At long last, Will Trent‘s deep-seated trauma is unlocked, and we at home come to understand why it is that our title character has been haunted by visions of his 12-year-old self.
It wasn’t just that Will found himself in the crosshairs of a violent foster father; he’d attempted to save his foster mother — the only foster parent who was ever kind to him — from an abusive relationship, and his heroic effort backfired.
In Season 2, Episode 8, we learned that 12-year-old Will hid Sleeveless Jack’s gun. One night, when Jack went after his wife Anna, Will loaded Jack’s gun and shot him in the arm. Jack, in turn, took his gun and aimed it at Will.
That’s when Anna intervened. She fought her husband in an effort to seize his weapon and protect Will. Jack then went and shot his wife dead. Will blamed himself and spent the next 20+ years attempting to block that night from his memory.
When it finally came rushing back to him Tuesday, Uncle Antonio was there to console his nephew and assure him that Anna’s death was not his fault. “She died because an abusive man killed her,” he said, “not because a brave child wanted to protect her.”
“That was a really tough episode, watching that all come to a head for him, where he figures out what this childhood trauma was that he’d blocked out of his memory,” series star Ramón Rodríguez shares with TVLine. “When he realizes what happened, and how much he feels at fault for what happened, it’s gut wrenching.
“To share that moment with [Uncle Antonio], someone who is family, but is also new, is all so vulnerable,” he points out. “He’s almost embarrassed by what he had to experience…. That’s something for Will that is a real, underlying issue: feeling blame and fault for a lot of things [that were out of his control]. He feels fault for what happened with Sleeveless Jack and Anna, and he feels fault for the death of his mother, even. These things really haunt him. They stay [with] him and he has not resolved them yet. He won’t resolve them this season. That might be something we explore next season.”
What he needs right now is a break from life. That’s precisely what Antonio afforded Lucy’s son the following morning, when he offered to take Will on a trip to Puerto Rico. That’s precisely where Will Trent will pick up in Season 2, Episode 9, airing Tuesday, May 14 (ABC, 8/7c).
