Transplant Boss Talks Season 3 Premiere's Bash And Mags Turning Point: 'We Just Couldn't Help Ourselves'
Warning: The following contains spoilers for the Transplant Season 3 premiere. Proceed at your own risk!
It's officially the season of Bash and Mags on Transplant!
During Thursday's Stateside Season 3 premiere, the docs made eyes at each other at the hospital, suggesting that perhaps their relationship status had changed. But it wasn't until the end of the episode that viewers learned that the pair have been secretly seeing each other in private. When they met up at a theater to celebrate Bash's qualification for citizenship, Mags questioned if it was a date.
"You know, a person could make a romantic assumption about a movie ticket," Mags said. Bash replied by soundly kissing her on the street.
Below, creator Joseph Kay reveals why now was the right time for Bash and Mags to become a couple and how they'll handle the challenges of dating. Kay also previews Theo's PTSD arc and June's new career path.
TVLINE | A lot of American fans are probably very relieved that the show is coming back to NBC. What was it like for you when you found out the show would return here in the States?
I was really excited. We get a lot of great feedback from the viewers who see it in the States. You work hard on something and you just want as many people to see it as possible. So I was excited because we get interesting feedback and interesting energy and a bigger market, for sure.
TVLINE | I'm always really fascinated by when shows decide to have their "will they/won't they" pairing become a couple. So why was now the right time for you to bring these two characters together?
We thought about it a lot, and we were, obviously, blessed with two actors who do this "will they/won't they" so well. Their onscreen chemistry [was] really excellent from the moment these two got in the room together. So it's something you could have let go [on] for a long time, but we try as hard as we can to not repeat ourselves as writers. So I guess that's the first thing.
We were, honestly, as we were writing Season 2, just so fascinated by the question of what would happen if they got together, because one of the reasons their "will they/won't they" chemistry is strong is because they have a lot of inherent friction. They connect, obviously, but they also see things differently. They take different sides of the same argument, whether it's as doctors or as people. So we were just fascinated [by] what would these two look like as a couple. He's kind of guarded and quiet and internal, and she's so heart on her sleeve, so present tense. What would that look like? We just couldn't help ourselves. Even though we knew we could maybe sustain the "will they/won't they" and that there's a lot of power in that, we just had to know. And we were so relieved that we did because we take our time with it. It goes over the season from, "Is it a thing?" to, "Yes, it's a thing" to, "How does that thing work?" to the peaks and valleys that always come with relationships. It gives us intimacy to both of those characters in a way that we just couldn't have achieved elsewhere, and we learn things about them that we wouldn't have, and they challenge each other and get to places that [were] just fertile for us. So we're thrilled that we did it.
TVLINE | Can you talk how they're dealing with the challenges in their relationship? And what are the biggest issues for them as a couple?
We say that Mags drags Bash across lines because she's that kind of person. She's always ready to, let's say, make it known that they're together or to ask this question, and he's much more careful. So that causes a kind of constant friction. And I would add to that that one thing he struggles with is this feeling that he deserves to want more is a challenge for him, and sometimes he feels guilty allowing himself to want that. He knows deep in his core that he deserves it like the rest of us, but he also sometimes doesn't fully believe it. She wants him to want it, but you can't pull somebody over that line. They have to get there on their own, and he's on a journey in that regard. He's still processing his past and trying to deal with some of the things he's been through. So there's just some inherent friction there, but you can see the love all the time, which is what's really interesting with those two actors and the way they kind of look into each other's eyes. They can fight, they can go in and out of conflict and bounce off against each other in really dynamic ways, but you still have this fundamental "Oh, I want these two to hash it out" feeling that you're left with as a writer or as a viewer.
TVLINE | Bash is discouraged away from pursuing a Trauma OR career path by the new chief. Where does that leave him, professionally? Is he just going to be focusing on Emergency, or is Trauma OR something that he's still going to go after?
He's going to try to pursue it. In Transplant, we always tell a story about Bash's past that sort of narratively aligns with his present, and in Season 3, we're telling the story of Bash's life before his country was destabilized by war. When Bash was a younger man, he was sort of destined to be a surgeon. His parents were doctors, and he was on that path. Now in the third season of the show, after making progress and being further along in his residency, a big part of him wants to get to where he was before things had to change. We see him want that in the beginning of the season. We see a new character in Dr. Devi, who comes to Memorial and destabilizes things as the new chief, sort of not really thinking it's the right thing for him, but he still wants it, and we see him fight to make that happen over the course of the season.
TVLINE | There's also some really interesting stuff going on with Theo in the season premiere. What is his journey moving forward this season? Obviously, he's dealing with some PTSD, coping in ways that are maybe unhealthy.
He's lost sight of himself. It's something that we saw happen in Season 1 kind of in real time and when he made a decision to change his life, which led to his marriage collapsing, and it led to some professional decisions that in a sense brought him to this helicopter crash that ends Season 2. Now he's having to deal with ongoing post-traumatic stress while figuring it out. So we see him in the beginning of the season really trying to find himself again, but it's a challenging place to have to do that because he's still heightened from his experience and his crash, and he's not making the best decisions. He ends up making some complicating, poor decisions even after this crash that muddle [his] view of who he thinks he is and where he thinks he fits in in this life before he starts to find his way back.
TVLINE | I love the new look. Was that something that was in the script or that Jim Watson decided to bring to Season 3?
Actually, it was Jim's idea, because he called me a couple weeks after we wrapped Season 2 to say, "Hey what's your plan, man? Should I just grow out a beard?" He texted me a photo of himself about a month later, and I saw the photo and said, "Yes, that is it!"
TVLINE | June made some career moves in the premiere, deciding to pursue Trauma OR. What is her arc this season? And might that decision put her in competition with Bash or create any tension there?
She's constantly evaluating what she sees as her own blindspots and trying to ameliorate herself, which is one of the many reasons we admire her. Obviously, professionally, she strives to be the best surgeon she can be, but also wishes she were more vulnerable, and she knows that she's not great with patients. So because Dr. Novak is also not great with patients and he's the person who runs Trauma OR and he offers her this challenge, she looks at that and sees, "If I can conquer this, then I can be both sort of novel in my career but also tackle something that I want to tackle as a person." So she just takes on that challenge, and she ends up, in a sense, actually being Bash's boss because when Bash sort of finds his career moving him back toward surgery, he's finding his colleague and friend [is] his supervisor, which is a hard thing to deal with. But worse than that for June is that she has to kind of get through Dr. Novak, who's really erratic guy and hard to work with. But we ended up discovering, as writers, in that relationship a really interesting chemistry and an interesting sort of conflict-fueled pathway to challenge June and to get to know her more as she successfully tackles this challenge.
Transplant fans, what did you think of the episode? Grade it below, then hit the comments!