ABC’s police procedural Will Trent recently aired the last episode of its second season, and it left viewers with a lot of questions for when the show comes back for season 3. One of the most pressing involves Trent’s on-again, off-again sometimes partner Angie Polaski, played by Erika Christensen. The people have spoken and they want to know: is Angie leaving?
Will Trent is based on a series of novels by the same name from author Karin Slaughter. There are 12 books in the series, starting with Triptych in 2006. The latest book, This Is Why We Lied, was released this year. Now let’s find out what’s going on with Angie!
What happened to Angie on Will Trent?
Angie has been by Will Trent’s (played by Ramón Rodríguez) side since the show premiered, and she adds a levity and lightness to the show, which often deals with very dark subject matter. In the episode “Do You See the Vision?,” Trent and team are tasked with tracking down a serial killer, who just happens to be a woman. The killer has been offing sex offenders in a rash of vigilante murders, and to complicate things this all happens when Angie is on leave.
What does that mean? She’s without an alibi for the killings. Oops. Regardless, using good old police detective work and her excellent instincts, Angie discovers that Crystal is the killer. A chase ensues and Crystal slips trying to jump across a river, falls, and dashes her head on a rock. R.I.P. Crystal. One would think this would be the end of it, but oh no, things just get much more complicated from here.
The main issue at hand is that Angie actually covered up one of Crystal’s murders (Lenny). Because he’s Will, he figures this out and even gets double confirmation from Crystal’s mom. This means that he pretty much has no choice but to arrest Angie on charges of providing false witness and tampering with evidence. This weighs heavily on him, and he packs up his stuff and gets the heck out of dodge.
This arrest is the main source of the speculation that Angie is done on the show, but it looks like that won’t be the case. Showrunners Daniel Thomsen and Liz Heldens did an interview with TVLine, and they touched on Angie’s arrest and what that could mean for the character moving forward.
Haldens said “everything is on the table” when it comes to Angie, and that they are huge fans of Christensen’s work with the character. Haldens said they’ve “talked about a path back” for Angie and that she would “follow Angie wherever she went.”
Of course, there’s also Angie’s sobriety to deal with, and whether she’ll fall off the wagon, and when. The showrunners said they don’t want Angie’s sobriety to be a “cheap plot twist,” so they want her to hit a real rock bottom. Thomsen said that he wanted Angie’s predicament to be realistic in terms of what “cops go through” in the judicial system. Will she be treated differently?
They don’t want to do some long drawn out courtroom trial, but they do admit that it’s going to affect Angie’s character in a very significant way and potentially fundamentally change her relationship with Will. Speaking to TV Insider, Heldens said season 3 was going to be a “nice challenging shake-up” and that they’re going to focus on “what these characters are going through.” That means special attention to Will and Angie’s dynamic moving forward.
Heldens quips that she doesn’t quite know where the series is going and that the team doesn’t need to actually figure it out until “June 3.” There are some ideas, she said, but that “it’s kind of nice to sort of throw all the pieces in the air and figure out where they’re gonna land.”
Thomsen said he understands that what draws people to the show is “how real it feels in terms of what these characters are going through, and I think that this kind of just seismic change that you have to find a way to roll with is kind of a part of life for people.” If it means that Angie and Will are going to be separated most of the season, he said they were “excited to kind of figure out” what things look like for Angie without Will and vice versa.