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Despite some possible second thoughts from the staff of Chastain Park Memorial Hospital and a scary scene that alluded to his demise, Governor Mark Betz (Steven Culp) actually winds up surviving the finale episode. And as a result, this also means that Chastain will live to see another day. Ever since becoming governor, Betz has served as a primary adversary to the hospital by threatening to slash its funding. But for the finale, titled “All Hands On Deck,” he finds himself at the mercy of the hospital he seemed bent on closing. Betz made a deal in the previous episode that he’d save Chastain following his heart transplant. And keeping in the finale’s feel-good ending, Betz gets his heart transplant, survives, and upholds his deal to save Chastain.
However, “The Resident” co-creator Amy Holden Jones revealed to TV Line that Betz could have suffered a horrible fate instead. While talking about the decisions behind the finale’s upbeat ending, Jones said in the interview that Betz almost didn’t survive his heart transplant. “… We strongly considered letting Betz die,” Jones told the outlet. “It would have been fictional revenge. But our team usually wins.”
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Considering the grief Betz put the staff of Chastain through, a potentially appropriate move would have been to kill him off. However, doing so would have left the fate of Chastain in question. With that in mind, we have to wonder if Jones and the writing team would have decided on Betz’s death if Season 7 had already been greenlit by Fox. After all, his demise and Chastain’s unfunded fate would have made for quite the cliffhanger heading into the next season.
