. They both acknowledge to each other that they’re going to try as hard as they possibly can to get the job, and so it just lets us reignite that.”
This has also put Bash in, sadly, a familiar position: facing having the rug pulled out from under him yet again when all he wants is security. “Losing a potential opportunity weighs a lot heavier than [on him] than it does for a lot of people,” explains Kay. “He loves it at this hospital, and he loves being a doctor. Whenever his future is murky, which it has been for so long, it really destabilizes him. So with his future murky once again, he’s in an emotionally volatile place and he’s been thinking about when he first came overseas, when he first landed as a refugee and the way that he felt in those days, which was he would never ever get the chance to be a doctor again. And now here he is five, six years later on the verge of maybe never getting to be a doctor again.”
In Season 3, head nurse Claire (Torri Higginson) was attacked, and, now, she’s struggling to deal with the aftermath. That means she’s not letting anyone in, nor is she open to showing vulnerability or weakness. “She is a born protector and healer,” Kay says. “She is managing a little bit of physical pain, which we can see her struggling with, but she’s managing a whole lot of emotional pain that she’s hiding and she thinks she can just get back on the horse, but it proves a lot harder than that.”
They consulted healthcare professionals about their experiences with violence at work. “It’s obviously a terrible and real predicament that, unfortunately, these people find themselves in,” the creator says. “After dramatizing that event, we owed it to the character to not just skip over it, to take the time to really let her live in the effects of what happened to her and find a way to kind of crawl out, but she’s in a bit of a tunnel right now.”
Joseph Kay always wanted this to be a “four-season window” into Bash learning to let go of some of his past. “I would never argue that he’s completely healed from everything that’s happened to him, but that it was a window of time where we get to learn about him, his experiences, and sort feel equipped that he’s going to be able to move on and that he is going to be able to start again, but that you can’t really tell that story unless you really challenge him emotionally in the present,” he shares. “We’ve seen him challenged emotionally in all sorts of ways, but we’ve also relied on his past, understanding what happened to him in the past. And I would say that Season 4 is the most emotional, gripping, present tense story that we’ve put Bash through, all in service of having the audience feel like this guy is going to be okay, even though he carries a lot of weight.”
Transplant, Fourth and Final Season Premiere, Thursday, May 22, 8/7c, NBC