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.
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