TRANSPLANT Creator Joseph Kay Previews Season 3’s New Boss, Bash’s Big Decisions, and More

As TRANSPLANT is set to return for its third season, it’s a bit of a surreal time for creator Joseph Kay: The medical drama also just kicked off its final run of episodes (AKA season 4) in Canada, with the last installments currently being filmed in Montreal. 

“In a sense, I’m saying goodbye to the show—but also we’re launching season 3 in the US,” Kay tells Give Me My Remote in the video below. “So it still very much exists. So…I get to prolong the emotional goodbye I have with TRANSPLANT by still living in the world of season 3. So it’s interesting and I like it.”

When season 2 ended, change was in the air for the doctors. “[Hamza Haq’s Bash] just had a very emotional end to season 2 where Dr. Bishop, who was his mentor and the person who gave him a chance, kind of fell on his sword and sacrificed himself for Bash’s career,” Kay recalls. “And so Bash finds himself in this transitional period where he’s been told he can feel safe—and feeling safe is a hard thing for him to get his head around, because he never feels safe because of his past. So he’s in that place at work.”

“We always say that Bash is always trying to allow himself to want more,” he continues. “That’s kind of what his arc has always been in the series—just to want more than basic survival, and that’s what he’s challenging himself to do. He’s been given more opportunity at work.” 

When season 3 kicks off, the doctors will still be trying to figure out how to work in a post-Bishop environment. “For Bash, he loses an ally and an important person who protected him; we always felt as writers that it was our duty to deprive him of that person,” Kay says. “As much as we love Bishop as a character, and John Hannah as an actor and a human being—it was heartbreaking to let him go—we thought the show is going to be more dynamic when Bash is challenged. And so for Bash, he doesn’t feel safe.” 

“And for the rest of the hospital, they lost essentially a strong paternal figure,” he continues. “Dr. Bishop and John Hannah both have a very strong paternal…’my hand’s on the wheel,’ kind of vibe. And it’s replaced and so they lose that.”

What they find instead is Bishop’s replacement at the hospital: Dr. Neeta Devi (Rekha Sharma). “What they get is a sort of younger, upstart boss who comes with an agenda and a lot to prove,” Kay previews. “So it becomes a destabilizing force and one that we were lucky to have a really remarkable actor named Rekha Sharma step into the big shoes left by John, and to do that [job] in a really different way. We didn’t replace John’s kind of father figure role with another parental role; she comes with a different energy.”

“We were lucky to have her and it just challenges everybody,” he continues. “She’s not a typical antagonist in the sense that she’s a bad guy. That’s not what she’s like at all. She just brings change and she also wears her heart on her sleeve. And she’s, admittedly, trying to figure out the job she has, while she does it, which is something a lot of us can identify with.” 

“In the writers’ room, we refer to it as a glass cliff story,” he concludes. “She’s given a lot of power, but it’s also tenuous power, because she doesn’t necessarily have institutional support, or even the right experience. So it’s a destabilizing force, but one that we think is interesting and challenging, and also just fun to see your way through.”

As for Dr. Devi, the team is baffled by her lack of experience—but she is a fighter, with her heart in the right place.

“Our show is set in Toronto—the cast is mostly Canadians, playing Canadian characters with the exception of Bash, who’s from Syria—but Dr. Devi’s character..is an immigrant in another sense in that she’s American,” Kay says. “She comes to Canada from the States. She was in hospital medicine, and she’s never been chief of an emergency department before. She had a public health background—she had more of a policy background. And so she’s a deeply humanist person, and she wears her heart on her sleeve. She believes in the patient experience, she believes in patient advocacy, and she believes in improving the patient experience in a big city hospital, which is constantly, as we know, especially through the pandemic and everything, [is] constantly suffering at the hands of institutional cutbacks and societal cutbacks.”

“She just comes with the view to making things better, but what she encounters is [the] reality that institutional change [in] public institutions like hospitals is not impossible, but hard,” he continues. “There are all these forces aligned against her. And so while she sets out to do good, and she sets out to make allies and to make a difference, she just keeps encountering roadblocks and that flummoxes her.”

Naturally, her relationships with her new colleagues are complicated. “[Bash] doesn’t have that relationship with Dr. Devi [he had with Bishop],” Kay says. “It’s different. She doesn’t really know who this guy is or where he’s coming from—and he’s an inherent rule breaker…she develops what we think is an interesting bespoke relationship with Mags, who is another person who wears her heart on her sleeve, and we were excited about exploring their relationship over the season. And she develops a couple of adversarial relationships with some of the doctors: Dr. Novak and Claire played by Torri Higginson, who’s our head nurse. They don’t quite get along because Dr. Devi comes to change policy; she thinks that she’s helping the nurses, but the nurses have a different view of it. So we think it brings conflict and dynamic change, but in a multifaceted way that we enjoyed writing to.”

Outside of the hospital, Bash may also be making some moves in his personal life: Season 2 concluded with Bash going to Mags’ (Laurence Leboeuf) home, seemingly about to take a leap to more than friends. “We left things romantically on a cliffhanger with him and Mags’ character, where it seems like maybe something is starting to happen there,” Kay teases. “And you will see where that goes as the season begins.”

Elsewhere, Bash will have another important thing to take care of in season 3. “He’s becoming a Canadian citizen, which is a process that we were very excited to dramatize over the season, in an honest fashion,” Kay previews. “He’s excited about becoming a citizen, but he also is emotional about losing another part of himself. So in all sorts of ways, he finds himself caught between worlds which is a constant state of being for him.”

TRANSPLANT, Season Premiere, Thursday, October 12, 9/8c, NBC

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