After four seasons, Transplant is coming to an end with tonight’s (Thursday, July 17) series finale. Showrunner Joseph Kay has been able to bring the conclusion he wanted, which is certainly a blessing. It’s rare that a TV show gets to end on its own terms.
We’d already chatted about why this show was always set to end after four seasons when Transplant season 4 premiered. Now, we have a chance to talk about wrapping up the show, bringing emotional deaths and moments, and also how it feels to be able to close out on Kay’s own terms.
GeekSided: You’ve managed to bring Transplant to an end on your own terms. How does it feel now to close this chapter?
Joseph Kay: I was very emotional to close the chapter. It was a long time, a very close group of people working on it, and even though I had always planned to do it this way, I certainly was asking myself at the end of season 3 and as we started writing season 4, ‘What are you doing? Are you sure this is the right thing?’
It took a lot of fortitude, but now it’s one year since we wrapped, and I feel really great about it now. So it was very emotional at the time when we ended it, but now I look back on it as this complete story that will always exist as this four-season arc that people can find and watch. I’m proud of it, and joyful, and very, very grateful to have had the experience with all of the collaborators to make the show.
GS: When did you know how you were going to wrap everyone’s storylines?
JK: It was toward the end of season 3. We had a very strong idea about what we were going to do with the Mags and Bash arc, and how we would use that to create this dramatic linchpin that would kind of drive us through.
But then in writing the scenes, we decided it would have to happen in season 4, and it would allow us to hold onto Mags as a character, so we had that structure just over halfway through the making of the show more or less in play when it came to specifics of everybody’s endings.
When it came to the specifics of everybody’s endings, such as who is going to stay, who is going to move on, what romantic arcs were we going to close, we had to put a lot of options up on our writer’s room board, so those were shifting as we were writing season 4.
GS: I want to touch on Mags, because I remember watching it when it aired in Canada, and you broke me. At the same time, I felt like it was needed, because life isn’t all rainbows and sunshine. Why did you decide to go the route of Mags’ death [which happened in Transplant season 4, episode 8], knowing that it could lead to a lot of hate from the fans?
JK: As you said to me, life isn’t always rainbows and sunshine. To me, that’s totally true, and if anything, it makes Mags a stronger character, because she went into this heart transplant with her eyes wide open. She wanted to bet on herself, and she knew full well that the odds are often that it doesn’t work out. She tells her mother, but her mother doesn’t want to hear it, but Mags knows.
So, to show the consequences that are devastating, to me, makes her braver and stronger, because it means the stakes were real. Laurence [Leboeuf] really wanted to do it. She really wanted that challenge as a performer.
The other answer to the question is that Bash needed a real-time crisis to go through for the audience to believe that he was going to be okay. We’ve seen him reflect on all of this terrible amount of trauma, mostly by the way of flashback. Everything that happened to him at home, how he got out of his life changed. I felt like we needed to see him face something terrible in real time and feel he had the support now. He had some of the tools we’ve seen him work on, even though we’re not meant to think he’s over it and he’s fine.
We see that he has the ability to [be okay] and that leaves us with an organic kind of hope that I thought was so important if we wanted to deliver a happy ending.
The last thing I’ll say is again, going back to what you said about if people hate me or are angered by the decision because they like Mags as a character, that’s a win, because it’s some reaction. I’d rather anger than nothing. The worst thing is people wondering what else is on. So, whether they applaud it dramatically and think it’s brave or whether they get really mad and tweet at me about that, I think those are both the same level of good.
GS: You’ve sparked emotion.
JK: Exactly.
GS: I adored you getting John Hannah back [in Transplant season 4, episode 9]. How did that come about, because he’s a busy man?
JK: We reached out to him in season 3 to see if it was possible. He does a lot of work overseas and in LA. He just works all that time, so scheduling-wise, it was tricky, as you would imagine. But he really wanted to do it, so we bent over backwards to make it work. We wrote to the timing of his availability, and we only needed him for a couple of days, I think. He ended up spending a week in Montreal.
John is an absolute delight, and he has a lot of natural, effortless gravitas as both an individual and as a performer, and in Bash’s life, so if somebody was going to be there to say ‘Hey, you know it’s going to be okay,’ it had to be him. Bash’s parents are dead, and Bishop is his surrogate parents. It couldn’t come from anybody else.
That also gave us the ability to tie up the story with Claire and the romance between Tori Higginson’s Claire and John’s Dr. Bishop, one of the most consistent romances we had on Transplant, to give it a happy ending and to give it some closure. I’m really grateful we got to do that.
GS: When did you know that it had to be him? Dr. Bishop had to be the one to help Bash realize that none of this was his fault?
JK: Right away. We knew in season 3 when we were thinking about this long term. It had been a recurring conversation between Bishop and Bash in the two seasons when John was a regular on the show. In this storyline that forces John’s exit from the hospital, it cases back to a mistake that happened, and Bash keeps blaming himself, because he does that; he blames himself; he throws himself in front of the grenade.
They’ve had this back and forth over this. Bash saves Bishop’s life with that drill, but the brain injury that Bishop gets contributes to his decline, the mistakes, and his ultimate exit. Bash always felt particularly responsible for that, even though the guy would be dead. Bishop is able to keep saying, ‘What are you talking about? You saved my life.’ So, really, he’s the only person who had the kind of organic weight to make it to sail.
GS: I want to ask about the flashback in Transplant season 4, episode 9. I know it wasn’t a deleted scene from the first season, so what was it like to de-age everyone by what would have been six years?
JK: Well, we didn’t have a CGI budget, so it was done practically with makeup. It was great, and it was the last scene that we shot of the series to bring us right back.
GS: Really?
JK: Yeah! Many actors had to look at the makeup stills and be confronted with how much they’d aged in six years, but it was very emotional to go back to that moment. It was very fitting to bring us to the end. I just love that it comes full circle that we see this amazing thing that Bash does in the pilot. He seems to come from nowhere to save all these people and save John Hannah’s character, which gives some of this opportunity to become a doctor.
The thing about the character, about what he’d been through to get out of his home, but also what he’d been through living in Canada, and how much of a struggle it was, that he actually had to accept the fact that he was never going to be able to become a doctor. So, to go back to the beginning with all this context and all these characters was really fun. Very emotional for the cast and crew.
It’s great when you get to end something by choice and the way you really want to, as opposed to having it wrenched away from you. So, it was very fulfilling, though emotional.
The Transplant series finale airs tonight, Thursday, July 17 at 8/7c on NBC. Catch up on the entire series on Peacock.