TV Recap: “Will Trent” Goes to Jail… To Solve a Case in Season 2, Episode 2

We pick up right where things left off in the second episode of Season 2 of Will Trent. As a refresher, Will and Faith uncovered a crime ring that was setting up car bombs on people who didn’t pay to keep their loved ones safe from harm in prison. By the end of the episode, Will lost his new love interest, Cricket Dawson, to an explosion at the impound lot under the GBI. And with the bombings seemingly orchestrated from inside the prison, Will was forced to confront the one person on the inside who he could get to talk… the man who made Will Trent an orphan… the man to whom Will might be related… And so begins this recap.

Season 2, Episode 2: “It’s the Work I Signed Up For” – Written by Daniel Thomsen & Inda Craig-Galván

Faith Mitchell (Iantha Richardson) arrives at the prison, submitting all of her belongings to security to gain entrance. Warden Sturgill Hawley (C. Thomas Howell) greets her as she arrives to speak with Miles Highsmith, whose father was a target of an extortion scheme that seems to be coming from inside (from Season 2, Episode 1). Her partner beat her there by almost an hour. She asks the warden if he knows where he is, not loving the answer. “He’s speaking with James Ulster.”

Will Trent (Ramón Rodríguez) sits in a room across from serial killer James Ulster (Greg Germann), the man who murdered his mother, a man who may be Will’s biological father. James has been trying to get Will to talk to him for months, and the need to investigate the prison has forced Will to do so. Will plays a coded voice message for Ulster, asking if he understands the lingo or if he recognizes the voice. Ulster doesn’t, so Will asks about contraband phones. Will says some of the guards sell them, and nearly all of the prisoners have one.

Faith visits Miles Highsmith (Mickey Cole Jr.) in his cell in solitary confinement. Despite his seclusion, it’s very noisy, with many voices heard through the air vents. She quickly realizes that their conversation isn’t private, so she takes out a notepad, verbally talking about Miles’ father’s health while a text exchange gets to the bottom of her reason for visiting. He doesn’t know who his attackers are since they wear masks.

In the Warden’s office, Faith reviews a map of cells and air vents, with five cells connected to Miles’. They’ve planned for James Ulster to approach these individuals at lunch, watching as he approaches the first one, Ringo (Steven Lane), who is quickly determined not to be involved. The second, Mackie (Kellen Boyle), is in his cell with the door open. Mackie quickly becomes hostile towards Ulster, assaulting him. Will and Faith go to his cell as part of the response, quickly discovering the burner phone used to call the people who bombed the GBI. They ask who he made the calls for – a man named Ron Flashwood, who goes by the nickname Flash. “Please, don’t tell him I snitched,” Mackie begs.

Flash is on dialysis in the infirmary, tended to by a nurse named Edina (Tracy Wiu), when Will and Faith enter to question him. He’s a convicted murderer in need of a kidney transplant, so he’ll never get one. Will theorizes that he runs the extortion scheme to pay for his organ. “You’ve got the wrong guy,” Flash declares as Edina tends to another patient. Will tells Flash he will die in prison, and Faith pulls him aside for his outburst. She thinks he needs to go home and take time to grieve Cricket’s death from yesterday. Will refuses.

Meanwhile, Angie Polaski (Erika Christensen) eats at a diner with Joey (Charlie Besso), a young addict whom she is sponsoring. He shares his excitement about his new job before leaving. Angie’s attention is then drawn to a TV with the local news announcing the GBI’s bombing. She can’t reach Will, so she goes to the GBI to look for him, bumping into Amanda Wagner (Sonja Sohn). “Physically he’s fine,” Amanda eases Angie’s worries. “Emotionally, who knows?” Angie is alarmed when she hears that Will went to speak with James Ulster, the man responsible for her medical leave of absence. But she can’t dwell on it too long because she gets a call from James, who is at a party and using. “I messed up,” he cries from a kitchen pantry, saying his new boss made him do it. Amanda overhears the conversation, using her phone to look up James’ employer, Coleman Walsh, who has a record of coercing young people into drug-filled parties. She tells Angie to get the APD involved, but she says if she does, James will get in trouble. Angie is prepared to go rescue him herself, so Amanda volunteers to accompany her.

Over at the Ormewood residence, Michael (Jake McLaughlin) tends to his “sick” son Max (Own Trumbly), who lays on the couch under a blanket and is taking the day off school. His mom Gina (Sara Antonio) tells him that he can retake today’s history test next week, but that his science fair project is due, offering to take it for him. Max comes clean that he didn’t do it, causing a small fight between his parents. Michael plans to work on it as a family, but Angie says she has an appointment and needs to go. She won’t tell him what it is.

There’s been an attack in the prison yard. Mackie is dead, his neck stabbed by something. The murder weapon is nowhere to be found, and the security camera didn’t catch the stabbing. The warden tells Will and Fatih that Flash has been placed in solitary confinement. “There’s no such thing as solitary when the vents are walkie-talkies,” Faith remarks, telling Will she wants to go check on him. Will doesn’t want to leave the prison yard, keeping watch to ensure nobody tampers with the evidence. But when Faith gets to Flash’s cell, he appears to have committed suicide, strangled by a rope tied to the sink.

Faith returns to the prison yard to share the bad news with Will. Upon closer inspection, she believes Ray was murdered by a guard based on the angle of the rope’s strangulation compared to how it hung from the sink. All of the prisoners who were in the yard when Mackie was killed are there on their knees, none of them willing to talk. Will borrows a guard’s baton and begins to tap along the tile walls and cement ledges. A syringe falls out from beneath a window. “We need to check the infirmary,” Will declares.

Combing through security footage, Will and Faith notice something unusual about Erina’s behavior. When she admitted Flash, she spent a lot of time getting him connected to the dialysis machine. But the other prisoner there merely sat in the chair, never being connected, and showed signs of being romantically involved with her. “It’s all for show,” Will realizes. The Warden enters, and when asked, he says the other man is Jack Richards (Keith Flippen), a serial killer who prayed on housewives. They ask where Edina is, he tells them she left after her shift. They ask him to call her back. The Warden seems unwell, having a dizzy spell. Faith suggests he drink some water. Will tells Faith he must talk to Ulster, who handled Jack’s legal work.

Amanda drives Angie to the party as Angie talks about how strange it feels to be sponsoring someone for a change. Faith asks how this came to be and Angie tells her she’s been bored being on medical leave, sharing that she’s not traumatizing Joey the way she did Will. “Will is the only person I’ve ever had on my side, so it’s hard to let go of that,” she shares. Angie also tells Amanda that she’s taking a physical next week to try and get back to work early. Amanda doesn’t think it’s a good idea. When they get to the party, Amanda has Angie wait in the car while she goes inside.

Will is let into James Ulster’s cell, who refuses to talk about Jake Richards due to “attorney/client privilege.” Will continues to ask questions, but James says he wants a give-and-take deal. Suddenly, the lights go out, and red emergency lights come on as the prison enters lockdown. “Let’s get to know each other,” James Ulsters says.

Just before the power was cut, the Warden returned to the security office to tell Faith that he can’t reach Edina. She thinks they need to find Jack ASAP when the lights go dark. The Warden quickly realizes that the backup power has been sabotaged and the phones were cut. The cell doors are inoperable. Faith says they need to get Will out of James’ cell. The Warden has a master key that can manually open cell doors.

Amanda returns to the car alone. “Where’s the kid?” Angie asks. Amanda shows her a picture of a highly poisonous snake in the living room, referring to it as a threat to public safety, which allows her to get Animal Control involved instead of the APD. Animal Control arrives quickly, and Angie is able to borrow a uniform to join them inside so she can find James, which she does. They hug as she leads her sponsee out of a bad situation.

James Ulster wants to talk about Will’s mother. “You killed her and then put her body in a trash can,” Will snaps, interrupted by a voice talking through the air vent. James tells Will that it’s Edina speaking in code. “What was the message?” Will asks. “It’s time for you to pay up,” Ulster translates. He asks Will how Angie is doing. “Keep it about me,” Will requests. James asks why Will didn’t kill him the night he rescued Angie from his clutches. “You wanted to die,” Will says. “So you resolved to spite me with a fate worth than death,” Ulster realizes. He asks Will if he’s found any of his mother’s relatives yet. Will can’t take it anymore, turning around and banging on the door, asking someone to let him out. Through the bars, he sees his 12-year-old self (Isacc Dodds) standing in the hallway. It seems like he has blood on his hands, horrified by the sight. The young Will turns and runs away down the hallway.

James seems distressed by Will’s change in pallor, asking him what’s wrong. “Tell me what Edina’s message said,” WIll counters. “She wants me to meet her,” Ulster reveals, pulling out his own contraband cell phone and giving it to will. “Consider this a gesture of love,” he says. Will uses the phone to call a GBI dispatcher, who connects him to Faith. He tells her that Edina is there and likely helping Jack escape through the ambulance bay. Faith is ready to head there, but the Warden collapses, seemingly in cardiac arrest. Faith grabs a defibrillator off the wall and tries to power it on, but the battery is dead. She sees a prisoner in the hallway and recruits him to help her, saying it could shave time off his sentence.

As Michael Ormewood and Max work on a science fair project, his son brings up Harris, the man Gina is having an affair with. Michael describes it as a mistake she made, monologuing about taking responsibility before things are too late. He helps his son create a magnetic gun, and when Angie gets home, they show her how it works. A marble is shot at a target with such force that it breaks through and knocks a framed picture off the wall. Max goes upstairs and Michael asks his wife where she went. “I drove to the empty parking lot behind where the Kroger used to be, and I sat in the car,” she says, adding that she needs space. “I just want to talk,” Michael calmly says. She brings up all the times he cheated on her and how she always blamed the women. “I didn’t deserve that forgiveness, but you do,” he tells her. “I just need you to know that I love you.” He apologizes. They hug. They cry.

Will tries to pick the lock open on James’ door to get out. James hands him a syringe shiv, and Will uses it to break the cover so he can pick the lock. “I’m so proud of you right now,” Ulster says as Will gets the door open. “Shut up,” he says, closing it behind him, locking his tormentor inside. He runs to the garage where he finds Edna dead in a police car, a needle-sized stab wound in her neck. The power comes back on, and Will calls for Jack, announcing that all of his extorted funds have been seized by the GBI. The killer steps out from behind an ambulance, holding Miles at needle point by the neck.

The doors burst open, and a gurney rolls into the ambulance lot. The Warden is on it, and Faith is on top of him trying to administer CPR as the prisoner pushes them towards the ambulance. That momentary distraction is all Will needs to lunge forward and grab the syringe from Jack. Miles rushes to help Faith with a defibrillator off the ambulance. But when Will turns around, Jack is gone. While Faith and Miles try to revive the Warden, Will slinks away to find Jack.

Jack sneaks up behind Will and binds his neck with a tube, strangling him. They end up on the ground behind the ambulance where no one can see them. Will can’t seem to shake him. And then, out of nowhere, a fire extinguisher hits Jack in the head, knocking him off Will. James Ulster escaped from his cell, telling Will the door just popped open. “It was fate,” he lies. And then, without sparing a second, James grabs the syringe and dives it into Jack’s chest, injecting the lethal liquid into him. “You should try it sometime,” he grins at Will, who is horrified.

Coleman Walsh (Alan Wells) and many of the partygoers have been brought into the GBI. Angie tells Amanda that James is worried about ending up back on the street. Amanda encourages her to keep her sponsor role to him. “Are we friends now?” Angie asks. “Don’t push it,” Amanda’s usual stern demeanor returns. But before walking away, Amanda tells Angie she will talk to her boss, agreeing that she’s ready to return to work. Angie is about to leave when she sees a familiar face among the detained partygoers, stepping into the conference room to pull her out.

It’s Crystal (Chapel Elizabeth Oaks), whom Angie helped free from the same man who abused her as a child, Lenny Brousard (from Season 1, episodes 9, 10, and 11). Angie asks Crystal why she didn’t go to New Orleans with her mom. “She’s scared of me,” Crystal said, who her mom blames for killer her boyfriend, Lenny. Angie asks where Crystal is living and offers her money. She wants to help her get into a better situation. Crystal seems reluctant at first, but Angie convinces her to share her new cell phone number so they can stay in touch.

Will Trent and James Ullster find themselves back where they were at the start of the episode, in a meeting room with James’ hands chained to the desk. “You’ll be back to see me,” James smiles. “Nope, I’m not coming back,” Will promises. “I killed for you,” he says. “That wasn’t for me,” Will answers. “Antonio Miranda,” James utters before Will can leave. “Lucy’s brother. Your uncle.” Will turns back around. “Not Morales?” James says he doesn’t know why he doesn’t have the same surname as Will’s mother. “I killed for you,” James repeats as Will opens the door to leave. “Family is everything.”

Will returns home to his family, his adorable chihuahua Betty, who is dressed in a sweater. Betty listens intently as Will’s Spanish language tape teaches phrases like “I walk” and “We walk.” She seems excited. Nico (Cora Lu Tran) arrives to watch Betty, finding Will tinkering with a broken toaster oven (he has a momentary flashback of helping Cricket diffuse the bomb that killed her). Nico points out that toaster ovens are inexpensive, but Will enjoys trying to fix things. He offers to show Nico how and they take a seat. As the camera pulls away, we see a case file on Will’s desk. The name on it – Antonio Miranda.

Will Trent returns next Tuesday, March 5th, at 8/7c on ABC with “You Don’t Have to Understand.”

With several civilians dead and one woman missing, Will and Faith question a suspicious pastor ahead of the councilman’s ribbon-cutting ceremony. Meanwhile, Angie joins Ormewood back in the field to investigate a sauna murder.

Songs Featured in This Episode: