As ABC’s police procedural show, Will Trent, continues with its 3rd season, the titular detective gets involved in a very serious case involving what seems to be a cult, right after going through tremendous trauma in his life. The previous episode had Will dealing with his guilt after he accidentally shot a young boy dead while pursuing a fugitive. In Will Trent season 3 episode 12, the protagonist has to spend time working the desk at the GBI office, as per the official policy, but still plays a crucial part in figuring out the mystery behind the deaths of three apparently unrelated individuals.
Spoiler Alert
What is the only connection between the three victims?
Will Trent season 3 episode 12 begins with two women getting into a pickup truck somewhere inside a forest, with one of them evidently sick and struggling to even walk. The women are also in a hurry to leave the place and drive out of the forest, but just as they start moving, someone with a sniper rifle shoots at them. The woman in the driver’s seat is hit, and since she had already started pushing down on the accelerator with her foot, the truck keeps moving forward, albeit quite slowly. It takes the police a few hours to find out about the crime, after the truck keeps rolling forward and softly crashes into a tree on the private property of an elderly couple.
The APD officers, Michael Ormewood and Angie Polaski, investigate the crime scene and learn from the elderly couple that the car had rolled onto their property very silently, and the woman inside it did not react in any way after the soft crash. Based on this information and the very bloody scene inside the car, the first responders had considered the two women to be dead and not checked their bodies, because of which they have to face the anger of Michael and Angie. When the officers check the women, the driver is revealed to have died, but the passenger is still alive and so is immediately rushed to the hospital.
The identities of the women are easy to find, and they are revealed to be Jade and Aster, who have no apparent connection with each other. Aster had been driving the truck when she was shot in the back, which led to her bleeding out and dying after a few minutes. Although Jade had not been shot by the assailant, she had been sick from before, because of which she is in a comatose state after being taken to the hospital. The whole premise is quite strange to the APD officers, and they soon seek the help of the GBI detectives, although only Faith can technically work with them, since Will Trent is still officially not allowed to do fieldwork, following his accidental shooting of a young kid. However, Will’s interest is naturally piqued, and he soon starts to look into the matter as well.
The detectives begin by trying to find some connection between the two victims, but cannot find any, following which Michael takes over the responsibility of finding out about the owner of the pickup truck. Although the vehicle identification number had been scratched off and the license plate had also been removed, most definitely by the perpetrator, a search through the database reveals that the vehicle belonged to a man named Dermot. When an attempt to find and interrogate Dermot is carried out, it is revealed that this man has been dead for some time now, meaning that there is no way to squeeze any information out of him.
Eventually, a few similarities between the three characters start to come out, beginning with the fact that Aster’s postmortem revealed that she had tapeworms in her body. Dr. Seth McDale, the current romantic interest of Angie and also the doctor overseeing Jade’s treatment, reveals that Jade too is struggling with a tapeworm infection, although he has not been able to figure out the source of this infection yet. As Will joins the discussion, he talks about a remarkable medical case from the previous year, about which he had read somewhere, in which a man had contracted a horrific tapeworm infection, and this man turns out to be Dermot Park, the real owner of the pickup truck.
While this medical commonality is very evident between the three individuals, another angle soon becomes clear to the detectives when they start talking to the friends and family members of these people. They realize that all three of the victims (although Dermot is technically not considered a victim yet) had suffered through some extreme emotional pains and struggles, because of which they were in a disturbed state of mind. Aster had lost her son in a road accident, following which her marriage broke down, and a few months ago, she had sent her ex-husband a letter, calling him toxic and stating that she did not want to keep in touch with him. Jade had been trying to get pregnant through IVF, which was taking a toll on her mental health, and a few months ago, she too had sent a letter to her sister, Sydney, calling her presence toxic and stating that she did not want to keep in touch.
In the same way the two women had almost abruptly cut off their closest family members after being troubled in their personal lives, Dermot had also done something similar a year back. His old friend, Kyle, is spoken to by the detectives, and he reveals that Dermot had been going through a very difficult time because of his depression, following which he had sent Kyle a letter stating that he wanted nothing to do with him anymore. Most importantly, Kyle reveals that Dermot had gradually started to feel better after attending some self-help and enlightenment classes, although he is not able to say anything specific about these classes. Only some time before his death, though, Dermot had once again frantically called Kyle and told him that his phone was being bugged. Then, Dermot passed away mysteriously, with the official reason being stated as a drowning accident, after he went swimming in a lake during the winter for no good reason.
Around the same time, Will Trent conducts his own research into the case, driven by his boredom due to being stuck at a desk job, and finds one concrete clue. Checking the financial statements of Jade, Aster, and Dermot, he realizes that all three of them had made sizeable payments to an organization named the Olas Collective. Searching up this name on the internet leads him to a website for the organization, which is basically a self-help group providing wellness retreats and helping people deal with their traumas and difficulties. Apart from the investigation that he is conducting, Will is seemingly interested in the organization, surely because he too feels stuck and extremely down in his personal life because of the guilt and trauma of having killed a young boy, which still haunts him to this day.
How does Will plan on exposing the real perpetrator?
Because of his own personal feelings and also definitely to take the investigation further, Will Trent visits the Olas Collective and meets with the founder, a woman named Rain Woods. Will obviously uses a fake name, calling himself Bill Morales, and joins in a session, which is coincidentally about individuals who struggle to deal with some major incident in their lives. While everyone else in his life, except for Angie, perhaps, had been trying to comfort Will and convince him that he should not feel guilty for his accidental actions, Rain Woods clearly uses a different technique to help people heal. She lets them feel bad about themselves so that they can understand and acknowledge their mistakes, and only then heal from the inside. Will is seemingly very impressed by this technique, and the thought of the Olas Collective remains in his mind, especially when he tells Faith, Angie, and Michael about his findings about its association with the three individuals.
As Will does not tell his friends that he had recently visited the wellness center, the three others decide to go check the property out, especially since Jade and Aster had been found only a few miles away from land owned by the organization. Although they are also shot at by someone, and they arrest the shooter, the detectives are in for a shock, for the perpetrator happens to be a teenage girl named Finn. As Finn’s sniper rifle is sent for a ballistics check, it is revealed that the gun had not been used to shoot Aster, meaning that the girl is not the murderer, after all. Finn is too innocent and lost in her thoughts to tell the detectives anything, and Rain Woods soon comes to the place to get her out of police custody.
While the detectives realize that Finn cannot be held responsible for any of the crimes, Rain seems very suspicious, especially with regards to how she carries an infant baby and even nurses it during the interrogation. Based on some more findings, it seems most likely that Rain Woods actually runs a cult under the façade of the wellness retreat, where she supposedly steals the babies and children of the individuals who come to the place for unknown reasons. Seth also eventually reveals that Jade had contracted the tapeworm infection after she had given birth recently, and this makes Amanda and her team believe that the baby that Rain had brought with her is the same one birthed by Jade.
Despite these grave suspicions, there is no way for the detectives to prove any of it so far, or even investigate the wellness retreat further, since there is not enough evidence for them to get a warrant. Therefore, Will Trent now decides to put himself in danger and infiltrate the Olas Collective so that he can gather incriminating evidence against the organization and its founder. After he talks Amanda and his colleagues into it, the GBI special agent heads over to the organization and tells everyone a sad story of how he is guilty of having killed a young boy with his car. Although this story is made up, the emotions that Will tries to convey are very genuine, because of which Rain selects him for the wellness retreat. Thus, Will now goes undercover, with only a hidden satellite phone to inform his department of his location, meaning that he is about to face some extremely tough situations, both physically and emotionally.
Do Will and Marion break up?
There are also some other significant developments in Will Trent season 3 episode 12 with regards to Will’s relations with his friends and his lover. To begin with, Faith Mitchell’s request for a new partner is turned down by Amanda, who suspects that something major has happened between the two special agents but does not investigate it yet. As of now, nobody else knows the reason behind Will and Faith’s falling out, and both of them intend to keep it this way. Faith tries to convince Marion that the confidential informant is no longer needed in the Rafael Wexford case and suggests that the informant be released. However, Marion is not convinced, and states that the informant’s presence is still very important to the case. Faith then tells Will that she will look into the matter herself from now on and ensure her son’s safety, despite Will offering to help her in this regard.
Finally, Will and Marion’s romantic relationship is also extremely affected by the events from last week, after which the protagonist is simply unable to let anyone get emotionally close to him. Although Marion tries to console him a number of times, Will is always put off by her trying to say that he should not bear the guilt of the accident. This is what makes Will push Marion even further from himself emotionally, and this is in sharp contrast to Marion’s willingness to let Will heal her trauma earlier in this season. Therefore, at the end of Will Trent season 3 episode 12, Marion decides that she needs a break from the relationship, which Will agrees to as well, since he is anyway going away to the wellness retreat. Thus, Will and Marion do temporarily put their relationship on hold, and whether they ultimately break up or reunite will only be revealed by the end of Will Trent season 3.
