SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for “Will Trent” Season 4 Episode 15, “The Blank Expanse of Nothing,” streaming on Hulu,
“Will Trent” just killed off one of its central characters, fundamentally altering the very fabric of the ABC cop drama.
Amanda Wagner, who has been played by Sonja Sohn since the show launched, met her end in this week’s episode. In the episode, Amanda is secretly working with the FBI to find information on the Commander, the mysterious figured linked to Adelaide Trevens (Mallory Jansen) and the cult-like group devoted to serial killer James Ulster.
Amanda is able to find a young man connected to the Commander that Will encountered earlier in the season. But as she tries to tail him, she’s suddenly surprised by an unseen assailant. Will (Ramón Rodríguez), meanwhile, is engaging in a cat-and-mouse game with Adelaide in hopes of rescuing his kidnapped uncle.
Will agrees to meet Adelaide at a bar, but when he tries to slip a tracking device onto her, she disappears, only to call him and say she has left a gift for him around the corner. Will then finds Amanda dead in the street with what appears to be multiple stab wounds.
In an interview with Variety, series showrunners Liz Heldens, Daniel T. Thomsen and Karine Rosenthal say that Amanda’s death “sets off a chain of events that is going to take us to the end of the season.”
“Amanda has been the character who has protected Will for as long as she has known him,” Rosenthal says. “So this gives us the opportunity for a completely new dynamic in the GBI, because her replacement will not have that same relationship with Will. Her death had the most impact on the most amount of characters. It really sets everybody reeling from this enormous loss. So it’s such a reset for our characters in a way that is painful but exciting for Season 5.”
The three also say that Sohn was aware of the death of her character early on, and that she handled the news with “an impressive amount of grace.”
“Nobody gets to always exit their shows — even on the writing side — on their own terms all the time,” Thomsen says. “It’s hard to do that with grace. So it was just very impressive. She is a total pro.”
Fans of “Will Trent” will remember that Amanda had a brush with death at the end of Season 3, when she was shot during a hostage situation at the GBI. According to Heldens, there were discussions about the character dying then, but “no one had the heart to do it. I don’t think we were ready, honestly.”
“I also don’t want to get through this interview without really honoring the work that Sonja Sohn has done on this character,” Heldens adds. “At the beginning of this season, I went back to watch the finale of Season 1, and her work is impeccable.”
And, of course, actors whose characters that have died off on the show have made appearances later on as projections of Will’s mind as he grapples with issues or tries to solve a case. The showrunners say that the door is open for Sohn to return in that capacity.
“That’s always a little of a comfort that we have a mechanism by which we could bring people back if Will needs to work something out,” Heldens says.
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