T.K. is in serious condition. What can you say about that and how that’s going to affect him and those closest to him especially Owen and Carlos (Rafael Silva)?
It’s going to affect them a lot. I know that I’ve seen a little bit online — I get this on 911 too with injuring Buck [Oliver Stark] constantly — and the decision for this to happen with T.K. was not taken lightly. It’s not that I wanted to hurt a character just to have some story for an hour or two. The idea was to not give it short shrift. It’s funny. I felt like in Season 1, when T.K. got shot, that kind of was something that I did because we were so far behind, I needed something to happen, but it really was given short shrift. He was in the hospital and then like the next episode he woke up and he was fine. One thing I’m trying to do this year is to let these stories breathe a little bit and not just rush through them.
So what you’ll find is we’re really spending time on these things that happen. We’re trying not to lose what the ramifications might be when something serious happens. So T.K. is going to go through a lot to try to survive. We’re gonna sort of go into his head a little bit and he’s gonna learn something about himself and it’s gonna absolutely affect everybody around him. Tommy is his captain. Owen is his father. Carlos is the love of his life. Everybody else are family members to T.K. So T.K. becomes sort of a rallying point for all the characters, and it kind of slaps Owen out of his complacency, which is not really complacency so much as it is fear.