The Flight Attendant bosses break down season 2 premiere mysteries and tease what's next
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Warning: This article contains spoilers for the first two episodes of The Flight Attendant season 2.
Cassie Bowden can stop drinking, move across the country, find a nice guy, and start a new job — but she cannot escape trouble. It's kind of her thing.
In the first two episodes of The Flight Attendant season 2, Cassie (Kaley Cuoco) has already walked into another international mystery, complete with bloody wigs and massive explosions, and things are just getting started. As she works on her sobriety, she also has to deal with her duties as a CIA operative… and the fact that a very questionable couple just moved in across from her.
EW spoke with showrunners Steve Yockey and Natalie Chaidez about those first episodes and what's to come in the rest of the second season.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Heading into season 2, were you able to sit down and really evaluate what worked and didn't in season 1? What did you want to dive into more with a this time?
STEVE YOCKEY: Yeah, of course. Natalie's new this season, so she was fresh eyes. I knew right off the bat when they said they wanted another eight episodes that we'd do what we'd always planned to do, which is another story with a beginning, middle, and an end. I was particularly obsessed with the idea of maintaining the mind palace in some form and continuing the emotional journeys for our characters because you're going to have a whole new mystery, but those emotional journeys are the grounding force of the show. I was really interested in exploring the idea of Cassie in recovery and what a rocky road that can be. And then Natalie came in and had this idea for doubles.
NATALIE CHAIDEZ: So doubles really came about from thinking about what made season 1 work, and that was really that it was a psychological mystery at the heart of it. I was thinking about Cassie's character and her discovery and admission of this other part of herself, this alcoholic part. That led to the idea of doubles, which then of course became a theme this season as well as part of the plot, and Steve took and made into this crazy multiverse in the mind-verse.
Julia Terjung/HBO Max Kaley Cuoco (and Kaley Cuoco) on 'The Flight Attendant'
YOCKEY: I do tend to take very good ideas and just shred them into weird things. [Laughs] The hardest part of doing a season 2 of this show is, what is the emotional damage that Cassie is unpacking? We can't just traumatize her over and over again; we're trying to work through her actual growth as a character, so the mind palace was the biggest question mark, and Natalie came in with the idea of doubling, and [executive producer] Sarah Schechter was like, "If she's going to be dealing with alcoholism, she should be in there talking to herself." That fit with the doubling, and I was like, "Okay, why not do like five?" So there's a lot of Cassie in this season.
How would you say Cassie is fairing after the first two episodes?
YOCKEY: By the end of the second episode, Cassie's feeling a little bit defeated and a lot scared because she really, really wanted Grace [Mae Martin] to be the bad guy, because that's an answer. So she's feeling a little helpless, and she channels that energy of needing to do something into a really hard left turn and decides to head for Iceland.
Is Cassie getting better at handling any of this?
YOCKEY: I guess it depends if you listen to Cassie. In the first two episodes, she sure is telling everyone that she's better at handling it. I think part of the ride of the season is finding out exactly how true that is.
What's going on with Megan (Rosie Perez), and when will we start to get those answers?
CHAIDEZ: Megan has been on the run since the end of season 1. She's in a mysterious place that we've sort of glimpsed in the first episode, and we're quickly going to discover one of the places she's been hiding out.
YOCKEY: Yeah, you're not going to have to wait very long at all. Episode 3 is particularly bananas, in a good way.
You all mentioned Grace earlier. We now know she wasn't who Cassie thought, but are we done with the Grace mystery or is there more to that as the season goes on?
CHAIDEZ: We will see more of Grace as the season continues, because we love Mae Martin and we love their relationship as Cassie's cool new friend. We love that and we will revisit it.
YOCKEY: Also we introduced a character that has some really fascinating hobbies.
Jennifer Rose Clasen/HBO Max Mae Martin on 'The Flight Attendant'
So much of the first two episodes are about Cassie's sobriety. Will that continue to play a major role as the mystery ramps up?
YOCKEY: Yeah, we're tracking it. Just like her alcoholism was fueled to become much worse than it already was by the events of season 1, these events in season 2 add extra stress on top of the fact that she's already done everything that you're not supposed to do in your first year of sobriety. She moved across the country, she started a new relationship with someone else in the program, she got a new job, so she's making all these big life moves and then all of a sudden she finds herself in another international intrigue, and that only increases the anxiety.
The real question: Can we trust Marco (Santiago Cabrera)?
CHAIDEZ: It's The Flight Attendant, and you can trust no one — even a super-hot, very sweet, responsible photographer.
How do you feel the season 2 mystery compares to season 1?
YOCKEY: It's a very different type of mystery. It's a different setup, it's a different situation, but also it takes a lot more turns than I'd say the mystery in season 1 did. We've got some fun surprises in store. What's important to us is that we never pull a reveal on the audience that they couldn't have gotten ahead of. We don't just want to shock people to do it. Characters acting out of character is the quickest way to make people turn off their TV. We want them to be able to trust us, just not any of our characters.
What can you say about Esteban (Joseph Julian Soria) and Gabrielle (Callie Hernandez)?
CHAIDEZ: They are a very happy couple. Gabrielle kind of wears the pants, and as you can see from the first episode, where they were doing some mysterious business with Cassie's phone, they have a very complicated, dangerous career.
YOCKEY: And they like designer labels. They love matching in designer labels. Expect more.
What's your favorite episode of season 2?
CHAIDEZ: I love [episode 5] because it's going to be a pivotal episode in Cassie's journey of sobriety and her recovery. It goes to such a great emotional place, and Kaley's just so incredible in it. That's definitely my favorite episode.
YOCKEY: I love all of the episodes for different reasons, but I think as we move deeper into post-production, I'm really falling in love with episode 7, which was written by our co-executive producer Jess Meyer. It's like one long panic attack and it has some of the most special imagery of the season in it, so I'm very excited about that.
New episodes of The Flight Attendant drop Thursdays on HBO Max.
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