KORSH: I have not said this before, but my initial idea was to have this all happen and have her make her decision to go, and I knew that fans out there knew that Gina might be leaving. We tried to keep it quiet, but you can’t keep that kind of thing quiet. Once she got her pilot, it certainly seemed people understood if that thing went, she would go. So my idea was to twist it and have her decide to leave and go to Jeff exactly as we did it in the finale, and have the father of the victim come back with a gun and kill her. I didn’t think we were going to see it, but my initial inspiration was sort of taken from M*A*S*H*. The beloved character Henry Blake left, and they had an emotional goodbye and then you find out that his plane had been shot down over the Sea of Japan, and it was very moving. That was my initial idea, to put the twist on it.
The network didn’t want to go that way, and I didn’t really have it in me to come up with two plans and sort of struggle to make my case on the one, so we ended up going this way. I think it gives her a little bit of a happy ending and certainly leaves more opportunity for her to come back from time to time in the future.