‘New Amsterdam’ Cast & EPs Tease Everything ‘Will Collide’ in the Fall Finale
Max (Ryan Eggold) has his new baby and Iggy (Tyler Labine) is looking to adopt another child on New Amsterdam, but they’re not the only ones whose families are or may be growing in Season 2.
As recent episodes have revealed, Dr. Kapoor’s (Anupam Kher) son is having a baby with Ella, but he left her and she’s not sure if she wants to keep the baby. That and other storylines will be taking off in a big way in the next group of episodes heading towards the fall finale, the show’s EPs and cast told TV Insider at PaleyFest.
Everything Collides in the Fall Finale
As previously revealed, Episode 9 will see the doctors heading to Rikers Island, and executive producer David Schulner has now revealed what brings them there: women’s health issues.
“It is women’s health issues. We are going to the female prison ward of Rikers Island, where mammograms are withheld as punishment, where women don’t get pap smears and end up with cancer,” he said. “We’re really going in to address female health at Rikers in a big way.”
That’s not all to look forward to in the fall finale and the winter premiere. “Everything’s going to climax with Episode 9 and 10,” the EP teased. “All those stories will collide and come together.”
Grandpa Kapoor?
Among the stories colliding in the fall finale are Iggy’s plans to adopt and Kapoor becoming a grandfather. The latter will “be a huge part of the next six episodes,” Schulner said.
Kher is hoping that his character gets to be a grandfather. “The way they are going about Kapoor’s character, they get him excited, then something worse happens,” the actor shared. “They want the audience to feel protective towards Kapoor. It’s a fantastic character who has so many emotions apart from the medical stuff.”
And those emotions include disappointment in his son. Though “he has learned to camouflage his pain … he’s very, very sad,” Kher continued. “Somewhere he’s ashamed of it, that he should have not been so irresponsible that he has impregnated Ella and disappeared.”
And it’s causing him to look inward, as well. “He’s at a crossroads,” he explained. “He does not know whether he has been a good father or not.”
A Wedding in Season 2?
Though the season (especially so far) is about grief, “there is going to be joy,” Schulner promised. And that may very well include a wedding for Reynolds (Jocko Sims) and Evie (Margot Bingham). “All of our fingers are crossed for [that],” the EP said.
But first, they do need to be in the same city; they’re currently in a long-distance relationship since Evie’s work took her to San Francisco. “It’s tough,” Sims said. “Both of these people are already married to their careers, and they take them both very seriously, so they’re going to be faced with a lot more challenges moving forward.” But something has to give, right? “Either she’s going to have to give up the career, or he’s going to come around and deal with it,” he continued. “It seems like that’s where we’re headed.”
The distance and their careers aren’t the only sources of conflict for the couple. At the end of Season 1, Reynolds introduced Evie to his family, which didn’t go over so well. “We’re going to definitely address the fact that the family wasn’t so welcoming,” Sims revealed. “Initially they were saying ‘Evie’s great,’ then Reynold’s mother says, ‘She’s great but I didn’t say she was great for you.'”
And Reynolds also has some tension at work to deal with in Season 2, in the form of his new intern, Duke. “He’s a little bit bigger than his britches, as they say,” Sims said. “At some point, one of the two of them might reach a breaking point.” But even so, it’s a storyline and dynamic the actor is enjoying because “you have this young protégé coming in and challenging Reynolds, which is something he doesn’t get much.”
Bloom’s Continuing Struggle
Schulner previously said that Bloom remains “the same short-fused, sarcastic, crazy, adrenaline junkie that we’ve hopefully grown to love,” and Janet Montgomery didn’t want her character’s addiction or the injury she suffered in the ambulance crash to change her.
“One thing I really wanted to make sure with Bloom is she kept her general essence as a person, whether she was using or not using,” she said. “She’s battling life as an addict, and sometimes that surfaces in addictions to other things. She’s always had an addictive personality, and then there are relationships that come in and how she just navigates her job and relationships being a recovering addict.”
Speaking of relationships, Bloom was getting a bit of pain relief from a physical relationship with her physical therapist, Zach. However, he just went on vacation, which is going to change things up for her. “She’s going to struggle with what exactly he represents for her and how she breaks old habits by maybe dealing with this situation in a different way,” Montgomery teased.
Let’s just hope she finds a healthy way to do so.
New Amsterdam, Tuesdays, 10/9c, NBC