Note: This story contains spoilers from “Wednesday” Season 2 through Episode 4, “If These Woes Could Talk.”
A hungry zombie, a Hyde monster, killer birds, even Uncle Fester — “Wednesday” Season 2 unleashed all kinds of mayhem in the midseason finale, titled “If These Woes Could Talk,” which brought the four-episode Part 1 to a close.
As Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) closed in on the mystery of the Aviary murderer, she got some assistance from the Addams Family, calling in Uncle Fester (Fred Armisen), the perfect person to infiltrate a psychiatric ward. She also got some vital info from Grandmama Hester Frump (Joanna Lumley) that helped her solve the mystery.
The episode also brought back Season 1’s big bad, Laurel Gates, aka Marilyn Thornhill (Christina Ricci), Tyler’s master who masqueraded as a professor at Nevermore. And speaking of which, Wednesday had a tense, violent standoff with her former beau, Tyler (Hunter Doohan), leaving things on a heck of a cliffhanger (and leaving Wednesday on the brink of death) — and TheWrap unpacked it all with series creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar.
The idea of a two-part season had already been discussed when Gough and Millar started breaking Season 2 in the writers’ room, which allowed them to build in a midseason cliffhanger from the beginning.
It wasn’t too much of a stretch from the format they followed in the first season, which similarly left Wednesday at a low point after Eugene was attacked, but for Season 2, they leaned in. “We always wanted to have a big turn there in the back of our heads,” Gough told TheWrap, “knowing if they did divide the two blocks, we wanted to have a very strong cliffhanger going out so that would drive you to come back.”
“We knew we couldn’t go back to just doing another closed, cards down, murder mystery going all the way to the end,” he added. “We wanted to give the first block of episodes a feeling of completion, but now you’ve opened the door to something else.”
LOIS and the Avian
Indeed, Episode 4 ties up much of the mystery that Wednesday spent the first half of Season 2 investigating. The deadly Avian turned out to be Dr. Fairburn’s (Thandiwe Newton) seemingly sweet assistant Judi (Heather Matarazzo), daughter of a former normie Nevermore professor, Augustus Stonehearst, who went on to run the Willow Hill psychiatric facility. She used to be a normie too, but through her father’s experiments, she became a powerful outsider capable of commanding birds … and killing with them.
What’s more, it turns out LOIS wasn’t a person but an acronym for the horrible secret hiding in the basement of Willow Hill: Longterm Outcast Integration Study. In short, Judi has been faking the deaths of Outsider patients and experimenting on them. That’s what Sheriff Galpin (Jamie McShane) found out, and that’s what he was afraid would happen to his son Tyler after he was locked up in the institution. Dr. Fairburn was just the smiling face of Judi’s horrific operation. Speaking of Dr. Fairburn, the doctor wound up zombie chow for Slurp, who seems to be turning more human the more people he eats. After he dines on Fairburn, Slurp turns to the elderly Augustus Stonehearst and calls him “Old Friend.”
As for Judi, last we saw her, she was fleeing, but it certainly doesn’t seem like Wednesday is anywhere near done with the horrors of Willow Hill.
A Hyde without a master
Because the action-packed midseason finale didn’t just tie up a lot of mystery, it set the stage for what’s to come in the second half of the season: perhaps most worrying of which is the now fully unchained and recently escaped Tyler.
Ricci’s Laurel Gates made a surprise return at the top of the episode, transferring into Willow Hill with the aim of getting closer to Tyler again. She’s completely confident that their time apart hasn’t lessened his bond to the Hyde she “groomed” (her own shameless words), but boy does she misread that situation. Tyler gives her a head start, but all the same, the Hyde stabs her through the side with his massive claws, seemingly killing her.
That means the show isn’t just saying goodbye to its Season 1 villain, but to Ricci, who brings Addams Family legacy to the production.
“It wasn’t something we did lightly,” Gough said, “We went around and around on it for a while. But then we ultimately felt, if we wanted to take the Tyler story to the next level, that dynamic had been played out.”
What happens next is a true mystery. There’s very little known about Hydes, that’s part of what made it such a fearsome monster, and the world’s foremost expert just got killed. Before she died, Laurel did make it clear that a Hyde who kills his master is doomed. “What happens now?” Gough teased. “Because, you know, we’ve set up that a male Hyde without a master … it’s not a good thing, and it doesn’t necessarily end well.”
“When that happens is unexpected, and it makes you remember and appreciate that people die in this world, that the stakes are very real,” Millar added. “You want to play those cards carefully, but we will. We definitely want to play them.”
Gough also said the decision to kill Laurel “is definitely an act that has a big impact on” Tyler going forward.
“We set up that they’ve been separated for all of these months, and he’s sort of had time to think and reflect, and realize that [the] whole relationship, which was supposed to “set him free,” has landed him literally in an underground bunker, ostensibly for the rest of his life,” Gough said. “He felt betrayed and manipulated.”
According to Millar, bringing Tyler and the Hyde back to center stage also gives them another way into their title character. “It not only speaks to Tyler’s character, but also to Wednesday’s. Why was she attracted to him? What was it about him that drew her to her first romance?”
“It’s something that, I think for her, is a cautionary tale, and something that haunts her as well,” Millar said. “She’s someone who always considers her decisions to be carefully considered, and yet in this moment, she sort of lost control, and her emotions got the better of her and, because of that, she was fooled.”
“That’s like the cardinal sin,” he added. “That she was fooled by somebody and deceived in that way, emotionally deceived. But then there’s also a part of her that is like, ‘Well, maybe that is who I’m destined to be with, that maybe there is some sort of innate attraction to darkness. Is that my destiny?’ “
“Those things feed the character of Wednesday and Tyler’s relationship, which we really think as an important element of the show,” Millar said. “You don’t see them on screen a lot this season, but when you do, it’s always really impactful.”
Mother knows best
Wednesday spent Season 1 reluctantly stepping into her mother’s shadow at Nevermore, but Morticia’s (Catherine Zeta-Jones) presence is even more acutely felt in Season 2 after she agrees to chair the gala.
“From Season 2, we realized there was so much more of that mother-daughter relationship to mine,” Gough said. In Season 2, Wednesday pushes the limits of her powers with help from Goody’s book, and Morticia “becomes a little bit of like a helicopter parent, which just makes Wednesday want to push away even more.”
And that’s before Morticia’s own mother, Grandmama Hester Frump becomes a “third axis” in the Addams Family mother-daughter disputes. That comes to a head when Hester not only gets Wednesday in on the family business without consulting Morticia first, but tries to blackmail Morticia into giving Wednesday Goody’s spelbook back. Instead, Morticia throws it right into the fire and says, “My family is non-negotiable.”
“People love the Addams Family, but the great thing for us as writers is there’s not really mythology for the Addams Family. So we have this blank canvas that we’re able to fill in. And you know, even though they’re a family that loves each other, doesn’t mean that they don’t have their own family politics and family dynamics that give you fertile ground for drama.”
Wednesday’s new low
One thing Morticia was unequivocally right about is that Wednesday’s headstrong insistence on doing things her way made things worse, something she even admits to herself after her confrontation with Tyler leaves her on the brink of death.
According to Gough, a character like Wednesday has to be the “architect of her own demise,” and when she hits a low point, “she gets there, frankly, the hard way.” And that’s exactly what we see in the finale’s final moments. “She’s never somebody who really is going to take advice from anybody,” he added. “If there is a harder path in life, she’s going to ultimately take it.”
The finale moment is reminiscent of another low point for the character from Season 1, Gough explains — her “breakup” with Enid after the bubbly werewolf moved out of their shared dorm. “You see Wednesday for the first time, in that moment, realize that was not really the way to go. She just thought she could just manipulate people, like chess pieces.”
In Season 2, he says, “This case, her mother’s been warning her the whole time, ‘You’re just going to make things worse.’ And lo and behold, she made things a lot worse.”
“When she hits those lows, she’s not there because she was tricked or duped. She’s there because she made a choice, not a good one always, and just went there herself. So I think that’s the thing she’s she’s always driving her own narrative, good or bad.”
We’ll see where Wednesday drives the narrative next when Season 2 returns with four more episodes Sept. 3 on Netflix.
