Inside the Death and Other Details Season Finale, and the Creators’ Plans for Season 2
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The post Inside the Death and Other Details Season Finale, and the Creators’ Plans for Season 2 appeared first on Consequence.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 1 finale of Death and Other Details, “Chilling.”]
The most important thing to know about the season finale of Death and Other Details is that all the answers are planted, in some way, in the first episode of the Hulu murder mystery. “Technically, you could hit pause and see the ending, if you really, really knew where to do it,” series star Violett Beane tells Consequence. “That was really important to [the writers], to not create some solution to the mystery that didn’t make sense, where the audience would be going, ‘How is that possible?’ They really wanted to provide everything for you in the beginning.”
We’ll go ahead and spoil here one of the biggest clues. Or, rather, we’ll let co-creator Heidi Cole McAdams do it: “If you go back to Episode 1, you can see as Imogene is walking on the pool deck in her yellow bathing suit, and there’s That Derek filming the thing that ends up being the clue — and you can see Hilde Eriksen in the background.”
Hilde Eriksen, as we learn in the two-part season finale, is just one alias for Viktor Sams, the mysterious figure ultimately played by Linda Emond — who’s also revealed to be Imogen’s long-thought-dead mother Kira.
That’s just one of the show’s big secrets, though, amongst many planted by the writers over the course of the ten-episode season. “We told the audience that details matter,” co-creator Mike Weiss says. “And I think because we knew we were going to tell the audience that, we went a bit mad making this show. Hopefully, people delight in all of the many, many details that are strewn throughout the show. There are so many things. We went crazy.”
In a bit, we’ll get into a few of those details. But let’s go back a bit, to the project’s origins. McAdams and Weiss hadn’t written anything together before the two friends and veteran TV writers started kicking around the idea of, in Weiss’s words, “a classical murder mystery, but updated in every way for a 2024 audience.” Thus, they landed on the setting of a glamorous cruise, where a purposeless but brilliant young woman named Imogene Scott (Violet Beane) teams up with Rufus Cotesworth (Mandy Patinkin), the supposed World’s Greatest Detective, to solve an unexpected death that unlocks a whole new world of intrigue.
Updating a story like this for 2024, McAdams says, included leaning on modern technology as a source of clues, but a lot of what makes the series specific to this moment in time “comes down to who Imogene is a character. Rufus is modeled after the classic detectives, and Imogene is, ‘Okay, so what if a woman from today became the next world’s greatest detective?’ It all kind of starts and ends with her.”
In addition, Weiss says there are additional touches they built in which reflect the show’s askew take on the genre’s tropes. “Like, we really love the idea that midway through the season, you get to see Rufus Cosworth wobble, and he lets the audience in on something that he knows that only he could know, which is that there’s no such thing as the world’s greatest detective. And so, in a slightly post-modern way, we’re commenting on the fact that a lot of this is a put-on and an act that he’s playing, rather than that he was just born with these innate skills, like a walking supercomputer. We like the idea of messing with some of those conventions a little bit.”
The Color Blue, and Other Details
Beane says that while Weiss and McAdams had the full mystery worked out in advance, they didn’t reveal anything about it to the cast until after they’d shot the pilot. “And then when we got picked up, they had meetings with each of us individually where they told us our complete character’s arc, but they didn’t tell us anything about anybody else,” she says. “So you didn’t know, if you were in a scene with one of the other characters, if they’re lying to you or not, which I thought was pretty fun, but we knew where we were going.”
However, Beane did know who Viktor Sams was early on. “Linda does such an incredible job of oscillating between the two characters and keeping them both grounded but still having fun, which is sort of the tone of the whole show,” she says. “We are on a ship and everybody’s dying and it’s this crazy sort of thing, but the relationships that exist are very real, and so it was really fun seeing Linda tap in and out of that. I don’t think anybody would’ve seen that coming. I think she does such a great job separating the two.”
While the full extent of her role wasn’t part of the initial pitch, Linda Emond found out during her first meeting with the creators how extensive her involvement would be. “I was, as you can imagine, a bit taken aback because I realized, ‘Oh, they’re not asking me just to play one person. They’re asking me to play multiple people, basically,'” she tells Consequence.
Some actors working in television prefer not to know about twists to come in future episodes, and some very much prefer to know. Emond’s one of the latter, adding that “in this case, it was really necessary for me to know because, in navigating through the season, I knew from a story standpoint that I needed to have Hilde be Hilde, but I also needed to actually not draw too much attention to myself because I didn’t want eyes falling in my direction too much. Had I only been playing Hilde Eriksen, I would certainly have taken a different attack.”
Adds Emond, “When people start grasping at straws and looking at who it might be, to me that’s a sign of great success on Heidi and Mike’s part, that they have spread far and wide the tapestry of who might be a bad guy for sure.”
That tapestry, as mentioned, is a detailed one, and here are some of those aforementioned additional details. One that’s not so relevant to the actual mystery, but might be of interest to any fans of the Oregon punk rock scene, is something Weiss mentions: “The very first time that we meet young Imogene, when she’s being questioned by Rufus about her mother’s murder, she’s wearing a Wipers concert t-shirt, and then at the very end of the pilot, we cut to credits with a fantastic Wipers song called ‘Mystery.’ I just find all of that delightful, and hopefully some people picked up on it.”
The more significant element to notice, McAdams says, is that “we played a lot with the color blue. There isn’t any blue in the show other than water and sky at all in the beginning. Because the idea was that Kira, who drove a blue car and wore a blue scarf — when she died, blue was taken away from Imogene’s life. So the blue smoothie that Lawrence is drinking, that it turns out is poisoned by Viktor Sams, is a clue. Erickson is wearing a navy blue suit. She’s the only one dressed in blue in the whole show. She’s got blue anti-nausea wristbands on her wrists.”
Adds Weiss, “The file that the governor is carrying, which eventually gets messed with, that’s a Viktor Sams clue. All the Viktor Sams clues were this one shade of blue.”
“We made it a bright, vibrant blue that you can notice,” McAdams says, “And there have been people who have said, there’s something going on with the blue here. We wanted to tip to things like that.”
“Only a Couple of People Very, Very Close to Me Knew the Secrets”
Death and Other Details (Hulu)
Over the course of the season, McAdams and Weiss haven’t been closely monitoring internet chatter to see how people have reacting to these reveals; says Weiss, “I have two little boys at home and a loving wife — that’s where I get my validation. I’m not searching for it in the comments section.”
However, McAdams says, “we do have some writers on our staff who are much more engaged and maybe more desensitized than we are. So they’re going deep on the Reddit threads and all that stuff, and it sounds like, at least from what they’ve been telling us, that there are certain people that have figured out pieces of the puzzle, but I don’t know that there’s anybody that’s figured out every single thing.”
Also, Weiss adds, “There’s so much pressure on the big twist in a 10-episode story, right? On some level, no matter how good the twist is, is it gonna be enough to feel like a payoff for an audience that’s been watching for 10 hours? And so I hope that people also like the fact that there are some additional twists along the way, that it doesn’t all rise and fall with whether or not you like who Viktor Sams is. We tried really hard to create some other character-twisting moments in that final episode.”
One of those twists includes the final reveal that Anna Collier (Lauren Patten), Imogene’s childhood friend, was the one responsible for the death of Katherine (Jayne Atkinson), her own mother. “Was [Anna] driven to do it by Viktor Sams, on some meta level? Sure,” Weiss says. “But she did it and now there’s a fallout from that murder that we’re going to follow, if we’re lucky enough to get a second season.”
Emond says that she knows plenty of people personally who are watching the series, and “they’re loving the twists and turns, and only a couple of people very, very close to me knew the secrets. Most of the people that I know, they think I’m playing a Norwegian Interpol agent, and I have been anxious to tell them at times, but I have not for obvious reasons. I want them to enjoy the show as anyone, as anyone would, and have it twist and turn.”
No one Emond knows personally has gotten close to guessing, though she says that “I’ve been delighted to see that some people are getting close, which I love because that’s the nature of a show like this. You want people to dig around, to be that invested, to try on different scenarios. That’s the great fun of a murder mystery.”
As for one of the show’s lower-priority twists, Beane says that even her friends have been debating the question of who Imogene should end up with romantically: ex-head of security Jules (Hugo Diego Garcia) or likely-to-be-incarcerated boat owner Sunil (Rahul Kohli). “Definitely people are leaning Jules. I think it is interesting that at first you just think Jules and Imogene are just, for lack of a better word, horny,” she laughs. “But then, you see that actually they’re a lot more similar than you think, and that they come from a similar background. I think that when Imogene and Jules first meet in the beginning, she’s not ready for any of that, so she just pushes it away — and maybe Sunil is kind of the door that she needed, to get to him. I don’t really know. We will see.”
“Maybe More Sherlock Holmes for Season 2”
Death and Other Details (Hulu)
As for the final corpse of the season finale, the creators confirm that whoever’s in pieces in the snow is currently a mystery — one that would theoretically be solved by a second season. The creators wouldn’t confirm that a second season would take place in the snowy scenery of the finale, though: “It’ll just be different from a boat,” Weiss says. “It’ll be a totally different, hopefully immersive world that we can drop an audience into. We like the idea of an elegant backdrop within which to tell a classical but contemporary murder mystery. Whether or not it all takes place in the snow, we have different ideas about that, but it’ll be someplace gorgeous that you’ll want to go and spend time in.”
Emond’s hoping for a second season for many reasons, but the biggest might be that “when you think about it, I never, in the entire first season, really had a chance to play my actual character. It would be really interesting for me to go to a Season 2, because you never really meet Viktor Sams. You meet Kira, or, more to the point, you meet Imogene’s mom. But in meeting Imogene’s mom, you’re meeting a woman who is relating to her daughter and trying to woo her daughter a bit. And that, of course, is very different than who Viktor Sams is. You never really meet Viktor Sams. And so I’m excited by the prospect on a personal level of having the chance to do that.”
Another important element of a Season 2, Beane says, is that while “Agatha Christie was the inspiration for Season 1, they’re thinking maybe more Sherlock Holmes for Season 2, and then following a model of all these different iconic detectives for each season.”
The most exciting aspect of a Sherlock Holmes-inspired Season 2 for the writers is what it would mean for another character. “I think we’re both really excited about seeing what happens to Anna, post-killing her mom and being indebted to Viktor Sams,” McAdams says.
“Yeah,” agrees Weiss. “If Imogene is meant to be our Sherlock Holmes, what does it look like to create our Moriarty, but in front of the audience’s very eyes?”
It’s all a lot, but Weiss says “I’d love to work on [the show] for the next 40 years. That would be great. The idea is a season-long coming of age story in Season 1 where Imogene goes from a girl who is drifting to [having found] her true calling — that she is meant to be the world’s next greatest detective. So when we meet her in Season 2, she knows who she is much more clearly. What does that look like as a jumping-off point for a season-long personal story?”
Also, Weiss adds, “And by the end, as you can see, she’s put together a little bit of a mystery-solving squad with her, some of these new friends that she’s made along the way.”
Exploring that dynamic also has Beane excited for a second season, since “everybody has their strong suits and the things that they bring to the team, which is really, really fun.”
Continues Beele, “I really do see this first season as like an introduction. And I think I would just be so grateful to be able to continue the journey.”
The first season of Death and Other Details is streaming now on Hulu. New subscribers can get a 30-day trial by signing up here.
Inside the Death and Other Details Season Finale, and the Creators’ Plans for Season 2
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