‘Pulse’ Team Breaks Down Shocking Blindside for Chief Resident

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Pulse Season 1.]

There are some major shakeups at Maguire Medical Center by the end of Pulse Season 1. Cruz (Justina Machado) is no longer running both the surgical and trauma departments, and Sanchez (J.R. Ramirez), who takes over the latter, shocks her when he announces who will be chief resident going forward: Danny (Willa Fitzgerald) or Elijah (Jessie T. Usher).

Danny had held the position temporarily after the complaint she filed against the current chief resident, Phillips (Colin Woodell), led to his suspension; their romantic relationship got complicated when it came to advancing in their careers with him her boss and a say in a promotion. Though Cruz could have easily kept her role being in charge of both departments by firing Danny, as Phillips’ mother (a board member) wanted (especially after an incident in the hospital), she stood by the other doctor (who had saved her daughter’s life). And so with Sanchez in charge of the trauma department, though Cruz recommended Danny — whom she hadn’t initially been a fan of but her opinion changed as she “watches what Danny does,” according to Machado — be chief resident to him, he gave it to Elijah, shocking everyone at the party.

Why have it go down the way it did? “I think Sanchez wants to be his own leader and he wants to be able to do things the way he wants to do them,” executive producer Carlton Cuse tells TV Insider. “I think there’s a lot of intentionality in him sidestepping Danny and picking Elijah. And I think it’s something where we understand that that is going to be a very complicated situation for Cruz going forward.”

Jeff Neumann / Netflix

Machado says that her character was completely blindsided. “No part of her thought he was going to go against her,” she says. “Remember, this woman has been the boss of these places for a while, so people don’t really go against her. So at no point did she think that was going to happen. She thought she was making nice with him and that he was going to do the right thing, but he did what he wanted to do.”

Going forward, she doesn’t expect smooth sailing between the two department heads. “I can’t imagine if we are lucky enough to have a second season that she would go down without a fight and there wouldn’t be tension between the two,” she admits.

There’s also a question of how the way Elijah became chief might affect his and Danny’s friendship.

That “was painful” for Danny, says Fitzgerald. “I think Danny is uniquely able to deal with disappointment and loss in a lot of ways, and someone who she really does very deeply love is Elijah. They see each other in fundamentally important ways. As disappointed as she is for herself, she also is incredibly happy for her friend. Danny would’ve probably felt a lot worse being given chief under the circumstances of the situation than Elijah getting it. Elijah getting it is almost freeing for her. It allows her to have a clean slate in some ways.”

That has to play into the final scene of Danny, of her going into the ocean and smiling. Fitzgerald says her character is in the best place we see her throughout the first season, both in the past and present, in that moment. It’s “one of the first times we get to see her just surrender to herself in a way,” she explains. “We see her ripping to so many desires, ideas, compartmentalized emotional experiences over the season that I think that why it feels like such a relief is because it’s a release. It’s the first time we see her letting go of that tension that is such a trademark quality of how she moves through the world.”

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Usher doesn’t expect Elijah getting chief like he does will change anything in their friendship, though he does think the job itself could. “Now you’re managing employees and your peers and your colleagues, and I just think that naturally would change anyone. So luckily he had some pretty close relationships in the hospital and I think he’ll be able to talk things through with people as they sort of come up,” he says.

But executive producer Zoe Robyn does caution that it will “introduce some interesting dynamics in their relationship. Elijah has this authority, and it’s a position that he always really, really wanted. As much as Danny will support him, she’s going to start to feel that natural tension that you [do] when someone is in charge.”

Being in charge is also going to give him access to information he may not have had before. For example, according to Usher, “There’s a piece in the scene where he gets announced where he’s even a little bit shocked and confused that Cruz is stepping down as the head of the trauma department and just going to be sticking with the surgical department. That was a move that he didn’t see coming.”

The other job change in the finale was Phillips becoming an attending. That means he’s still Danny’s boss “and almost stepping into a bigger role in that way because now he is the big boss of all the residents,” notes Robyn. “And so I think that they’re sort of left in this place where the dynamic is the same, but things are going to change for both of them in Season 2. I think we see the first kernels of Philips kind of potentially losing his golden boy status in those scenes with Sanchez and we’re really setting him up to take him in a very different direction and giving him a lot of personal struggles in Season 2 that we didn’t see him struggling with in the first season.”

What did you think of those shocking job changes in the finale? Let us know in the comments section below.

Pulse, Streaming now, Netflix

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