The Resident got off to an emotional start of Season 5 thanks to the departure of Emily VanCamp as Nic, resulting in a heartbreaking but powerful storyline as she was killed off. Now, the show has cast a new character who should help fill the void left by Nic, although that doesn’t mean that she’ll be Nic 2.0. The Resident newcomer Kaley Ronayne will play a surgeon already described as an “action heroine.” And that’s not all!
Kaley Ronayne will recur on the fifth season of The Resident as a character by the name of Cade, who will join the hustle and bustle of Chastain’s emergency room. Cade is an athletic doctor who isn’t afraid to take risks and find solutions, but her status as an “action heroine” doesn’t mean that she’ll lack empathy with her ER patients. And based on the kinds of patients that The Resident has brought in over the years, she’ll need that empathy!
TVLine additionally reports that co-showrunner Peter Elkoff also describes Cade as “mysterious” and “very guarded about her past” with a methodology that stands out from the other characters. Her role will be to help The Resident “do one of those thriller-y arcs that we’ve done in the past.” Elkoff previewed how she’s going to fit into the ER (or not fit in), saying:
She’s going to attract a lot of attention while trying to keep a low profile, which is sometimes complicated. I just imagine that the audience is going to have really strong feelings — a lot of theories and a lot of predictions.
Kaley Ronayne’s Cade clearly isn’t being added to The Resident as Nic’s replacement, as her character isn’t a nurse practitioner and definitely sounds different from a personality standpoint. There are no details just yet about when exactly Cade will make her debut at Chastain, or what kinds of theories fans will be concocting about her, but Peter Elkoff also indicated that she’ll be a key player in the second half of the fifth season, so it’s possible that fans won’t see her for a while.
And The Resident will actually be a return to Fox for Kaley Ronayne, after she had a short stint on Gotham playing the stepsister of Oswald Cobblepot/Penguin. Cade will definitely be different from Kaley Ronayne’s Gotham character, but in a fun bit of trivia, she’s not the only Gotham veteran who will be part of the Resident cast.
Jessica Lucas, who played Tabitha Galavant on the Batman prequel series, joined the medical drama for Season 4 to play neurosurgeon Billie. It won’t exactly be a Gotham reunion since their characters didn’t really have much in common, but the odds seem pretty good that they’ll interact on The Resident. Kaley Ronayne has also appeared in multiple episodes of Quarry and The Right Stuff in the years since the end of her time on Gotham in 2016.
While Kaley Ronayne’s debut on The Resident is unclear at this point, you can see what’s next for Conrad and Co. after Nic’s heartbreaking (and mysterious) death with new episodes on Tuesdays on Fox at 8 p.m. ET as part of the fall TV lineup.
