TRANSPLANT: Joseph Kay and Hamza Haq Preview the POV-Shifting Premiere and the Ambitious Sinkhole Episode

TRANSPLANT’s fourth (and final) season kicks off on NBC on Thursday, May 22 with a two-hour block—with the first episode, “Crete,” telling a story from multiple points of view.

“We have always enjoyed playing with form where we can,” TRANSPLANT creator Joseph Kay tells Give Me My Remote in the video below. “And so we decided for the premiere just to totally mix it up and try something structurally that we hadn’t tried before…The premiere plays with point of view in a fun way, to tell the story of this family that were essentially hiking—what seems like hiking—but got separated for some reason. And each had a different experience that we filter it through our different doctors.”

“I think we also were sort of narratively trying to use that device of people’s points of views and people’s intersecting stories to have an interesting and fun way into the season,” he continues. “To let the audience catch up to where everybody was and sort of get us off to the races, as it were.”

Hamza Haq, who plays Bash, compares the premiere to the classic THE SIMPSONS episode, “Trilogy of Error,” noting the animated show is the thing he and Kay “probably talk about most.” 

“[In ‘Trilogy of Error’] you revisit the story, like Bart’s day, Lisa’s day with [grammar-correcting robot] Linguo, and everything like that,” Haq says. “So when I saw the script, I think I texted him, ‘Linguo dead.’ And he replied, ‘Linguo is dead,’ [echoing quotes from THE SIMPSONS episode.] It was just like, all right, I know what we’re doing. This is good.”

Also likening it to Ridley Scott’s THE LAST DUEL, the actor notes “I love exploring the different perspectives of the same story, and how we really are all the protagonists of that story.”

“I just thought it was structurally very different and kind of a callback to how the pilot was structurally so different from the rest of the show,” Haq notes. “So it was a really nice moment where, like, yeah, we’re gonna do something that’s substantially different from the layout for the rest of the show. And it was a lot of fun.” 

“From an acting perspective, it was the first episode we shot after a break [between seasons],” he continues. “So just to be able to be like, ‘All right, guys, this is the first episode. We’re gonna film from your perspective, and then we’re gonna film from a different perspective’…it just gave us an opportunity to fall back into our characters with both our perceptions of it and our co-stars’ perception of it. To be able to film those scenes with Laurence [Leboeuf, who plays Mags] and Ayisha [Iss, who plays June] over and over and over is just—knowing that it was going to be the last year, and to start off the season with so much time spent together and playing with different versions of the same scene, it’s just a lot of fun. Like, I pray that for anybody that’s on any show that they have co-stars that they not only enjoy working with, but they get to do this sort of fun stuff with, you know?”

The second hour finds Bash trying to help a man in a sinkhole—but is restricted with how much he can actually do. “We were very excited about that one,” Kay says. “We do a sinkhole that opens up [and] swallows this entire vehicle whole. And Bash has to go into the sinkhole and rescue this guy…It’s harder and harder to realistically generate opportunities for Bash in the fourth season of the show to use his field medicine techniques, because there’s only so much that it’s going to be believable that this keeps happening. So we would do maybe one a season, I think, for the most part.

“It puts him in a situation where he has no equipment, no tools, and also something that happens down there, which is that they have to wait,” he continues. “There’s not that much he can do other than wait for the response teams, which is a really interesting opportunity to examine who he is from a character perspective, which is also what we’re always looking for. Like, this is a man of action. He always wants to run in. He always wants to do the bold thing. But if he has to just sit there and wait for fate to unfold. What happens to him? And we kind of use that to interact with his past a little bit.”

“I love a set piece, you know?” Haq enthuses. “It’s just great. I think everybody on the TRANSPLANT team, they did such a wonderful job building great sandboxes for us to play in. As a kid whose best friend growing up was movies, it’s just so awesome.”

Filming on the sinkhole set the TRANSPLANT team built, “it does so much of the work for you,” Haq points out. “To have, like, dust falling on your face, a little bit of discomfort…it was so much fun. And you sort of go head first, right into Bashir’s mentality.”

“And Daniel Maslany’s performance was so good in that, too,” he continues. “So early in the season, we’re doing different things. Like, I felt spoiled. It was like a victory lap…so I love that episode, too.”

Plus, check out the video below for more from Kay about Bash and Mags’ relationship, June’s journey, and Theo’s troubles…

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TRANSPLANT, Season Premiere, Thursday, May 22, 8/7c, NBC

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