TVLINE | Talk to me about the decision to kill off Seth. At the point where Angie and Seth got married earlier in Season 4, did you already know their happily ever after would be short-lived?
HELDENS, ROSENTHAL & THOMSEN | [In unison] Yeah.
ROSENTHAL | We did. And then when we saw the wedding, we were just like, “Oh my God, how are we even…?” It was awful. We felt like horrible, horrible people. It was so beautiful.
HELDENS | And we were, like, “What else can we do?” Both of these deaths were very hard, and there was a lot of debate in the writers’ room. But yeah, we did have that on our mind to get Angie and Will back in each other’s orbit.
TVLINE | There was a lot of fan anxiety this season that something like this might happen to Seth — and that elevator stabbing a few weeks back really seemed to heighten it. Watching it, I feared it was a setup for Seth to realize all too late how badly he was bleeding internally, which is ultimately what happens here. Was that designed as a fake-out, knowing how his story ends?
ROSENTHAL | I think it was. [Laughs]
THOMSEN | To me, specifically the stabbing wasn’t it, but as we were writing the episode, you were supposed to think like, “Oh no, there’s a gunman and Seth is being forced to [treat this patient] at gunpoint…” So yeah, the smart audience — the audience that’s seen 10,000 hours of an ABC soap — is going to be, like, “Oh, he’s not getting out of this one alive.”
ROSENTHAL | Yeah. So it wasn’t the stabbing, but yeah, exactly. We did think it was almost, like, “Get ready!”
HELDENS | But we also wanted to get the most out of Scott Foley while we had him. He is just a wonderful man, and I want to work with him many more times in my career. And it was fun to get him in an action sequence on our show, and it was fun to give him some hero moments.
TVLINE | I don’t know about all of you, but that “ER” stabbing all those years ago scarred me for life in terms of TV characters getting stabbed in hospitals.
HELDENS | That episode is talked about in every writers’ room ever.
ROSENTHAL | For sure.
