The arrival of Veronica Fuentes in New Amsterdam Season 4 as Max’s replacement meant that the rest of the doctors had to band together to try and resist against all of her changes, but the resistance is no more thanks to the betrayal by Dr. Reynolds. He had a valid reason and the best of intentions for telling Veronica about the other doctors’ illicit activities, but there were serious repercussions for pretty much everybody else, and Max’s return to save the hospital might not be enough. Tyler Labine, who plays Iggy, spoke with CinemaBlend about Reynolds’ betrayal and Max’s return.
Although Bloom was dealt the most serious blow when Fuentes fired her, Iggy has been demoted from his position as the head of Psychiatry, and not all the long after losing Gladys to Fuentes’ layoffs. When I spoke with Tyler Labine about what’s up next on New Amsterdam, he shared how his character is dealing with his demotion and how it came about:
He's dealing with it okay, as well as any of us are. I think the bigger news is how the demotion came to be, how Bloom being fired came to be, how Wilder being blackmailed to stay came to be. It's Reynolds, man, what was he doing? I know he did the right thing, and we all need to sit back and kind of look at the choice he made from a bigger, sort of macro lens, but he screwed everybody over just in the name of doing the right thing. The resistance got toppled. So Iggy is dealing okay with that, but he was already tentatively seeing patients. I have a feeling that Veronica demoting him is just going to light a fire under his butt and make him just come back full force. But I think Iggy is also going to have to be there for his Dam Fam. There's a lot of big emotions, and there's gonna be a lot of healing that has to be done after what happened.
Reynolds’ goal may have been to prevent the doctors from performing a dangerous procedure without the resources they’d need if something went wrong, but the effects of his betrayal extend far beyond the secret morgue surgery. Fuentes fired Bloom after she’d made the decision that she needed to stay, blackmailed Wilder after she tried to resign on principle, and of course demoted Iggy.
With Max no longer employed at the hospital and Helen no longer even in North America, there seems to be little reason to hope for Fuentes to go down. According to Tyler Labine, Iggy is at least dealing with his demotion well enough. The actor went on to elaborate on whether or not it made a difference to Iggy that Reynolds had flipped with the best of intentions, rather than for any selfish reason:
I think with Iggy especially, it does [make a difference]. Even while we were shooting the scene, I made sure – and they left it in – when he was leaving the room, it was quite tense. And everyone was glaring at him. And I wanted to make sure I looked at him with more curiosity than anger. You know, just like 'I wonder what pushed this very good man and very good friend to make this decision.' I think more curiosity than anger for Iggy, but there's gonna be some hurt for sure.
Of course, Iggy arguably lost less than the others, as he does still have his job in his longtime department (which is more than Bloom can say) and wasn’t forced into remaining at the hospital like Wilder. Still, he goes pretty far back with Reynolds, so it’s no surprise that he feels hurt. Does his curiosity mean that he could be faster to forgive Reynolds than the others, or is Reynolds still going to be on the outs with everybody after basically destroying the resistance?
Only time will tell on that front, but at least the doctors have a ringer on their side now that Max is back. Although the death of Vijay was a tragic reason for him to return to New York, it gave Max and Helen a close look at the dismal version of New Amsterdam run by Fuentes, and Helen encouraged him to stay and do his best to help get rid of Fuentes. While this is certainly a noble goal, Max already faced some frostiness from the people he left behind when it came to the state of the hospital. Tyler Labine shared how Iggy is feeling about Max’s returning to try and save the day:
Uneasy, maybe a little perturbed, you know. We all made peace. And so did they, Helen and Max, leaving with finding their joy. And we all did what we had to do to be happy for them. And then kind of have been left with a crumbling New Amsterdam. I don't think it's necessarily because Max is gone. It's that he's emblematic of our team. Without our team, fully assembled, it's been kind of whack. It's really, really hard. And Fuentes is a maniac! There's some emotions and some hurt feelings about being left in this situation. But it's not his fault.
Max and Helen truly embraced their new relationship and took a leap of faith by moving to London together, and their friends in New York were as happy for them as they could be, considering that they were being left with Fuentes. Max couldn’t be expected to just not pursue his own happiness with the woman that he loves, so he’s not the bad guy in the situation. But he may not get the warmest of welcomes once it becomes clear that he’s sticking around. Labine continued:
It's not [Max’s] responsibility to take care of us. We're all grown ups. But I think when he tries to come back, it's a little bit like, 'Hey, dude, you don't get to just do that.' You can't just come back and be like, 'New Amsterdam Team, assemble!' He doesn't get to just call us into action. We're dealing with the realities of it. And he's coming in a little deluded, I think, if he thinks he can just come in and just make it all okay by being Max. But that's what he wants to do. That's his default. So there's going to be a lot of big feelings and conversations around that.
As much as it’s fun to imagine Max walking down the halls of New Amsterdam and yelling “ASSEMBLE!” to all the doctors, it sounds like he is in for an uphill battle on multiple fronts now that he’s back in New York and away from Helen. (Stars Ryan Eggold and Tyler Labine already shared how Season 4 will continue to use Freema Agyeman despite Helen’s status across the pond.)
Now that the 2022 Olympics have finished, New Amsterdam will be back with a new episode, directed by Ryan Eggold, on Tuesday, February 22 at 10 p.m. ET on NBC. The bad news is that this episode will be the last before the show goes on a break until April, with new miniseries The Thing About Pam taking over the Tuesday night time slot starting in March in the 2022 TV schedule.
