Designated Survivor boss explains latest shocking death

The Designated Survivor winter finale contained one of the biggest shockers of the entire series to date in the closing minutes. In the closing minutes of the episode Alex Kirkman (Natascha McElhone) died as a result of a shocking collision while she was in the middle of her motorcade — a truck hit her car, and it absolutely seemed to be intentional.

This move completely broke President Kirkman in the closing minutes of the episode, and it absolutely sets up the remainder of the season … but how long did the show know about this move in advance? It certainly seems like quite a while. Speaking to TVLine, show executive producer Keith Eisner confirmed that McElhone’s desire to move on to a new project helped to set things in motion:

Natascha had this great opportunity on a cable show (Hulu’s The First, set on Mars and starring Sean Penn) that she really wanted to do and which was going to limit her availability. It posed a question for us: Do we figure out a way to temporarily absent her from the show? Or not even absent her but have her involved on a lesser basis? And what occurred to us is we had an opportunity here to do something that TV hasn’t done before, which is show a president who is a widower in office. We loved that as a prospect. We love Natascha as an actress as well, so it was difficult to figure out the right thing to do, but once the opportunity popped up, it became clear that this is the road [to take].

Ultimately, this was probably the right road for the show since it is so different; also, keeping Alex alive but not featuring her is such a half-measure. We’re also all for allowing an actor to leave if they want to move on to something else. Why force someone to stay? Designated Survivor chose to make the move here that will bring a lot of drama to the show and also make McElhone the happiest — we’re certainly curious to see what happens from here and how the producers will move on. Maybe this invigorates the show, or maybe it just makes fans angry because it was so sudden. Technically, the writers could have plotted this out on-screen far in advance given that this was not a sudden development.

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