Yahoo Finance Prodigal Son creators take us inside that wild series finale and huge cliffhanger
Warning: This article contains spoilers about the May 18 series finale of Prodigal Son.
The Prodigal Son and his creepy serial killer father have left the building — in more ways than one.
After the news that the crime procedural drama had been canceled, Tuesday night's season finale also served as the series finale (damnit, Fox!), and, (my) boy, did they go out with a bang. Seriously, stop reading here if you haven't watched yet or we'll send Dr. Whitly after you.
Having escaped from prison and then Vivian's (Catherine Zeta-Jones) psychotic grasp, Martin (Michael Sheen) managed to talk a reluctant Malcolm (Tom Payne) into helping crack a decades-old crime and hunt down another serial killer at large in the tiny Vermont town in which they were hiding out. So, yeah, for a minute there, in its usual and unique mix of quirky comedy and genuine horror, the episode became a buddy cop story as father and son worked together to catch the killer. Of course, there was only so long that Malcolm could suspend his disbelief, and once they rescued the would-be victim, the profiler made the call to turn in his father.
Phil Caruso/FOX Tom Payne in 'Prodigal Son'
Martin being Martin, a.k.a. infamous serial killer The Surgeon who has taken 23 (known) lives, didn't love that. In a SHOCKING final scene, the father turns on his son and comes at him with a knife, intent on killing his own child. Fortunately, Malcolm was able to overpower his pops, but that meant driving the dagger into Martin's gut, just as the cops closed in.
So will Martin survive? Will Malcolm go to prison? Or just lose it entirely, hearing his father's parting words, "I was right, we are the same" on loop? Well, we'll never know. Cancelations suck. But since we couldn't leave it like that, we chatted with co-creators Chris Fedak and Sam Sklaver to see what they would've had in store had the show gone to season 3.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: First off, ugh, I'm so sad the show has been canceled. Is there any chance it might get picked up elsewhere?
SAM SKLAVER: As the famous Monty Python sketch goes, "We're not dead yet!" There can't be that many idiots out there. Someone's gotta pick up this show.
How was the fan reaction right after the cancelation news broke?
SKLAVER: We've always had a rabidly loyal fan base and we've loved them and it was always our intention to make a great show for everyone, but we really did listen to what the fans wanted and we tried to give it to them and it felt like it worked. So all this love and outpouring that we're getting from them is appreciated and it's sad to know that people are taking it so hard. The only good thing is that Chris and I know we were able to provide a really great finale, whether it's for this season or if it's for the series. There are many things we wanted to do, but we were able to do so much that I don't think this show ended with the sort of cliffhanger that sometimes shows that are canceled too soon do. We were able to tell a really great 33-episode story.
Definitely want to get into that wild finale, but also want to look back at this season as a whole because it's been pretty crazy throughout. How did the idea for a prison break come about?
CHRIS FEDAK: As we were coming to the end of season 1 and just seeing what our cast could do, season 2 started to come into focus. COVID was going to have an effect on what we could do and what our assets would be. We knew that we could essentially lean on our cast and really build out that family story that materializes and the trauma that Bright's going through. So it was really an opportunity for us to deepen the show and move it beyond even the procedural roots. Here's the thing, once you do an escape, you've done the thing you wanted to do, and then it's about how do you undo it? On our show, we were like, okay, we're going to do it, but we're not going to undo it. We're going to really go full crazy and have an escape, not in the finale, but in episode 10, and from that point on, each episode will only get crazier and crazier. If people were responding to the last four or five episodes that simplified it because we were like, if you think that was crazy, guess what comes next.
SKLAVER: I think that's why our penultimate episode is one of my favorites because it ends with Martin driving a speed boat with Malcolm unconscious in the back, and that's just the craziest image I could ever have imagined us producing — but if you watch this season, it totally makes sense. There's nothing crazy about it because that's the world we're in and all of our moves got them there.
Catherine Zeta-Jones was an amazing addition this season as Dr. Vivian Capshaw, and wow, did her story arc get wild. How excited were you guys to have her come on board and in such an out-there role?
SKLAVER: It was amazing. It was outrageous and amazing. That last twist, those last three episodes, we told Catherine, "Here's what we wanna do, we want to establish the character with the tragic story of Vivian Capshaw, and then there's the twist that she's just as bat-s--- crazy as The Surgeon." She was like, "Oooh, that sounds fun." From the get-go, we were like, we need someone who takes this character from identifiable and tragic to Kathy Bates level and fun.
FEDAK: When we first spoke to her, she was like, I don't want to do Nurse Ratched because that's been done so well, and there's a Netflix show, and her husband produced One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. We were like, what about doing Misery? And she was like, 'Oh, I'd like to do Misery.' So what was so fun for us, in those first few episodes, she knew that she was a psychopath; she was just hiding it from us. Because we're always looking at the other psychopath in the room in Martin Whitly you don't see it. But upon second viewing, knowing the character that she was playing, she just did an amazing performance — which isn't surprising because it's Catherine, but her performance was just beyond our expectations, which were high to begin with.
You also addressed racism in the police force this season through J.T.'s (Frank Harts) experience with other cops at the precinct. Was that one of the first conversations when you got back in the writers' room for season 2?
SKLAVER: The George Floyd protests were happening, and we hadn't even opened up our writers' room. We had calls with all of our cast members and when we were talking to Frank, it felt inevitable. We were able to avoid COVID on our show because there weren't really stories to tell. But this racism that was being so strongly felt by society, felt like that had to live in our show. We're very fortunate that our police crew is a Filipino and two Black cops, so it was unavoidable. We never thought we would be able to solve racism, but we also didn't want to ignore it and we wanted to show how it could impact the characters and hopefully give our audience a new perspective and a greater understanding of it.
FEDAK: Just to add on to what Sam said, for us, this was something we wanted to come back to. We didn't want to do an arc where we solved racism at the NYPD, but it was something that we wanted to come back to and see that it lived constantly in these characters' lives, especially for J.T. and Dani (Aurora Perrineau). So another shame of the show not coming back is our inability to come back to that story.
Shippers will be happy we finally got to see Dani and Malcolm share a kiss after months of will-they-won't they. Did you ever consider getting them together sooner or did you want to build that friendship first?
SKLAVER: There was never a thought of getting them together sooner. The Dani and Bright friendship is a connection. We realized how important it is, but also it's something that you don't want to do too quickly because they're both people suffering with their own problems. Them coming together as people that need to commiserate with each other and understand the brokenness is something that was very much a part of season 1. The romantical part — not a term, not a real word — was something that we really loved how it built, especially with the insanity of the last few episodes of Martin being on the loose and Dani really being the one person to understand just how broken and messed up Bright is about this entire situation. So we didn't want to go faster, but we just knew we were building to this incredibly romantic moment inside a storage facility.
The sexiest of settings! Okay, let's talk about the finale a little more in-depth. Tell me everything about the fight scene between Vivian and Jessica (Bellamy Young).
FEDAK: The moment we start talking about it in the writers' room, in my mind, I started seeing some of my favorite moments from Dynasty. We couldn't go that way, so it was like, what is the Prodigal Son version of that? From the get-go, it was going to be delicious. Chris Grismer, our producing director, who directed the last two episodes, knew that we were going to take it and make it more intense and more violent than you'd ever expect. Then Catherine and Bellamy dug in. It wasn't like, are we doing this? It was, this is going to be so much fun. We were working out each individual detail like we were working on a Matrix movie, and it was a blast. Everyone was totally game on board for making something really insane and scary and fun. And it also has a Grace Jones joke.
So at what point did Malcolm realize his dad was never really going to change? Or did he just know that deep down the whole time?
FEDAK: The nice thing about Sam and I writing the show together is we don't always have to agree. On a show like this, you can have a lot of complicated things in between that you just leave. We can hold two different thoughts at the same time. I have a thought, in regards to what Malcolm is thinking in that moment. He says it to his father at the end, "You're not for this world. You can't be out here." I think the son wants to save him but to save him means not letting him go, bringing him back to Claremont, and locking him up. He knows, in the end, his father is a psychopath and he is a predatory psychopath and that he can create anything inside his mind to make any kind of logic but that's not a safe person you can let out into the world.
SKLAVER: Even if Martin could change — and I'm all for prison reform — if you killed 23 people you gotta stay in prison for the rest of your life! I don't think Bright would disagree with that thinking as well, but what's so interesting about having different points of view is you want to look at Bright's point of view, as a son just looking at his father, he probably wants to believe that his father could change, even if the profiler part of him knows that that's impossible and knows that he isn't for this world. The son in him wants his dad reformed. That is why the show is so beautiful.
So the cliffhanger ending... Can you say whether Martin would've survived that stabbing? Would Malcolm have been heading to prison himself? Where was it going to go from there?
FEDAK: I want to be vague just because you never know... The crazy thing is, for Sam and I, we finished work on season 2 two weeks ago and we immediately kind of started figuring out season 3 between us and we put together a pitch and it is an epic and crazy pitch. And when we pitched it to Fox, they loved it. Unfortunately, there were other extenuating circumstances that we ran into, but it was huge... I want to keep it close to the vest because Sam and I need to torture ourselves by knowing what we were going to do. But I think that what we would say is that our plan was always to have Michael Sheen be a part of the show. So take that as an answer to something...
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