‘New Amsterdam’ Kills off Major Character in Season Finale

New Amsterdam fans didn’t know what him them Wednesday night during the season 1 finale — or even which of the main characters died, for that matter.

During the episode, fans thought that maybe they were out of the woods after Georgia (Lisa O’Hare) delivered Luna at her apartment. Although she was fading fast and in desperate need of blood, Helen Sharpe (Freeman Agyeman) and company arrived in the nick of time to save her. She, the baby, Max (Ryan Eggold), Lauren Bloom (Janet Montgomery) Sharpe and two drivers piled into an ambulance to head to the hospital. On the ride over, Georgia woke up, getting to meet her daughter in a sweet moment that lulled fans into a false sense of security.

A split second later, however, another ambulance crashed into theirs. Not everyone made it out OK — but fans couldn’t tell who. It was clear, at least, that Max and the baby appeared to be fine, but Georgia, who was already on a stretcher, was wheeled away, and Bloom was thrown through the windshield and left bloody on the ground. What’s more is that another body was covered with a sheet, leaving many fans to wonder: Where is Sharpe?

New Amsterdam executive producers David Schulner and producer/director Peter Horton told TVLine that viewers’ questions about the scene won’t be answered until the season 2 premiere.

“All of the questions that you have around this, like, ‘Why haven’t we seen Sharpe? Who’s under the sheet? Is Bloom dead? Is Georgia going to make it?’ All of those are questions we want everyone to be asking. Indeed someone dies, as you can see by the sheet. David has a great way of revealing who that is on the first episode of next year, but even the cast doesn’t really know,” Horton said.

Schulner wanted to make it clear that he and the rest of the crew weren’t taking the easy way out with the death: “You have seen the lawyer who stole the ambulance, he’s clearly dead. But we don’t want people to think, like, we’re playing a fast one and he’s the one who died,” Schulner said. “In addition to him, one of our key cast is dead.”

Horton said even the cast member whose character was killed doesn’t know for sure that they’re dead, but that they’ll find out in a few months when they receive the new script.

“I went through this experience years ago in a series called thirtysomething, where my character died, and even back then, it was really, really hard to keep that a secret,” Horton said. “That was before social media and all of that. It was actually horse-and-buggy. But given all of the social media today, and how everyone’s talking about everything, we really felt we needed to keep this sealed tight until it’s revealed next year.”

New Amsterdam returns with season 2 in the fall on NBC.