The end of Revival is here, and it certainly didn’t end the way the comics did. To be honest, ending it the way the comics did wouldn’t make sense for a TV show. How can you continue the story from there? There has to be something that pushes us into Revival season 2.
Showrunners Aaron B. Koontz and Luke Boyce discussed that from the start. They knew they needed to do something that would help create another mystery for the second season. Well, they’ve certainly done that.
Now we get to break it all down with them. Yes, there are major spoilers for the Revival season 1 finale in this post. It’s a post-mortem interview, so what do you expect?
Creating another mystery for Revival season 2
Precinct TV: From the beginning, I wondered how you were going to create the ending, knowing that Em ultimately sacrifices herself in the comics. When did you both make the decision that things would have to change for the ending?
Aaron B. Koontz: Right from the beginning. We wanted to keep the show going for a while, and Em is a pretty amazing character. But with that being said, there are elements that we’ve done where you have to ask the question, ‘did something die?’ I don’t know! There’s more to that than I think we’re fully giving yo at the end of this.
But we did know we wanted to tell that murder mystery story in season 1, so we knew we had to get to that point. And still build on that mystery to continue to tell the revival story, so we had to refashion that a little bit to make that work. There’s something fun about thinking that Em has made the ultimate sacrifice and right at the very end, maybe not, but what does that mean? We have not fully told you yet.
Luke Boyce: I also think Em believes she’s making that sacrifice at the time. She thinks she is, so what’s happening to her may not be as clear as it might even look in the finale.
PTV: I have to ask about Em’s soul, because while everyone else’s souls were yellow, hers was purple. Is that some sort of clue you were hoping for us to pick up on as something bigger to come?
AK: Sort of, yes.
LB: I think the core of it is isolating that Em is different. We just want to continue to establish that Em is different, and that would mean that her corresponding passenger, as we call it, is also different. So, what does that mean? Why is she different? That’s not something that is in the comics, so we’ve added a lot to Em’s backstory that’s not in the comic too. I think there’s more that people are going to realize and understand going forward if we’re fortunate to have a future season.
There’s a lot of story left to be told with them. This is just the start of Em’s journey. In my mind, it’s actually the start of Em’s story.
This whole season is an adventure of her and Dana, and they’re figuting this stuff out, and now she’s becoming something. What is that going to be? What does it mean going forward?
PTV: Em has gone through this wonderful development, and I want to praise you on the realism of that development. What were the conversations to make sure she had that time to breathe and peel the layers off her character?
AK: That was the conversation from the beginning in telling the story. Dana becomes the clear protagonist right away, and we knew Dana was that, but Em is a tougher nut to crack throughout. And we’re adapting the comic. We changed some of the story, adding in her illness, thinks like that that became important to us, because she has the biggest arc in season 1. It’s sort of Em’s arc, so those conversations happened pretty early on trying to crack the story.
LB: It’s also why it had to be a TV show and not a movie. There was something about Em’s journey that you can see in the comic. You can see how dark she goes, and things have happened and stuff that she’s wrestling with. We had to define the inner turmoil.
I really believe this is the start of her real story, of her becoming something different and where she’s going to go from there, and that could not have been told in 90 minutes. We had to take the time to really focus on Em’s geography. Dana is relatively static. At the beginning, she’s wanting to leave Wausau, and then she’s willing to stay and she’s figuring some things out.
The real journey is in the arc through Em’s eyes and through Em’s manifestation. What is the infrastructure? How is she going to reach these points? How are we going to get her to episode 6 when you meet her she’s just this meek thing in a car and sleeping on a bench, and now she’s killing the Check brothers and ripping them apart. How do you get to that? And then how do you get from episode 6 to episode 10 and this sacrificial moment and the Mother of Babylon and all of this?
We had to really think about it. You needed a television show to do that.
PTV: I really appreciated how there was so much focus on family. A lot of TV shows put the main focus on love interests, and while there was some of that in Revival, it was mostly family, whether it was the Cypresses, the Checks, of the Blackdeer family. What were the conversations like to keep it rooted in that?
AK: We pitched it as a family drama, and we knew that was tough to do because people want high concept. It has high concept, it’s supernatural and horror and all those things, but we said from the very beginning that this is a story about a dysfunctional family who needs to heal. They have gone through shared trauma, and they don’t know how to communicate and get better.
We want to see them heal, and that’s something that’s vital to be, because that’s all our stories. We can all relate to that. We can all relate to having these family dynamics. Some of us are more broken than others, but we all have that level of understanding, and we can relate to it right away. So that was vital from the very beginning. That was in our bible from the word go.
LB: And in our minds, the dead coming back and all that stuff, none of that mattered. What matters is the Cypress family and the real Revival Day. For us, that day was when Patty died two years ago, because the Cypresses came back. They look and appear the same way that they were before, but they are forever changed, and something is different as a result of that. So, the day that Patty died is the real Revival Day in our story.
It started with family; it’s going to continue with family. That’s going to be the thing that we want to focus on and understand what those dynamics are like and love within that. There are people you can love for many, many years of your life and never talk to again, but your family stays with you, even the family you don’t talk to, they’re still in your life. And we’ll continue that in future seasons.
PTV: The main villains of the story were just sprinkled in here and there. How did you develop that to tease us the villains without telling us who they were?
AK: Are you talking about Lester specifically?
PTV: Lester and Nithiya.
LB: We really like Agatha Christie whodunit types of stories and we spend a lot of time deconstructing shows like Mare of Easttown. We wanted to misdirect you again and again into different potential murderers and suspects. We wanted to give you something and then pull it back. No, it’s not them; oh, it’s them; no, it’s not them. That was fun.
Just by the nature of that structure, they’re kind of coming and coing, and they’re jumping in and out. We wanted to see how far some of that goes, but we alsow anted to constantly be a show that the second you think you have the answer, every time we want to say, ‘no, you don’t.’
That’s why we have Aaron showing up. He took her to the bridge. In episode 4, I remember we were in the writer’s room and talking with the network, and they’re like, ‘You can’t do this. What’s happening?’ But it was much more than that. It was the conspiracy about the murder can be just as interesting as who physically did it. In reality, the person who murdered Em and put her under water was Aaron. It was Aaron the whole time. Lester was a bigger force behind all that, but it was Aaron who was drowning her. He’s just a gaslighting liar as he says in episode 4.
That’s where the Nithiya piece of it came in. What does that mean? I will say that because things might happen in the comic does not mean it will happen here. So, Nithiya is very much an open-ended questions, but there is now a question that Dana has about her.
Revival is on Peacock, with the season finale dropping next week.