The long-awaited fourth season of New Amsterdam is just days away from premiering, and fans will finally find out what happens after the whole batch of cliffhangers that ended the Season 3 finale back in June. Some of those cliffhangers were more promising than others when it comes to characters starting off Season 4 in a good place, but others were less clear. Fortunately, star Tyler Labine recently spoke with CinemaBlend to chat about Iggy's big finale decision, a new "Hannibal Lecter" kind of character, and those lingering cliffhangers.
After Iggy's terrifying experience with a patient in his own home in the third season, he made the decision to stop seeing patients, but Tyler Labine wasn't leaving New Amsterdam, so a big question of hiatus has been: what does Iggy's work look like if he has stopped doing something that was so central to his character for so long? When I asked that very question, Labine explained how that decision is affecting Iggy to start the new season, saying:
I think it looks like a really great healthy decision. It's working. When we first join back up with our characters in Season 4, it's working. You know, Iggy's feeling healthier. He's feeling good. He's connecting with his husband, his family. But like any big life decision, especially for a guy who wrapped up his entire identity in being a caretaker, [to] just say, like, 'I'm just gonna stop taking care of people.' I think it's admirable. Is it gonna last? I don't think so. I think it's gonna be a really, really challenging journey for him. I think he's gonna find a way to his joy, this season is very much about everyone finding their joy. But that's a journey. Like, you make a decision, you can't just be like, 'I'm gonna be happy now. I'm gonna find my joy.' You got to find it. There's a journey to find that joy. There's a lot of challenges along the way. So that's what it's gonna look like.
Iggy's family was a big part of his decision to leave seeing patients behind after going on a trip with his husband and kids, so it can only be a good thing if he's able to connect with them more. But, as Tyler Labine pointed out, there's more to finding joy than just deciding to change what was causing some distress. Iggy has always been a complex character, with even more layers added last season, so it's no wonder that he's facing some challenges.
And based on the kind of character who will be introduced into his story in the Season 4 premiere, those challenges are going to be formidable after the show returns. Iggy is getting his own kind of Hannibal Lecter character, and she should be quite complicated for him. Tyler Labine confirmed that a little bit of a time jump happens and Season 4 picks up at "the exciting part where that decision is being put to the test," then previewed what the premiered has in store:
In the premiere episode, Iggy is sort of outsourced by the hospital as an expert, a technical expert, because one of his old patients, a long-standing patient has a very specific knowledge of something that's happened in the hospital. I don't want to give anything away because I think it's really cool. And so Iggy is brought in as like a consultant, basically, to meet with this patient and use her as a way to identify sort of maybe what had happened, who could be the culprit. And it's scary, and it's really dark. And she sort of knows that Iggy has decided to sort of leave his post as a therapist, and she challenges him and she turns into his like Hannibal Lecter. She knows too much about him. And she starts picking on the scabs, you know, they haven't been healed yet. And she really basically puts him on blast and says, like, 'When does the White Knight stop believing that people need to be saved?' Or wouldn't be cared for when he stops believing they need to be saved? And that really hits him in a place where he's like, 'Oh, my God, you just just pinpointed his like heart and stabbed him there.'
Iggy's Hannibal Lecter may not necessarily be snacking on murder victims with a nice chianti like the character made famous by Silence of the Lambs, but will seemingly have a knack for psychologically getting under his skin and knowing him too deeply. That's pretty much what caused some big problems for him in Season 3 that led him to give up seeing patients in the first place, and it sounds like being put on blast by this particular character isn't going to be good for poor Iggy. At least it's clear that Iggy's skills in psychiatry definitely aren't going to waste just because of the cliffhanger of not seeing patients anymore!
Tyler Labine went on to explain what the end of Season 3 means for all of the major characters in the fourth season, and the ongoing search for joy:
Like I said, it's interesting. And it's not just Iggy. Everyone had a big sort of Season 3, there was a cliffhanger for everybody. We had Reynolds and Malvo, we had Lauren and Leyla. We had Sharpwin, obviously. There's a lot going on, and everyone has this huge sort joy journey they're on. We do deliver, you know, but I think in the delivering of that, it's got to be this journey. Like that's the juicy stuff. You don't want to just watch people all the sudden just be happy. You want to see how they get there.
Season 3 came to a complicated end for Reynolds and Malvo, as he discovered that the man who he'd be working closely with was actually her husband. Lauren and Leyla's relationship seems to be going strong, with the exception of the issue of Lauren seemingly crossing some lines to get Leyla a residency at New Amsterdam. And then of course the Sharpwin hookup when Max and Helen finally made the official jump from "will-they-won't-they" to romance. Throw in Iggy not seeing patients anymore, and there is plenty for New Amsterdam to deal with when it returns.
Luckily, the wait for the show to return won't be too much longer, and the new episodes will feature the debuts of some new characters, and one of them could be bad news for everybody at the hospital. New Amsterdam Season 4 premieres on Tuesday, September 21 at 10 p.m. ET on NBC, following the premiere of the latest season of The Voice.
