Note: The following interview has been very lightly edited for length and clarity. So if you, like me, are reeling over everything that just didn’t happen in Bristol Cove, read on! Thankfully, Wald and Whitesell were ready to take some time out of their first week on set for Season Three to hop on the phone and help make sense of the wild hour they just left us with.
Well fuck me, I typed, as the shot cut back from Maddy (Fola Evans-Akingbola), bleeding out in a pitch-black forest while on the run following the worldwide reveal of the mermaids’ secret, to Ben (Alex Roe), underwater, staring at overzealous journalist Ian Sutton (Luc Roderique) through the window of his crashed and fully submerged SUV and deciding not to save him after all. And yet, five minutes before the episode was over, the furious notes I was taking in preparation to talk to Eric Wald (co-creator/EP) and Emily Whitesell (EP) for this debrief: Did you model the hybrid checkpoints and detention centers off of those currently on America’s southern border? How did you determine which side of the moral line each player would fall on? HOW DARE, XANDER, HOW DARE?-came crashing to a self-owning halt.