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‘Pulse’ Stars Break Down Danny & Phillips’ Brutal Falling Out and Their Romantic Future
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Pulse Season 1.]
Pulse’s central romance between Danny Simms (Willa Fitzgerald) and Xander Phillips (Colin Woodell) will make your heart skip a few beats as the show unravels their relationship in and out of the hospital. Over the course of the season, viewers have to piece together the foundation of Danny and Phillips’ relationship and how it all fell apart.
The series begins with Danny making a sexual harassment claim against Phillips, her superior at the hospital, and we learn at the end of the first episode that she’s actually been in a secret relationship with him. As Pulse oscillates between flashbacks and the present day, details behind Danny’s fallout with Phillips are revealed.
It isn’t until Episode 8 that we see the moment their romance explodes. In the aftermath of a drunken night at a retreat, Phillips and Danny admit that they love each other. Phillips also drops the bomb that he got the attending offer and says he wants to go public with their romance. Telling everyone they’re in a relationship now will inevitably impact Danny’s career, and she won’t get chief resident without it looking like favoritism. Their argument spirals out of control, with both of them going for the jugular with their words.
Fitzgerald, Woodell, and showrunners Zoe Robyn and Carlton Cuse open up about Danny and Phillips’ turning point in Episode 8.
Courtesy of Netflix
“I think that it is the kind of cornerstone of why what happens happens,” Fitzgerald said. “And I think it is also the inflection point for both of those characters of feeling totally unseen and that being totally heartbreaking and a betrayal. I feel like it is probably the single most important moment for them in terms of putting them on the path that they both get put on.”
For Woodell, all the different elements of the fight “felt relatable.” He added, “You’re pouring your heart out to someone, you’re being so vulnerable, and then you’re celebrating this huge victory in your work life, and then you just want to go to the mountaintops and scream it for everyone to hear it. I think we can all sort of relate to that when you’re vulnerable, sensitivities can really come up.”
However, he acknowledged that Phillips’ “certain level of entitlement” with his powerful and very rich family prevented him from seeing Danny’s point of view of the situation. “I believe when you’re told yes a lot, you have a very hard time hearing no, even if your intentions are completely pure, which his are,” Woodell explained. “Also, I’ve been kind of feeling this way a lot looking back on it. Watching the show you really see, despite the love for each other, just how these two people need to do a lot of work on themselves. I think he’s reluctant to believe that about himself, and that’s very common. I think it’s common for men to neglect their feelings. I think sometimes it’s also easy to feel stubborn and to feel prideful energy towards someone because you don’t want to be wrong.”
The show’s creator revealed that the Danny and Phillips relationship was “sort of based on a personal relationship that I was going through at the time when I wrote the pilot, and there are kernels of that in the show, but it was me kind of trying to work through my fears and anger and anxieties about that relationship in writing this relationship between Danny and Phillips.”
Robyn continued, “I think our intention always with the backstory was to really keep it along those lines like no one was the bad guy. This is just a complicated way that this kind of relationship with this kind of power dynamic can break down.”
In Episode 8’s present day timeline, Danny drops her HR claim, and Phillips finally sees how the relationship put Danny in a precarious position. The love is still beating between them, but with their careers at the top of the minds, reigniting their relationship right now is not the move. The actors weighed in on Danny and Phillips’ future after the finale.
Jeff Neumann / Netflix
“I think that anything’s possible,” Fitzgerald said. “I think that most of us can relate to having a love that, for whatever reason, is really not the correct time, place, or situation. I think there’s a real deep tragedy in that because I think there is such a connection there. But I also think that, at least to me, a lot of the problems between them stem from a lack of seeing and being seen. And because of that lack there can’t actually be that real true connection because there’s really something critical missing and that makes it so painful and so problematic for both of them. There’s always the possibility that people grow and change and start to unpack their own stuff so that they’re more able to be present with the people in their lives. I guess we’ll see if that happens.”
Woodell believes that “some healing definitely needs to happen” before Danny and Phillips could ever entertain the possibility of getting back together. “He saw, in a lot of ways, how his actions had really been very similar to the actions his parents had taken with him and what had happened at Kennedy,” the actor told Swooon. “He had done a very similar thing to the person he cared most about. So I think he’s aware of it now, but there needs to be some time to settle. In a perfect world, I think for Phillips, he would get back together with her, and they would be together, and they would pick up where they left off. That’s the indication to me that he’s not ready. I think when the show comes to an end, he wants her to say that she wants to still be with him, and when she doesn’t, there’s disappointment, which is every indication that he still needs to grow a little bit.”
He admitted that he was “devastated” by how things ended for Danny and Phillips after they what they went through. “But I think for the longevity of the show, I think there’s something really important about exploring other relationships,” Woodell said. “I really want us to continue to explore it gradually rather than force it. It’s something that is tough when you’re rooting for two characters to be together.”
Danny and Phillips’ relationship fate is open-ended in the Season 1, and that’s just how Cuse likes it. He compared their final beach moment to when Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford cross paths at the Plaza Hotel in The Way We Were.
“I think that’s where we wanted to leave it,” Cuse said. “We want to leave the audience wondering what’s going to happen with these two. And yet, obviously, there’s scars and history and, of course, now he still is her boss. He’s going to be an attending. She’s still a resident. We’re kind of playing the long game. We hope Pulse will be going for a long time and the audience will get to see a lot of additional permutations in their relationship.”
Pulse, Season 1, Streaming Now, Netflix
