The New Amsterdam doctors continued to grapple with the aftermath of Helen, Mia, Casey, Trevor, and Elizabeth being drugged during their big night out. Max discovers Helen passed out on the floor of their apartment and rushes her to the hospital. Turns out, she’s got clots all over her body, and a hysterectomy is on the table.
Max proposes to Helen while at the hospital, and she happily accepts. Helen manages to avoid having a hysterectomy but has to have emergency surgery to get rid of a blood clot in her lung. When she wakes up, Helen can’t speak. HollywoodLife spoke EXCLUSIVELY with New Amsterdam executive producers David Schulner and Peter Horton about Helen’s “massive stroke” and what it means for Sharpwin moving forward. Plus, get scoop about Reynolds’ baby drama, Iggy and Martin’s future, and more.
Helen’s stroke is completely unexpected and shocking. What does Helen’s journey look like ahead? What can they do?
Peter Horton: The truth is, all they can do is wait to a degree and try and get her to go through therapy and get her to try and speak. But one of the things that’s so dynamic about that story is this is Max and Sharpe at that launchpad where they finally are at this moment where everything they’d worked for, have all of their projections in front of them of what their life is going to be like, how fabulous it’s going to be, and suddenly this happens. We don’t know if she’s going to be able to speak in a week or two years or ever. And so that question comes up immediately, what does that do to your love for each other, to your world if you’ve had this whole projection, everything’s ready to go, and suddenly it’s completely different? How does that impact your genuine feelings for each other, and how you’re going to go forward? It’s the kind of vulnerability that just shakes you to the core. It’s the wolf at the door that we all try to avoid and not open when he knocks, but this one crashed the door down.
For both of them, this is a lot to take on. How will they individually be trying to accept this complete life change?
David Schulner: Well, it also puts the relationship to the test, right? Each deals with it completely differently. They each have the same goal, which is to get Sharpe better, but they have very different ways about how to do that. That’s something that every relationship goes through, and they have to figure it out.
Peter Horton: I think Max’s journey in [episode] 17 is so wonderfully convoluted and interesting, at least to me, because his take on everything is just to be optimistic. It’s going to be fine. It’s going to be fine. But what Ryan [Eggold] did in this episode, which I thought was so beautiful, is you can see his terror and fear right underneath his positivity. It’s like, it’s going to work. Translation: It has to work. To see those two things playing right next to each other, I think that’s a version of his positivity we haven’t seen in 4 years. He’s kind of wonderfully vulnerable and fragile.
Just before that final twist, Helen and Max get engaged. Will we see any engagement bliss?
David Schulner: We promise some wedding planning in the future.
Peter Horton: You can’t avoid wedding bliss forever.
Reynolds has a baby on the way, and he makes quite a decision about Evelyn, the child, and Claude. How will Reynolds be struggling with that decision that he made to tell his child about him when it’s the right time? How Reynolds is going to be grappling with all of that going forward?
David Schulner: Well, what it does is it makes him reconsider his own relationship with his own father. Here’s someone who left Reynolds in a very different way than Reynolds is leaving this child, but leaving nonetheless. I think it brings up everything about his dad that he has just pushed aside for so long and makes him reconsider the man he thought he knew in ways that I think really shake him to his core.
Peter Schulner: It maybe gives him a little more empathy for the father that was villainized his whole life because his life isn’t working out the way he thought it was either. Maybe that happened with his dad.
How will what happened to Mia, Casey, Trevor, Elizabeth, and Helen impact everyone at the hospital moving forward?
David Schulner: It affects everyone differently. I think the most hopeful version is Dr. Wilder where she is still going to put on her scrubs and walk out into the world as a doctor and hopefully this anti-science and this violence toward the people who are trying to help us goes away, or at least now she’s ready to confront it head-on.
Peter Horton: She’s the only one who really goes to the bartender and confronts him. She doesn’t want to be a victim. From the beginning, she is proactive about it. I think that’s one of the things that allows her to put her scrubs on and go out into the world.
Iggy and Martin had quite the confrontation about their relationship and Trevor. What does their future look like?
Peter Horton: Iggy broke a seal in the family. And how do you reseal it? Can you re-seal it ever once you do that? That’s a heartbreaking journey to go on because I think the answer to that is you really can’t, especially with a family and little kids. It’s a seal he broke kind of without paying attention. It wasn’t like he went out to do it. He wasn’t looking for an affair. He wasn’t looking for some way to escape a marriage that he didn’t like. It crept up on it and ambushed him. Suddenly, he’s here now holding the remnants of the grenade he threw into his family. How do you recover from that? It’s a heartbreaking story.
David Schulner: I think he’s going to reach a shocking conclusion in a couple of episodes that are going to really shake the foundation of their marriage in an even bigger way.