Transplant's Hamza Haq on What [Spoiler]'s Arrival Means for Bashir
Warning: The following contains spoilers for Sunday’s Transplant premiere. Proceed at your own risk!
Bash’s past caught up to him during Transplant‘s stateside Season 2 premiere, when he came face-to-face with his presumed-dead fiancée Rania.
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When the two finally had a moment to talk, Rania explained that her father had been funneling regime documents to the Free Syrian Army. After their house was bombed, they had to go into hiding, and no one could know they were alive.
“But for five years? You could have found some way to get me a message,” Bash countered.
Rania said she wanted to get in contact, but she didn’t know where he was. Then when she learned that Bash had made a new life for himself and his sister, Rania didn’t want him to risk everything to come and get her, so she made the choice for him.
“It’s something that I don’t know if Bash necessarily made peace with in that he was OK with having lost that life,” star Hamza Haq tells TVLine, “but I think he understood the logic of it and was satisfied enough moving forward and trying to find a life and trying to find something stable in his life with Amira [and] in a potential courtship with Mags, as we saw at the end of Season 1. And then here [Rania] is coming back, and he’s sort of a deer in the headlights. It throws a lot of things into question for Bashir, and we see him navigate all of those throughout the season.”
At the close of the season premiere, Bash embraced a distraught Rania, suggesting that the two will pick up where they left off. But is there room for Rania in Bash’s new life? “He has a second chance to rekindle a romance that he thought he had lost permanently,” Haq shares. “This is somebody who brings him the comfort of home, that his sister can relate to… And there is genuinely a good amount of love that still remains. But there’s also this other half of him that has moved on, that has changed. Everything about the circumstances of his life has changed. As they try to figure out how to move forward, there’s a speed bump or two along the way.”
One of those bumps might be a certain blonde doctor with whom Bash works. “I think it’s pretty evident what Bashir’s feelings are for Mags,” Haq says. “Much like any personal relationship that he’s foraging, he’s tentative because he’s afraid of losing people. And he’s also following Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to a tee. So until he’s figured out all these other things, he won’t even explore something for himself, because at some level, until he achieves a certain level of comfort or a certain level of success or takes care of his sister, he won’t think about what he needs as a person, as a man, and to some degree, maybe he doesn’t even think he deserves it because of the enormous guilt that he feels over the loss of his parents and everything. And enter Mags, who allows him to finally feel these sorts of things again, and then enter Rania, [with whom it’s] like, ‘Well, I had that already, and now I have the opportunity to have that back.’ So there’s definitely conflict there.”
Elsewhere in the premiere, Bishop survived his second stroke, but he’ll be “facing some very difficult situations in regards to how and why he got to where we were at the end of Season 1,” his portrayer John Hannah previews. “So there’s the ramifications of all of that that we have to deal with. But he very quickly [gets] back on his feet again.”
Transplant fans, what did you think of the season opener? Grade it below, then hit the comments!
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