Felicity Huffman Not Returning for “Doc” Season 3 After ‘Fantastic Twist’ in Season 2 Finale

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the two-part season 2 finale of Doc.

NEED TO KNOW

• Felicity Huffman made her last appearance as a series regular in Doc for the season 2 finale, which aired Tuesday, April 14

• Huffman praised the show’s team for “great writing” and a “fantastic twist” in the finale episode

• The season 2 finale of Doc is now streaming on Hulu

It’s the end of the road for Dr. Joan Ridley.

Felicity Huffman made her final appearance in Doc in the season 2 finale, which aired on Tuesday, April 14, as her character, who’d been going through a private health battle, died offscreen.

The plan had always been for Huffman, 63, to star in just one season of the Fox medical drama, so her character’s story was “acred out” purposefully over the 22 episodes, executive producer Barbie Kligman told TV Insider.

“It wasn’t a situation where you’re like, ‘Felicity’s got to go.’ It was literally the character of Joan was going to come in, have a tremendous impact, and then I think as soon as we decided she was sick, you want to play that off.”

Huffman found her character’s arc — and her demise after using her last ounces of energy to save Amy (Molly Parker) — to be “great writing.”

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“It’s a fantastic twist,” she told TV Insider. “It’s a huge surgery on Amy. It saves her life and ultimately costs Joan her life. It’s a wonderful, mythic sort of Greek tragedy kind of ending.”

Huffman said she “worked on” the scene where Joan chooses to save Amy at her own expense with her husband, William H. Macy.

“I was like, ‘It doesn’t exactly make sense because if you save Amy, she’s going to save hundreds, if not thousands, throughout her career.’ So had it been me, I would have put my finger on the scale, which is probably why I’m not a doctor,” she told the outlet.

Her character’s final scene was “beautifully written,” she said, and a “beautiful farewell.”

“I love that scene,” she said of her character lying in hospice with her son, Ethan (Connor McMahon), by her side. “That’s how she’s going to go out, which is how I hope that we all get to go out — surrounded by loved ones.”

A possible return for Huffman is not totally out of the question in season 3. “While the plan is Joan was a series regular for one year, I would imagine, and it depends on where we go in the room and what story feels right to tell, but I would hope we would be seeing Felicity again, now and again,” Kligman told TV Insider.

The actress said that she’s had conversations about Joan “coming back and being the ghost that haunts the halls of Westside” in the upcoming season.

Season 1 featured Scott Wolf in a pivotal role, and season 3 will have Blair Underwood as a series regular. Doc executive producer and co-showrunner Hank Steinberg told Deadline: “I don’t know if we’re going to do a big name every season, but Felicity was fantastic. We had a concept from the beginning that it would be a one-year deal. And we always knew that she was going to come in, she was going to be sick and hiding her illness, and by the end she would die in some heroic fashion, in a way that would be cathartic for Amy.”

Doc is now streaming on Hulu.

Read the original article on People