‘The Fosters’ season 4, episode 1 reaction: Show boss on Nick’s motives, history

The premiere of “The Fosters” season 4 has now come and gone on Freeform, and if there is one word we’d use to describe it, it is “devastating.” While no major character died or was injured, we’re not sure we have seen a depiction of a school lockdown quite like this one. Nick had a gun, and was seemingly wandering around campus with it. Eventually the students were let go, but there’s no guarantee that the Adams Foster family is out of the woods just yet.

There were some interesting decisions made creatively in what we think was a pretty incredible episode from a writing standpoint; namely, we put the emphasis on the students rather than a shooter, which left some ambiguity as to what was going through Nick’s head. This was appropriate, given that it is often impossible to know what someone is thinking in this sort of dangerous situation. Executive producer Bradley Bredeweg did his part to explain to TVLine precisely why the show cultivated this story in such a way, and also what may have caused Nick to be put into this situation:

“Obviously, Nick has a heartbreaking history. We’ve been able to explore his relationship with his father a little bit. He comes from a very broken household. There is some mental instability there with Nick, and we believe that that has to be the focus in these tragedies as well. How can we put more focus into our mental health system in order to help prevent serious situations like this moving forward? Nick is in a very bad place. It’s a multi-layered situation for him.”

Hopefully, the show will address in the weeks to come precisely what happens to Nick; there’s no guarantee that he gets help, given that in the real world, unstable people often do not. We just hope that this is the case, both for him and for some of those around him.

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