‘The Resident’ EP spoke EXCLUSIVELY with HL about what’s ahead in the second half of season 5, including what we’ll learn about what’s wrong with Bell, that Billie and Conrad moment, and more.
The Resident season 5 midseason finale left fans with a number of questions. Who is Kincaid Sullivan, and what is she hiding? What’s wrong with Bell? All will be revealed in due time, executive producer Andrew Chapman told HollywoodLife EXCLUSIVELY.
Andrew revealed that Kincaid’s story is just beginning, and the truth about her backstory will be uncovered in the episodes to come. He also noted that the impact Bell’s diagnosis will be “incredibly impactful.” Andrew teased what’s to come concerning Conrad’s romantic life after Nic and more.
We met a mysterious new character named Kincaid Sullivan. I’m genuinely curious about her because Devon and Conrad started looking into her history at the end of the episode, and there’s nothing out there about her. When The Resident comes back, will the show be diving in full force into who Kincaid is?
Andrew Chapman: Yes. We’re going to explore who she is. She’s going to be cagey about her past, but it will come out in episodes after the break. What it really will do will lead us to a huge storyline going forward all the way to the end of the season. Literally, we’ve been plotting out our season finale and Cade and her backstory. What she’s hiding will be very important and will really give us a fun, raucous, meaningful end of the season.
I’ve been thinking about if she’s hiding something terrible or to protect herself. There’s a bunch of scenarios in my head.
Andrew Chapman: Well, like all things on The Resident, it is both bad and good. We never go for just good or just bad. Like all things in healthcare, there are ups and downs, so the backstory will be very much a story of doing good things and doing bad things and being redeemed or not being redeemed. It will very much tie into where the back half of the season goes. Her storyline’s super important to us.
We saw right off the bat that Conrad and Kincaid do make a really good team. What is the dynamic going to be like between Conrad and Kincaid going forward?
Andrew Chapman: Especially for this episode and the whole idea of a Go Team, we really wanted it to be like an adventure episode. They’re like Butch and Sundance. They’re just having one adventure after another, and we thought that was really fun. We want to continue that push-pull going forward. She gets hired into Chastain, and she has a little bit of that cowboy thing going. That’s really fun and really interesting. That’s challenging to our other doctors and challenging to Conrad, especially when you don’t really fully understand where she came from. There’ll be a lot of good juice and maybe there’s, who knows, there might even be a little attraction between Conrad and Cade. I’m not saying that there will be there or there won’t be, but it’s possible. Conrad’s love life is something that we’re going to very carefully test the waters on. You saw that we did that with Marion, and we’re going to continue to do that doing going forward. It’s been a bunch of years since he lost Nic, and he’s a man with needs and wants to be careful and not break any hearts, but he also wants to be fulfilled.
Speaking of love interests, there’s a moment I’ve been thinking about ever since I saw it. There was a moment between Billie and Conrad when she was encouraging him to live his life. He goes off with Marion, and there’s a look on Billie’s face. Will the show dive more into what’s possibly going on there?
Andrew Chapman: Absolutely. And let’s sing the praises of Jessica Lucas, what a fantastic look on her face. You could just read so many emotions, and they’re so complicated as he goes off with this other woman. There’s something just heartbreaking and wonderful about that look. I just loved it. I was so happy with that, but we’re definitely going to play that out. We’re definitely going to see what happens. There’s a lot of options out there. And just like in episode 8, where we played Conrad as the world’s most eligible bachelor at Chastain, which I thought was really fun, that’ll continue. He’s the world’s most eligible bachelor. Who wouldn’t want to date the guy? He loves his daughter. He’s a family man. He’s a great doctor. He’s compassionate. I think it’s what makes him sexy.
I could not agree more. Obviously, the situation would be a bit more complicated with Billie. Nick would want them both to be happy, but Billie was Nic’s best friend. It’s a little weird, so I saw that on her face, too.
Andrew Chapman: I think that that’s the complicated juice of real relationships in this world. Sometimes you fall in love with people you don’t know, but sometimes you fall in love with people you do know. That’s such a wonderfully interesting way to go with characters because I think it’s very true to real life.
On another note, we’ve seen a little bit of progress between Billie and Trevor. I know they agreed to not make it known that she’s his biological mother, but where are they headed?
Andrew Chapman: They do and there is going to be a huge bombshell storyline that starts in episode 12 and goes through 13 and 14. It will be entirely about Billie and Trevor and their relationship and what he knows, what he doesn’t know about his mother and her past. I can’t say too much, just that all of those things will come to a head and be really, really dramatic and powerful. So expect a lot of interesting, powerful Billie and Trevor after the break.
The midseason finale actually ended on a cliffhanger. Conrad tells Bell that he thinks he knows what’s wrong with him. I’m assuming when the show returns we’re going to find out what’s wrong with Bell, right?
Andrew Chapman: You will find out, and it will be really moving. It will be incredibly impactful on Bell’s life, his life with Kit, his life in the hospital, his life as a surgeon. We’re going to dive into it, and I can’t tell you what it is because you’ve got to watch. But it’s going to be really interesting. It will be a central storyline going forward. The idea that Bell started our show so many seasons ago killing somebody on the table and then hiding it. He started as such a bad guy, and now we’re all terrified for him that this terrible thing is possibly going to happen to him. He does the right thing. He pulls himself out of surgery because he doesn’t want to harm a patient. What a redemptive story for this character and what a real-life story, too. People can change and they can be redeemed and they can learn. He seems to have learned, but now he’s faced with this huge challenge and that challenge will play big time in our stories.
What’s ahead for Raptor at the hospital and in his romantic life?
Andrew Chapman: We love Raptor, the playboy. We love Raptor, the media star. We love Raptor, the blowhard who loves to wax on about crazy stuff and is a fantastic surgeon at the same time. We feel like he had this intense love relationship with Mina, and he softened a bit. Now he’s kind of gone back to that guy. We love seeing Malcolm-Jamal Warner in his joyous phase when he smiles. He lights up the room, right? Even when he’s being an arrogant ass, and then he smiles, he lights up the room. There’s just something so wonderful about him. You love to see him in full adventure joy mode. So expect more of that. Expect him to be the playboy media star. Expect him to be the arrogant Raptor of old, but at the same time, he will be balancing that with his mother, Carol, and where she goes. Obviously, she’s very sick. There are going to be end-of-life issues that will temper his joy and give us both medical stories that we find very powerful because I think everybody in this country has dealt with an elderly mother or grandmother or grandfather or relative. How do they face all those things coming down the pike? How do you face them as caregivers? And what’s the right way to live out your life? And we don’t want to be too dark, but this is an important story. I think it’s an important story in the zeitgeist of how Americans deal with the medical system of their country.
Devon has been such a great mentor to Trevor. Will that continue in the second half of the season and what’s coming for Devon and Leela?
Andrew Chapman: Yes, absolutely, Devon will continue to mentor him and pull him into a very specific direction with his career. And that will be interesting and fun and really about science and medicine and the intersection of the two. We introduced Trevor as like a chemist, who is making recreational drugs in his college, and now he’s a doctor so the chemist part of him never goes away, the scientist part. We’re going to play with that. So that’ll definitely happen. One thing to know is that Manish [Dayal], who plays Devon, is going to direct an episode for us. He’s directing episode 14, so in episode 13, his character’s kind of going to disappear. And in 14, he’ll disappear too because he has to prep his episode and then he has to direct the episode. We’re going to take a little bit of a Devon break. But then after that, we’re going to deal with a big, juicy, fun, Devon and Leela story. Where does that relationship go? There is going to be a big bombshell that shows up in 13 and in 14, and then they’ll have to deal with it in 15. It will involve Leela, it will involve Devon, it’ll involve where they are going in the future, and also Leela’s sister Padma. I can’t really say more than that but expect fireworks.
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