Will Trent Kills Off [Spoiler]: Its A Reset For Our Characters That Is Painful But Exciting For Season 5 – TVLine

R.I.P., Amanda Wagner.

Tuesday’s Will Trent culminated in the death of the GBI Deputy Director, played since Season 1 by Sonja Sohn.

“Amanda has been the character who has protected Will for as long as she has known him,” co-showrunner Karine Rosenthal toldVariety. “So this gives us the opportunity for a completely new dynamic in the GBI, because her replacement will not have that same relationship with Will. Her death had the most impact on the most amount of characters. It really sets everybody reeling from this enormous loss. So it’s such a reset for our characters in a way that is painful but exciting for Season 5.”

Rosenthal, along with fellow co-showrunners Liz Heldens and Daniel Thomsen, told Variety that Sohn was made aware that her arc was coming to an end early in Season 4, and that she handled the news with “grace.” Added Thomsen: “Nobody gets to always exit their shows — even on the writing side — on their own terms all the time. It’s hard to do that with grace. So it was just very impressive. She is a total pro.”

In Season 4, Episode 15, titled “The Blank Expanse of Nothing,” Amanda was secretly working with the FBI to track down the Commander, the young man who met with Will in Episode 13 and gave him a burner phone that would put him in touch with James Ulster’s daughter, Adelaide Trevens (recurring guest star Mallory Jensen), who’d been holding Will’s uncle Antonio captive.

Amanda ultimately tailed the young man, and when she set out on foot to confront him, she was intercepted by an unseen assailant — possibly Adelaide herself.

All the while secretly in contact with Adelaide — and never telling Amanda that Ulster’s daughter had reached out — Will agreed to meet her at a bar. But when he tried to plant a tracking device on Adelaide, she vanished, only to call moments later and say she’d left him a gift around the corner. What he found instead was Amanda, dead in the street.

For his entire adult life, Amanda was the closest thing Will had to a mother. As fans of both the ABC drama and the Karin Slaughter novels on which the series is based know, the titular special agent was abandoned at birth and endured a tumultuous childhood in the Atlanta foster care system.

In the Season 1 finale, it was revealed that Amanda not only knew Will’s mother — a sex worker named Lucy Morales who died during childbirth — but rescued Will after he was left for dead by serial killer James Ulster. She even intended to raise him as her own, but adoption wasn’t feasible for a single woman in 1980s Georgia.

Believing she had placed him with a good family, Amanda later came to regret that his childhood took a very different path. She did, however, give him one lasting connection: her mother’s maiden name, Trent.

Nineteen years later, an unhoused Will was arrested for stealing food. Amanda was the arresting officer — and the one who ultimately took him under her wing, setting him on the path to becoming the GBI’s top agent.

Will you miss Sonja Sohn’s portrayal of GBI Deputy Director Amanda Wagner on “Will Trent”? Drop a comment with your reactions to her shocking death below.