Spoiler Alert: This article contains spoilers for “Will Trent” Season 4 Episode 15, “The Spread of Empty Space,” available to stream on Hulu.
“Will Trent” killed off one of its central characters and fundamentally changed the very structure of ABC’s crime drama.
Amanda Wagner, played by Sonya Thorne since the show’s inception, met her end in this week’s episode. In this episode, Amanda secretly works with the FBI to find information about the Commander, a mysterious figure with ties to Adelaide Trevens (Mallory Jansen), and a cult-like group devoted to serial killer James Ulster.
Amanda is able to locate a young man related to the Commander Will encountered earlier in the season. However, when she attempts to tail him, she is suddenly startled by an invisible assailant. Meanwhile, Will (Ramon Rodriguez) engages in a cat-and-mouse game with Adelaide as he tries to rescue his kidnapped uncle.
Will agrees to meet Adelaide at a bar, but when he tries to insert a tracking device into Adelaide, she disappears, and when she calls, he is told that she left a present for Adelaide around the corner. Later, Will finds Amanda dead on 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 said that Amanda’s death “sets off a chain of events that will lead to the end of the season.”
“Amanda is a character who has been protective of Will ever since she met him,” Rosenthal says. “So this gives us the opportunity to bring a whole new dynamic to GBI, because her replacement doesn’t have the same relationship as Will. Her death had the biggest impact on most of the characters. Everyone is really reeling from this huge loss. So for Season 5, this is very much a reset for our characters in a painful but exciting way.”
The trio also said that Song was aware of his character’s death early on and handled the news with “amazing grace.”
“Nobody, even the writers, can leave the show at any time for their convenience,” Thomsen says. “It’s hard to do that gracefully. So it was very impressive. She’s a complete professional.”
Will Trent fans will remember that at the end of Season 3, Amanda was shot during a hostage situation at the GBI and almost died. Heldens said there was some discussion at the time about the character dying, but “no one really wanted to do that. I don’t think we were ready, to be honest.”
“I also don’t want to end this interview without paying my deepest respect to the work that Sonya Thorne has done with this character,” Heldens added. “I went back to watch the Season 1 finale at the beginning of this season, and her job was perfect.”
And of course, the actors whose characters disappeared on the show later appeared as projections of Will’s mind working on problems and trying to solve cases. Showrunners have said that the possibility of Song returning in the role is open.
“It’s always a little comfort that if Will needs to work something out, there’s a mechanism he can bring people back to,” Heldens says.
