[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Transplant series finale “Never Too Late to Start Again.”]
June (Ayisha Issa) was ready to leave York Memorial behind in the Transplant series finale, but in the end, she chose to stay.
Two episodes prior, she’d revealed that she’d accepted a position in Cleveland in their trauma OR as a staff surgeon. But in the finale, during an emergency, she jumped in to help, including scrubbing in for a surgery. Novak (Gord Rand) said he never should have said she’s too damaged to be a mother, and she explained it wasn’t about motherhood but about feeling she didn’t deserve anything. Later, he tried to convince her to let Devi (Rekha Sharma) and the hospital lawyers get her out of her Cleveland contract and stay. They could run trauma OR together. She’d have stability at work and could try for a kid again, he suggested, and he’d have a partner who makes him better.
She agreed, and as she told Bash (Hamza Haq) and Theo (Jim Watson), there were people there she cared about and who cared about her, and she realized she deserved that.
That job in Cleveland was “one of those bittersweet things where you put your head down, you work really hard in a certain direction, you kind of push and kick everything out of the way to get there, and then you get there and something taps you on the shoulder and goes, ‘Well, hold on a second. What about all this?’” Ayisha Issa tells TV Insider. “She was so sure that that’s exactly what she had wanted and what she had been working for and sacrificing for and everything, but in that process and in that journey, she changed and she evolved and her needs changed and how she saw the world changed and the things that were important to her changed. She had a little bit of Mags [Laurence Leboeuf] in her.”
She continues, “And so now it wasn’t just about the position and just about the title and all of those things. It was about the people, and it was about the relationships and the connection and her work had deeper meaning and her life had broader meaning and broader intention. She couldn’t do that in Cleveland. She had to continue on and can continue to nurture what she had where she was.”
As for how June and Novak working together is going to go, “I think it’s going to continue to be a comedic, frustrating, strange relationship. But I think that June is going to become, as has been the trend, increasingly good at managing it and at setting her boundaries and interacting with him and asserting herself and her needs around him. And I think that Novak’s character is going to kind of fall in line a little bit more because he’s going to respect having those boundaries, even though he likes to push up against them. I think the tables are going to turn, and it’ll probably be — as weird as it’s going to sound — a bit like a spoiled child and mother type relationship where she just becomes really good at being like, ‘No, we’re not doing that.’ Ultimately, I think June is just going to end up being the emotional leader of this partnership, and Novak will have his strengths, but we’re not going to count on him to lead this emotionally. I think that June, strangely enough, will be the kind of emotional anchor and the emotionally intelligent kind of leader of that team.”
Transplant, Complete Series, Streaming Now, Peacock