Contains SPOILERS of the Season 1 Finale!!
If there is a Season 2, here's what we can expect .....
While Brad Wolgast is absent from Justin Cronin’s version of the story from pretty early on, Executive Producer Liz Heldens admits she feels “this show is Wolgast and Amy” and therefore did not want to adapt his demise identically. “I just think people connect to TV by characters — that’s how you live and die by the show: because you love the characters. And so we always knew we wanted to find a way to bring him back,” she says.
Heldens also wrote ways for characters such as Clark Richards (Vincent Piazza) and Jonas Lear (Henry Ian Cusick) to survive. For Richards, she allowed him to be Shauna Babcock’s (Brianne Howey) “one person” — connected to her through blood after he allowed her to save him when he was dying outside Project Noah. They are linked.
For Lear, “there was something really great to us about him starting the episode wanting to kill himself and ending the episode by giving himself a virus that may make him live forever," she says.
And even Lila has a greater shot at survival because she got the shot that Nichole Sykes (Caroline Chikezie) was working on, which slows her aging and makes her not one of the virals but instead one of the “super people.”
However, Heldens points out that even though her team took great pains to “look at who it would make sense to keep alive,” the 100-year time jump comes after bombs were dropped, “so even if you are superhuman, that doesn’t mean you can survive bombs dropping," she says. "We wanted it to be a big question mark of who is going to come back and who is not going to come back. Season 2 is going to be a lot about people trying to find one another again."
Structurally, if the show sees a renewal, the second season may be a bit different than the first, as well. Although Heldens often utiilized a flashback structure to offer additional insight into characters’ motivations and says she is still “commited to using" flashbacks should they serve the story, now that the action is set in the colony, it's a different kind of tension.
“Now we’re fighting for our lives; now we have virals attacking us; now the colony is running out of batteries," she says of the conflict in Season 2.
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IS SYKES DEAD?
Sadly, the answer to this one seems to be yes… though Heldens didn’t rule out a return at some point for Caroline Chikezie. “It was not an easy decision, and we’ve had a lot of conversations about the future, so I don’t know,” the show boss says. “But as far as officially? She’s dead.”
WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH BRAD?
In Cronin’s books, Brad falls ill thanks to nuclear missiles that detonate in his vicinity; he later appears as a viral who is loyal to Amy. As you saw, however, the TV version of Wolgast now has the cure running through his veins. “What is completely working on our show is Brad and Amy’s relationship. It’s just the beating heart of The Passage,” Heldens says. “The trick to Season 2 is: How does that relationship evolve? What does it look like now? What does it look like 100 years later, when they finally reunite in the future?” She chuckles. “I couldn’t kill him. I couldn’t do it!”
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For those who haven’t read the novels, how the finale blasts open the action to the outside world and across centuries could come as a shock.
Up until the second half of the finale, the show had been confined mainly to the Project Noah facility, with heavy reliance on expository flashbacks and the Virals’ psychic dreamscapes to add variety. While some of these scenes provided much-needed character building, many of them felt like the show spinning its wheels to save the monumental events for the finale.
This must have been torture for those who have read Justin Cronin’s source novel because the entire season only accounts for about 40 percent of the book. The rest deals with the post-apocalyptic events, which are left as a cliffhanger in the series.
The Fox series has set into motion many possibilities for the evolution of the story.
What has happened to the world and Amy in the intervening 97 is intriguing on its own, as is the deepening mythology of the Virals. Shauna Babcock (Brianne Howey) turned Clark Richards (Vincent Piazza), who now appears to have both Viral and human-like qualities; and since Lila took the antiviral cure after becoming infected, the Virals no longer regard her as a potential victim or snack.
It’s possible that since the Virals could withstand the bombs, these human hybrids might also. This would keep more familiar faces in play for Season 2 since Amy also gave Brad the cure, and Dr. Jonas Lear (Henry Ian Cusick) injected himself with a test vaccine.
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