(Warning: This post contains spoilers through the Season 1 finale of “Carnival Row”)
For fans of Amazon Prime Video’s “Carnival Row” that have gotten off the fantastical, speeding carousel of a tale that was Season 1 of the fantasy drama and are already looking for hints about what that ending means for human detective Rycroft “Philo” Philostrate (Orlando Bloom) and his lover refugee fairy Vignette Stonemoss (Cara Delevingne) in the second season — which the show has already been renewed for — TheWrap has you covered with answers from the executive producers and stars themselves.
As you know if you’ve made it through the finale, Chancellor Absalom Breakspear (Jared Harris) was assassinated by his wife Piety (Indira Varma), who also happened to be the one controlling the Darkasher that was murdering the Fae folk all season in the hopes of killing Philo after she found out was Breakspear’s half-Fae son. But no one knows the truth about any of that except for Philo and Vignette.
And now that Piety has gone missing, “all of this is placed at the feet — or the hooves — of the fae folk,” showrunner Marc Guggenheim told TheWrap. “So Jonah (Arty Froushan) — who rises to the position of acting chancellor as the result of the death of his father — he orders the city sealed and all the fae folk sequestered on Carnival Row.”
“So when we end the season, there’s a wall going up on the Row and all the Fae folk who live in the city are being led into this ghetto,” creator Travis Beacham said, with Guggenheim chiming in to add, “that’s obviously a huge part of Season 2.”
“By that point in the story, basically, because Philo is a half-blood, he has the ability to pass — so he doesn’t have to cross over, but he does to be with Vignette,” Guggenheim said. “So he outs himself as being Critch. And because the humans don’t make a distinction between being full Critch or being a half-blood, if you have any Critch blood in you, you’re a Critch. So he makes the decision to cross over and live behind the wall with Vignette, not just as a Critch, but as a half-blood. So in Season 2, Philo is — to use a phrase from Episode 2 — neither man nor Fae. He himself is both, but not really respected by the Fae who still see him as a copper. And of course he’s still seen as a Critch by the humans. So he’s really, in Season 2, he’s a man without a country.”
Delevingne told TheWrap she thought Philo’s decision was “a perfect ending” for the season-long will-they-or-won’t-they love story.
“The fact that being half Fae is such a bad thing, the fact that he picks that just to be with the person he loves — also realizing that is the part of him that he’s tried to deny for so long, just to finally embrace that, it’s really that moment that he’s got a gun to his head: are you going to be truthful and honest or are you going to continue to be with this secret your whole life?”
Despite the fact the couple were already trying to run away together before the wall was going up, Delevingne doesn’t think Vignette would have believed Philo truly loved her until he chose to out himself.
“At the end of the day, until he really passed that barrier and admitted that, I don’t think they would have ever been together,” she said. “And I don’t think he necessarily did it for that reason, but it was like, oh my God, he’s actually the person that I thought in my heart… he’s finally proved that he is that person and it’s really a great moment for their love story.”
Bloom says all of this “sets up really well for a second season where we’re then looking at what life inside Carnival Row, and what life in the Burgue is without having the support of the Fae, who are basically running the houses, running the world.”
Season 1 of “Carnival Row” is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video.