(Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Season 1 finale of “The Passage”)
Fox’s vampire — er, viral drama “The Passage” wrapped its first season Monday night with an action-packed two-hour finale that, in its final moments, took us over a hundred years into the future via a time jump. And then maybe even further via a flash-forward earlier in the episode.
TheWrap spoke with series creator Liz Heldens about the many twists and turns in tonight’s pair of episodes, including that cryptic vision Amy (Saniyya Sidney) had of herself feeding blood to Fanning (Jamie McShane) in a sunny future. So, why was she helping him in that scene — which she saw in her mind’s eye as she came face-to-face with her viral father when everyone escaped Project NOAH?
“Part of it is, she’s tied to Fanning,” Heldens told us. “I really like in the show the struggle, the push and pull between good daddy and bad daddy, between good father and bad father. Her good father is Brad Wolgast (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), obviously, and then Fanning — I mean, Fanning’s blood does run through Amy. They are tied in a way that can’t be denied, and she’s constantly going to be fighting that darker side of her. We like the idea of kind of throwing ourselves a complication down the road that we have to fulfill, you know, like we made a promise that that scene is going to happen at some point. But it seemed like an OK box to put ourselves in…like at some point she’s gonna help him, at some point their relationship is going to change.”
Now, going back to that time jump to the Palm Desert in the year 2116, which took place in the closing moments of the episode after those bombs dropped. The scene shows Amy on her own, battling virals in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, as she approaches a fortress in hopes of finding Brad, who she has been separated from for a century.
Heldens said the decision to cut the season off here was for the “gut punch.”
“You see that girl who you met with those kids and she’s doing the arm wrestling — and you see that little girl come up standing on that desert plan with her bow and arrow, looking so fierce with those braids. And you just look at her face and go, ‘Oh my God, she’s been through so much, I wonder what happened to her,’” she said. “There was just something super emotional about that gut punch.”
And it certainly was a shock to find out Amy has been looking for Brad for decades, after running away out of fear he would not forgive her for murdering two people who were trying to kill him once he became infected with the virus and giving him the only sample of the antidote in existence.
But not to worry, because the agent and some other Season 1 characters will join Amy if the show is renewed for a second season, even though not all of them made it into the future in the Justin Cronin novels on which the series is based.
“Yeah, that’s the point of spending a whole season at Project NOAH — that we’re investing in these characters and seeing what makes them tick and we’re seeing who is responsible for what. And we’re gonna let more people live than lived in the books,” Heldens said. “Like, what has not entirely been decided — I mean, there was certainly some hints, like you said, about some people got the virus, you know, Richards is tied to Babcock and he’s kind of her Renfield. But yeah, I mean, I think television is about characters. You watch TV ’cause you are invested in the characters and you are gonna be able to follow some of those people into the future — but not everybody!”
OK, so who are the new characters we’ll be meeting, then?
“Well, [Amy] is on her way to the Colony, so we’re going to introduce some fan favorites from the Colony,” Heldens said, referring to a location from the Cronin books. “There are the characters Peter, and Alicia, and Sarah, and Michael. And you’re gonna meet those people for sure. And we’re just gonna let her narrative converge. But I guess the difference is we are letting a few people from the present tense timeline survive. And I think the reason we came… you know, you only see Amy at the end is ’cause it just seemed right to start with her and finish with her.”