‘Transplant’ Boss on That Shocking Ending With Mags — What’s Next?

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Transplant Season 3 Episode 4 “Multiple Choice.”]

Uh-oh, one of the docs is down!

Transplant‘s latest episode ends with Dr. Magalie “Mags” Leblanc (Laurence Leboeuf) now one of the hospital’s patients. It comes as she’s worried about her future working with Dr. Fisher (Deena Aziz) after disagreeing with her about the data they are to present on abnormal left ventricular ejection fractions; Fisher says they’re focusing on the results to get the funding. But Mags worries that Fisher owning stock in the company marketing the ICD (implantable cardioverter-defibrillator) is a conflict. Fisher assures her it isn’t according to the ethics board — and reminds her that she went to bat for her to switch residences and the condition of that is Mags doing the study.

But on her way to the presentation, Mags is distracted helping a patient she bumps into, and by the time she meets up with Fisher at the end of the day, she’s worried — but is that why she’s breathing fast? (Hint: No.) “You asked me a question this morning. Do I trust you? And obviously, I’ve been thinking about that not just today but for weeks and the answer is no,” Mags tells Fisher. “I don’t trust you. … but does it have to be an ultimatum? If I don’t trust you, I lose my job, and if I do, I keep it?”

Fisher, instead, focuses on the symptoms she’s seeing in Mags, who, after briefly protesting she’s fine, admits that in addition to her breathing, she’s dizzy and has pain in her jaw. And then she collapses. By the time her boyfriend, Dr. Bashir “Bash” Hamed (Hamza Haq) is paged to cardiology, Mags has been admitted. It was “a massive arrhythmia, out of nowhere. We’ve cardioverted twice. We won’t know the extent of the damage for a day or two,” Fisher warns him. He was the only person Mags would let them tell.

This event plays into what excited creator Joseph Kay about seeing Bash and Mags as a couple this season. “Bash inherently is a person who guards a lot and doesn’t share a lot. Megs tends to kind of pull it out of him,” he tells TV Insider. “But with her health, and when she has her heart event at the end of Episode 4, it reveals something that she herself as an otherwise really open person, heart on her sleeve person has been guarding from people.”

He continues, “they’re trying to feel their way through it with each other because they are vulnerable with each other, but neither of them wants the other to be saddled with their problems. It’s that kind of combination of, how intimate do you get with somebody, especially early in a relationship? It gives us a lot of runway to get to know them and challenge them.”

Now, going forward, this is something that’s going to affect her on a professional level. “For the first time in her life, she has to try to merge her physical impairment with her work, and Mags has chosen a line of work which is extremely physically demanding,” says the creator. “Emergency medicine is really adrenaline-fueled. She’s had this heart condition since she was a kid, which she’s hid and she can’t hide from it anymore. And so she’s having to ask for special leave in certain parts or she has to make that public in a way that really lets us access the character in a way that we hadn’t been able to before.”

And yes, this does “lead her back to her calling,” Kay confirms. The series started with Mags in emergency medicine, and this season, she’s in cardiology. “Dealing head-on with the truth of what her kind of health issue is brings Mags back squarely to what she believes is her calling, which is emergency medicine. She’s trying to find herself as a person, like all the characters on Transplant are in some way trying to figure out how they’ve been led astray a little bit in their past and how that can align with what they really want in life. And it’s a big one for her.”

Let’s just hope we see more of Mags as a doctor, not a patient going forward.

Transplant, Thursdays, 9/8c, NBC