TV Recap: ABC Kicks Off Season 2 of “Will Trent’ with an Explosive Opener (And Clark Gregg!)

Special Agent Will Trent is back after a 9 month break, but in the Season 2 premiere, we find we’ve only missed 6 months of life at the GBI. The wait’s been long enough, so without further delay, here’s a recap of the Season 2 premiere.

Season 2, Episode 1: “Me Llamo Will Trent”

It’s a beautiful morning in the Lynwood Park area of Atlanta. A man, Keith Wakefield (Tedd Laskey), exits his home, already on a work call as he gets in his maroon BMW and starts the ignition. KABOOM!

“Hola, me llamo Will Trent,” the detective (Ramón Rodríguez) says to a classroom of his peers. The assignment was to talk about your family and in Spanish, he shares that he’s a GBI detective who grew up in foster care, never knowing his birth parents. Six months ago, he discovered his mother’s name, Lucy Morales, and that she was originally from Puerto Rico. He’s learning Spanish to connect with her, but he doesn’t tell the class that she was murdered. Bending over, he scoops up his chichuaua Betty, who is wearing an adorable sweater. “Ella es mi familia,” he tells the class. But he’s interrupted by his phone ringing – his boss, Amanda Wagner (Sonja Sohn), calling him to the sight of a car bomb.

Will arrives on the scene in his 1970s yellow 911 S Targa, his dogsitter Nico (Cora Lu Tran) already there to take Betty from him. The detective puts on gloves and pulls out his tape recorder to get to work. He finds an earring and notes that all of the houses in the culdesac look the same. He observes that it’s trash day so the curbs are blocked by receptacles. “GBI is here, I guess we can all go home,” Michael Ormewood (Jake McLaughlin) smugly announces as he approaches. Will passes off the earring and asks the APD officer to go door to door to inquire if the earring belongs to a neighbor. He tries to pass it off to Franklin (Kevin Daniels), who says no. Amanda rushes into the circle, ordering them to get to work, telling Will that the higher ups want to find out ASAP if this was a possible act of terrorism. Bomb squad specialist Cricket Dawson (Susan Kelechi Watson) steps in just in time to say this doesn’t seem like a terrorist bombing, and that based on the way it was hooked up, she believes whoever put it there has some missing fingers. Ormewood points out that the car was typically driven by the victim’s wife and son. Will asks Franklin to ask the neighbors if they notices any cars parked in their driveway due to garbage day, and if they have a doorbell camera that may have recorded it.

Will picks up a piece of the maroon BMW off the street and inspects it. Cricket shares that she’s excited to meet him as a fan of his work, particularly the capture of serial killer James Ulster (from episodes 12 and 13 of the first season). “You gave so many people closure,” she adds. But Will is distracted by a vision. A boy standing between two of the houses… a reflection of the past, himself at age 12 ((Isacc Dodds). And then he’s no longer in the culdesac, but the living room of a house with two other kids (MJ Tanaka and Connor Boland) and a little girl (Gabrielle Jackson) in his arms. We hear two adults, a man and a woman, fighting elsehwere in the house. All of the kids seem scared, including Will. And then Will snaps back to reality as Cricket asks if he’s alright.

Will goes inside the house where Ormewood is interviewing Keith’s widow Sue (Cristen Barnes) and his son Jason (Lion Way). Will looks through the mail on the counter and sees a pool catalogue. He looks out the back window and observes that there’s no swimming pool. He interrupts to ask Sue about it and she said the catalogue belongs to a neighbor across the culdesac, whose address is the same numbers rearranged. As someone with dyslexia, Will understands this all too well. He goes to the front of the house and looks across at the catalogues intended address. The car parked in the driveway is maroon.

Arthur Highsmith (Clark Gregg) steps out of his house with a duffel bag, loading it into the truck of his maroon car when Special Agent Will Trent approaches to return a misdelivered pool catalogue. Will makes an oral observation that less than 1% of cars in the US are maroon. He asks Arthur if he has reason to believe that anyone is trying to kill him. And then Arthur tries to make an unsuccessful run, with Will Trent quickly tackling him to the ground in his own front yard. Amanda rushes over to ask Will what he’s doing. Will declares that Arthur was the bomber’s intended target.

Angie Polaski (Erika Christensen) basks in the afterglow with her doctor (Josh Henry), whom she shouldn’t be sleeping with. “That was just what the doctor ordered,” she tells him. “Actually, this doctor is ordering rest,” he reminds her, saying she still has a few months left in the recovery process from her spinal surgery six months ago. Angie is tired of waiting and feels she’s ready to return to work, threatening to expose their sexual relationship if he doesn’t sign her paperwork authorizing a physical exam.“So that’s what this has all been about?”, he deflates.

Will’s partner, Faith Mitchell (Iantha Richardson), joins him in the interrogation room with Arthur. They’ve done some digging and discovered that Arthur is an accountant who took out a second mortgage on his house and declared bankruptcy. They ask who is trying to kill him, but Arthur deflects, insisting that Keith must’ve been the killer’s target and feigning innocence. Since Arthur hasn’t committed an obvious crime, they have to let him go, but Will strongly suggests he stay at the GBI where he can be protected. Instead, Arthur gets up and heads for the elevator. Will and Faith make small talk for a minute before they exit to tail Arthur.

As Will and Faith enter the elevator, she sees someone coming and tries to get the doors to close faster. Reporter Luke Sullivan (Ser’Darius Blain) enters and greets Faith, saying “You look great.” Will asks to be introduced.

Michael Oremwood took a break from work to take his kids to the dentist, driving them back to school and commenting that their lack of cavities must be due to fluoride in the water since they never brush their teeth. “Maisy’s dad says the fluoride is poison,” his daughter Cooper says from the backseat. Michael asks more about Maisy’s dad as his son Max (Own Trumbly) dissasociates by putting on his headphones. Michael learns that his wife has been taking Cooper to regular playdates while he’s at work, and that Maisy’s mother is dead.

Faith and Will sit in her car outside the Cup & Saucer Diner where Arthur is enjoying a meal by the window. “He is a tall drink of water,” Will comments about Luke, trying to get Faith to open up to him. She finally gives in, revealing that she had a fun 48-hours with him over the 4th of July and that it’s over. They get up and head into the diner to talk to Arthur again.

Faith reveals to Arthur that they’ve been following him in a bright yellow car and he didn’t notice. Before he went to the diner, he went to his accounting office and left with a bag. Will asks what’s in it. “Socks and clean underwear,” Arthur quickly responds, the bag seated next to him in the booth. Faith’s phone rings and she steps outside to answer. Arthur asks for the check and gets up to leave.

When Will joins Faith outside, she tells him that a neighbor’s doorbell camera caught a suspicious car prior to the bomb going off. “Let me guess, a blue Dodge Charger?”, Will asks as one comes screeching around the corner in the diner’s parking lot. A man hangs outside the passenger window with a gun. Faith ducks behind a car and draws her weapon while Will rushes to Arthur to try and get him to safety. As the bullets begin to fire, they hit Arthur’s bag, sending cash flying all over the parking lot. Faith gets up and fires a few shots at the car as it drives away. “You ready to tell me what’s going on?”, Will asks Arthur.

Police cars and ambulances fill the diner’s parking lot as the sun sets. Arthur hands the bag full of cash to Will and asks him to deposit it at Southern Bedrock Bank. “They’re going to kill my son,” he breaks down. Arthur reveals that after his son went to prison, he started getting calls demanding money to keep him safe. He ignored them at first, but then his son was beaten within an inch of his life in jail. Ever since, he’s been paying $5,000 per month and he’s no longer able to keep up with the payments. Arthur was told he would be murdered if he told anyone. Will and Faith ask him if he’s encountered anyone else with a similar story. He tells them about an Asian woman who approached him at the bank, but he doesn’t know her name. He asks if it’s possible to talk to his son. “Of course,” Will assures him. “We’re going to figure this out.”

Angie walks into the APD to everyone’s surprise. She tells Franklin she’s just there to help her partner, Ormewood, who thinks his wife is having an affair. Michael chides her for telling Franklin, but Angie points out that he’s good at these things. He asks for the evidence and Ormewood recounts what he learned from his kids. He checked his home’s thermostat report and noticed that the air conditioner is increased every Tuesday and Thursday at 2:00 pm, and that he put a tracker on his wife’s car. Their conversation is interrupted by a phone call from Michael’s wife, and when he says “I love you,” she doesn’t say it back.

Will enters his office and immediately notices something that shouldn’t be there – a bottle of limoncello in a gift bag. He calls for Damon (Landon Huff) to dispose of it carefully. He’s replaced by Cricket Dawson, who came to follow up on the car bomb, saying it was Russian C-4. She notices that Will’s lamp is flickering and busies herself tinkering with it. While she does, she asks who sent the limoncello. “James Ulster,” will reveals. She asks if he and Angie are still romantically involved. “We’ve been over for a while,” he confirms. Cricket begins to drop hints for Will to ask her on a date, but he tells her it wouldn’t be appropriate for them to date since they work together.

Arthur is alone in the conference room on a video call with his son Miles (Mickey Cole Jr.), who tells his father that he’s up for parole soon. Will, Faith, and Amanda watch through a window, discussing how Miles has been moved to solitary confinement for his safety. Will traced the ransom calls Arhur received to a burner phone, and the signal was coming from inside the prison.

That night, Will goes to a community pool where he finds Angie practicing her backstroke. He asks about a prison gang case she was previously on and she confirms that there were inside jobs at the prison. No one was ever caught. Will changes the subject to Angie’s back and she says it’s good, inviting him to join her for a swim. He insists he can’t, but she knows just how to manipulate him. “Stop being Will Trent for 5 minutes,” she says, teasing him as he starts to undo his French cuffs. We see Will helping Angie float on her back as part of her physical therapy. He tells her that Cricket asked him on a date. “You should go,” Angie encourages him. “You wanna come?”, Will asks his on-again/off-again love interest and best friend. She tells him that her boss, Captain Heller, approved her physical exam next week. Will thinks she needs more time to heal. “How am I supposed to heal if I start using again?”, she proposes, likening Will’s own obsession with solving crime to an addiction. She points out how he barley missed a beat when he found out his mother was murdered by a serial killer. Will gets frustrated and Angie backs off.

Luke finds Faith in her office and he tells her he thought they had a fun date. She shares that afterward, she looked at his Instagram and it seemed like he was having fun with a lot of girls. Changing the subject, he tells her he once did a story about an Eastern European gang, passing along information on where she can find them. He invites her to go for a drink and when she declines, he pulls out a bottle of bourbon. Instead, Faith tells him to close the door and they begin to make out in her office.

The next day, Faith and Will get a call that the blue Dodge Charger is in the impound lot in the basement parking garage. There’s even more good news, with Amanda having figured out who the woman in the bank was. Her name is Emily Chu, and she has a brother in the same prison as Miles.

We see Emily (Christy Jung-Yun Choi) walking down a city block as she arrives at her car. She opens the car door and sits in the driver’s seat, noticing a weird click sound. Her phone rings and she answers it to hear Special Agent Will Trent introduce himself, sharing that they have reason to believe her car has a bomb inside it. She starts to panic and they tell her to remain still.

The team moves in fast, closing the block off as Will Trent and Cricket Dawson arrive to try and save Emily. Cricket explains to Emily that the click was a pressure plate and as long as she remains seated, she has nothing to worry about. Emily is ready to panic, but Will joins her in the passenger seat to try and keep her calm while Cricket diffuses the bomb.

Meanwhile, Faith goes down to the impound lot, which is run by a man named Barney (Alonzo Ward), who has a lot of cats. He doesn’t have an organized system for where cars are parked, and Ormewood is frustrate by it. But he saved Faith some time by finding the blue Dodge Charger and searching it. He found a wrapper from a chain restaurant, Grandma Millie’s Biscuits, and Faith immediately calls up the one in Mechanicsville, where Luke’s reporting led him. She asks if they have any regular customers who are white Russians, one of whom is missing a finger. “We’ll be right there,” she responds.”

Will has Amanda on speaker phone as he talks to Emily, who shares that she belongs to a support group for people with incarcerated family members. Three of the members of her group were being hit up for money to keep their loved ones safe, too. Will gets the names of the other group members. Cricket successfully deactivaates the bomb, and Will is turned on by it. He formally asks her out on a date. He calls Faith to share the good news, only to find that she has better news. She found the bombers and brought some evidence to the GBI.

Cricket pages through a “cookbook” of bombs that was retrieved, and she points out that these guys are pretty experimental with their approach. Among the confiscated items is an old tape recorder. Will presses play and it’s clear they’re speaking in code. The timestamp on the message was 18 hours before Keith’s car was targeted. Faith believes they’re speaking a prison language.

Gina Ormewood (Sara Antonio) and Max show up at the APD to see Michael because Max is in trouble for skipping class every Tuesday and Thursday to sneak home to play video games. Michael realizes this is the cause of the thermostat change and he starts to laugh at himself, confessing to his wife that he thought she was having an affair with Harris, Macy’s dad. Her eyes well up with tears as she doesn’t deny it. She rushes out, saying they will talk about this tonight, leaving him alone with their son. “You’re the reason people hate cops,” Max snaps at his dad, who orders him to find a quiet corner and go do his homework. Ormewood is embarrassed in front of all of his peers.

Will, Faith, and Amanda meet in his office. The bombers already have lawyers and it’s been hard to get information out of them. Will thinks someone inside the prison is making people scared to talk. Faith tracked the three people from Emily’s support group. Two of the three’s cars have been checked and are fine, but the other is missing. And then they realize it’s in the impound lot in the basement. Amanda orders the building to evacuate.

Will and Cricket rush to the impound lot, asking Barney where they can find a blue Toyota Tacoma. He doesn’t know where it would be parked, and he’s trying to find his cats. They order him to leave, saying they will try to save his cats. They run through the lot trying to find the car, and Will notices several cats accumulated on the hood of a truck. “Do cats smell C-4?”, he asks. It turns out they can, and they find the bomb when they crawl under the truck. The timer lists just 6 minutes until detonation, and Will calls Faith on the radio to tell her. Cricket tells Will the plan. If she can’t disarm it, she will take it into Barney’s office to contain it because otherwise, it will set off a chain reaction with the gasoline in all the other vehicles.

While Cricket works, she asks Will to talk to her. Silence makes her uncomfortable. She asks why James Ulster is sending him gifts. “Ulster thinks he might be my father,” Will says, adding that he’s afraid to find out through a paternity test. “Even if he is your father, it doesn’t matter, because you’re your own man,” Cricket tells him. “You’re Will Trent.” It seems like she just diffused the bomb, but then the timer skips down to just 2 minutes. She realizes this bomb has a collapsable circuit and there could be others. She instructs Will to grab a hacksaw from her toolkit to get ready for plan B. Will brings the saw back and starts to work on cutting the bomb from the underside of the truck. As Will works, he finds resistance and doesn’t think he can saw the bomb off. With 30 seconds left on the clock, Cricket asks him to retrive something else from her tool kit. He gets out from under the truck to follow her instructions.

As the building evacuates, Michael Ormewood frantically runs around looking for his son Max. He calls his name, but Max doesn’t answer. Finally, he finds him in the clinic, where he got locked in. They hug just as an explosion goes off. Tiles fall off the wall, hitting Ormewood in the head.

Will Trent was blasted with some rubble. There was nothing he could do to stop Cricket. She tricked him into exiting the truck so that she could detach the bomb and follow through with her plan, running to Barney’s office and throwing it inside at the last second. She closed the door, but the blast was immediate and she was in the line of fire.

Amanda comes to Will’s house the next day, surprised to find that he has dressed for work. His face has scars from the explosion, and she tells him he’s in shock and needs to slow down. Nico agrees, holding Betty. Will walks into his bathroom and opens his medicine cabinet, taking out a bottle of pills. But before he can take one, he sees another reflection in the mirror – his 12-year-old self. His ears are once again filled with the sound of kids begging him for help. He throws the pills into the bathtub in frustration. Back in the living room, Will asks Amanda if anyone else was killed by the bomb. She tells him that Michael Ormewood has a concussion, but nobody else was hurt, not even Barney’s cats. “The person I’m worried about right now is you,” she tells him. “I have to do this,” Will declares. “Cricket died saving my life. The least I can do is figure out who ordered those bombs.” Amanda reminds Will that he’s not the only agent at the GBI and that nobody at the prison wants to talk to him. “That’s not true,” Will says. “I know one person who's dying to talk to me.” Amanda covers her mouth as she watches Will leave his house.

Will stands in an interrogation room, looking at his reflection in the two-way mirror, waiting for his guest to arrive. A guard brings him in and sits him at the table. “Will,” the voice says. Will Trent waits to turn around. “Did you receive my gifts?”, the prisoner asks. Will finally turns and sits at the table. “Hello, James.” It’s James Ulster (Greg Germann).

Will Trent returns next Tuesday, February 27th, at 8/7c on ABC with “It's the Work I Signed Up For.”

GBI Special Agent Will Trent uses the unique point of view gained from growing up in Atlanta's overwhelmed foster care system to solve cases.

Songs Featured in This Episode: