'Designated Survivor' Season 2 Spoilers: Was Alex's Accident Really Just a Random Tragedy or Is There More to It?
President Kirkman (Kiefer Sutherland) will continue to deal with his heart-wrenching loss when "Designated Survivor" season 2 returns next year.
The show will pick up 10 weeks after the death of his wife Alex (Natascha McElhone), which is the same amount of time between the airing of the winter finale and midseason premiere.
In an interview with TVLine, showrunner Keith Eisner teased that "Designated Survivor" season 2, episode 11 will see the president still reeling from the heartbreak.
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During that time, the president hasn't simply moved past grief completely; that wouldn't be real. We're going to pick up with how he has been dealing with the loss of his wife and the mother of his children, his best friend. And it's not an easy transition. Episode 11 deals with that uneasiness in a very interesting way, and the remaining part of the season will deal with it too, the consequences of being alone and what that means for him.
McElhone's exit from "Designated Survivor" was prompted by the actress getting the gig on a new series on Hulu. This prompted Eisner and his team to kill off her character although they initially considered to just make it so like Alex is temporarily absent.
And what occurred to us is we had an opportunity here to do something that TV hasn't done before, which is show a president who is a widower in office. We loved that as a prospect. We love Natascha as an actress as well, so it was difficult to figure out the right thing to do, but once the opportunity popped up, it became clear that this is the road [to take].
Alex's death in "Designated Survivor" season 2 appeared to be an accident, but Eisner hinted that while it has "all the earmarks of randomness," it might have been planned after all:
People will have to tune in to see if that's in fact true. But what's interesting for all of us is that Alex's death comes out of the blue. It wasn't drum-rolled, it wasn't set up, it wasn't expected. It is true to life. As people saw in the episode, Kirkman didn't have that last conservation with his wife, but that's real. You are left to pick up the rubble afterward. One of the things that's difficult to sort through is "you never got to say goodbye" or make peace with your loved one. That will be an emotionally difficult thing for him to grapple with.
"Designated Survivor" season 2 returns Feb. 28 on ABC.
