‘The Resort’ Season Finale: Creator Andy Siara On Approaching Potential Second Season Like A Film Sequel, An Idea For A Nick Offerman-Led Spinoff, His Upcoming Andy Samberg Sci-Fi Project At Apple & More
SPOILER ALERT: The follow story contains details from the Season 1 finale of Peacock’s The Resort.
In today’s Season 1 finale of Peacock’s The Resort, a core relationship was mended, as long-separated family members were reunited and major mysteries resolved.
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Operating on multiple timelines, as was the case with past installments, the episode opens in flashback on teenagers Sam (Skyler Gisondo) and Violet (Nina Bloomgarden), who make their way down into the caverns of the enigmatic Pasaje as the hurricane at the center of the story hits, after falling asleep in the jungle. Inside the caves, they find waters that swiftly rise and trap them, with the pair for a moment seeming to have met their end.
Araya Doheny/WireImage
Our present-day timeline finds Emma (Cristin Milioti) and Noah (William Jackson Harper) venturing into the caves alongside Baltasar Frías (Luis Gerardo Méndez) and Murray (Nick Offerman), with the pairs ultimately finding two different tunnels into Pasaje’s interior and going their separate ways. Murray recounts to Baltasar the story of his globe-trotting adventures over the last 15 years — amidst an existential crisis, following his daughter Violet’s disappearance — with Baltasar then encountering and taming the yellow snake, symbolic of the family history he’s been running from.
Noah is at the same time boosting Emma up into a tight tunnel, where she gets stuck, before clawing her way to the other side. There, she finds a whirlpool with Sam and Violet’s seemingly dead bodies floating into it. As she looks into the water, she has a supernatural experience — presumably getting a glance at the daughter she’d lost at birth all those years ago, and had never before seen. We then learn that Sam and Violet are very much alive — and preserved in their teenage form — as Emma fishes the disoriented pair out.
Emma and Noah then exit Pasaje with Sam and Violet, reuniting the latter with Murray. Baltasar marvels at the kids who have “transcended time,” with Sam expressing his belief that he’d only been in the water for five minutes, before learning just how long he’s been away. While Sam has no memory of that period, Violet does recall encountering her late mother while submerged. Elsewhere, Noah asks Emma why she didn’t get in the water herself so that she could be with her daughter, with Emma responding that she didn’t want to lose 15 years with her husband.
After a helicopter comes to the group’s rescue, we cut to Baltasar at dinner with Luna. Wearing an embroidered jacket depicting silhouettes taking in a fireworks display, he hands Luna some papers and tells her that he plans on traveling to an ocean very far away.
Peacock
Ariel Kleiman directed The Resort‘s finale from a script by series creator Andy Siara. In conversation with Deadline ahead of its unveiling on Peacock, Siara discussed the thinking that informed the episode, the status of a second season for the show and how he would approach it, the untitled Apple sci-fi film that has reteamed the Palm Springs scribe with the Hulu/Neon film’s star Andy Samberg, and the personal experiences he’s “really leaning into” exploring in his writing now.
DEADLINE: What was the process like for you, in getting to The Resort‘s season finale? At what point did you fully lock in the story for Season 1?
ANDY SIARA: It started maybe eight years ago as a feature that was not very good, about a couple who goes down to a resort for their 10th anniversary. Then, they strike up this friendship with this younger kid who’s there on vacation with his parents, and that’s pretty much the only thing that’s similar from that original script. It didn’t work and I didn’t really show it to anybody, and just put it away, but then I kept coming back to it every year because there was something about the core idea of a couple trying to recapture a feeling of their past, to recapture their youth and try to figure out how they got to where they are in their marriage, 10 years in, all through a friendship with this younger kid. So, it was just taking that core emotional idea and setting it against the backdrop of a resort.
I kept dismantling and piecing together, dismantling and piecing together, and finally, I just gave up on it all. [Laughs] Then, maybe 2018 or so, right after my first daughter was born, we were moving and I was packing up the garage, and in an old box I found a couple of my old cell phones. They were like Nokia; I could never afford a Razr. But I popped open my main one and plugged it in, and it didn’t work. I swapped out the SIM card and put it into another old cell phone that worked, and I found like 400 old photos from my band days. I was in a band back in the 2007, 2008, 2009 era, and I just sat on this box and scrolled through all these photos and tried to piece back these memories of like, what happened right before and after I took this photo. I just took a stroll down memory lane, [in] this little nostalgia spiral. And next thing I know, a few hours had passed. The garage was still a mess and I hadn’t packed anything up, and I realized, Oh, yeah. You can spend a long time just obsessing over the past and living in these memories, and then you’re just losing time in the present.
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That is the entire show basically, in one sentence, the point of the show. So, I went back to that old script and was looking at both the script itself and then what inspired the script, all through this kind of nostalgic lens, and I just split up these characters over time and created a little mystery story within it. Then, I wrote this pilot and teamed up with Sam Esmail’s company and UCP, and then I wrote a longer series bible, which is very, very close to what the show is. That was at the end of 2019 and top of 2020, right before the world shut down. So, then the world shut down and we kind of just paused on it for a moment to see what was going to happen, and then we decided to take it out officially the following year. But I’d say it was end of 2019, top of 2020, that all of that was cracked, in a way.
DEADLINE: How much did your finale change over time? Were there major plot lines that you considered taking in a different direction, at one time or another?
SIARA: I would say that there were some little tweaks in there. It was always Emma crawling through this tight tunnel and getting stuck, or some version of that. When they go down there, it’s Murray, Noah and Baltasar, but it’s always like, Emma makes it to the end and finds the kids, and nothing had changed at all. Like, they’d been in there for five minutes, and 15 years had passed just outside of this room. The couple things that have changed was like…The first episode’s called “The Disappointment of Time,” which is kind of the running theme throughout the whole show, is “What is the disappointment of time?” My initial pitch was that she gets into this room and ultimately, as promised from the very beginning, it’s a disappointment. It’s a dead-end room and there’s nothing magical here.
I felt like going through this — actually doing the writing of the full show, and then watching Cristin bring it all to life — that was one of the things that did evolve over production, what that looks like in the room. I felt like the disappointing, dead-end cave room might have just been too much of a letdown, where I felt like we know what Emma wants when she goes down into the tunnel. We know what she’s ultimately hoping for. I felt like you needed to give her a glimpse of something, for lack of a better term, magical. And what she sees in there, it’s up to the viewer to decide, I guess. I mean, it’s kind of obvious that she sees something that she was looking for, but then has to ultimately make this choice of like, I can go live in this out-of-time world if I go into this water. I can go live in this nostalgia spiral. I can live in the memory, or a new memory. But in doing that, I see firsthand what could happen, where she sees the two kids floating there, and they have lost time. They have lost 15 years maybe not of their lives, but people on the outside have lost 15 years of them. So, rather than live in this thing that she’s been striving for the entire time, just giving her a glimpse of it and then make a decision to take a step back and pull the kids out, rather than going into it. I think that those tiny little turns in there, and then I guess the pool itself — this kind of slow-moving whirlpool — that was all evolving as we were in production even, and down to the very end, and even down to the edit, too, just making sure we’re hitting all those little beats properly.
DEADLINE: What more can you tell us about the work that went into building out the series’ world and its core mystery? I imagine it must have been fun to work through these kinds of challenges, at the writing stage.
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SIARA: It was definitely all very fun. But what’s interesting is [with] the mystery, at least I personally don’t feel like we leave any questions on the table. I could be wrong about that. [Laughs] But most of it is hit pretty on the nose…One of my favorite scenes of the whole show is actually the final scene where we’re just with Luna and Baltazar, where it’s like, “In case it’s not clear what happened, here’s what happened. It might look good on the surface, but actually if there is a message to the whole show, that’s it underlined right there.” Then, the other loose mysteries that are there, you know, I’m a big fan of the movies and shows where [it’s] like, we’re not going to get the underlying, explicit answer, but the answer is in there, if you want to just look at it. For example, how Alex knew in Episode 5 to leave the phones there, and how his whole thing works. I can pretty confidently say it is all in there, if people want to just go look for it. I don’t show like the flashback to explain anything with that, but it’s definitely all in there. And I think any of the other little mysteries that pop up that might seem unanswered, they’re definitely peppered in there, in a way that [I like], speaking solely as a viewer, [in the vein of] the things that I liked growing up. Any kind of show or movie that makes me want to watch it again, knowing that I have to watch it again in order to kind of crack it, that’s what I live for as an audience member. So, there are elements of all that within this, for sure.
DEADLINE: Could you clarify what we can take away from Baltasar’s final exchange with Luna, given his comment on heading off to “an ocean very far away?” What was the significance of the embroidered jacket he was last seen wearing?
SIARA: I think specifically for him, he looks at his years at the Oceana Vista as the best years of his life. That’s why Episode 4 is such an important turning point, [where we] start to get into what the show is about on a deeper level, through this wild tale of his years at the Oceana Vista. Then, all this stuff happens at the end of Episode 4 —the resort’s destroyed; his memories, his heyday, his high point of his life is destroyed. He obsesses over this over the next 15 years because he feels like if he can solve what happened here, then maybe he can restore those memories, restore the good feelings, the highs of his life. Then, at that campfire scene in Episode 7, it’s the Treasure of the Sierra Madre kind of thing where if the thing’s real, if the gold is real, if Pasaje is real, what are you going to do with it? If you can go to the past, you can go to the future?
Baltasar, just to make it clear, he had talked again about, he would like to go back to the past, but specifically to this night that he considers the best night of his life, which we saw a glimpse of in Episode 4, which was when Alex and Luna stole a bunch of fireworks and got stoned, and launched the fireworks by the pool of the Oceana Vista. He just wants to go back to that because it’s like, “Yeah, those are the good days.” Because the present kind of sucks and he can’t see a future for himself. Because he feels like he’s been running from this family, this snake that has haunted him his whole life. And then by the end of the whole story, he realizes, just like pretty much every other character in the show, that you can’t go back to the past. You can’t recapture this thing, but you don’t have to completely turn your back on it. You just incorporate it all into your present.
Peacock
I look at his final suit, and this back piece is that memory. It’s him, Alex and Luna watching the fireworks that one night, where you can commemorate a thing. You can get a picture of it, or a portrait of it, or a tattoo of it. What he does is, he’s taking the parts of his life that are his family stuff, the tailor skills, and he takes the parts of his life that are his high point, his heyday and the relationships that matter most, and then kind of merges it together. Then, now he can move forward into the present, having just accepted the thing of the past, I guess, rather than rejecting or obsessing over the thing of the past.
DEADLINE: To be clear then, the line about an “ocean far away” isn’t meant to suggest that Baltasar is headed for Pasaje?
SIARA: I guess that’s an avenue for a Season 2 thing. I decided to not show what was on that newspaper that he hands to Luna. In the world of answering all the mysteries, I guess that is one new mystery that is not answered, just because I felt like [it’s best to have] some questions left over, I guess. He shows her something that is a news article that hints at another mystery, where Baltasar is kind of like our… I mean, he’s, he’s a full-on memory detective now, I guess. One thing that I constantly talked about in the writers’ room was, and this is the reason that there is a Batman reference in Episode 3…And there’s little references actually throughout the entire show, tiny ones. But I’d say, Baltasar and Batman are very similar, in a way — a rich kid who was obsessed, who wants to become a detective, and has to basically face his fears in a dark cave. So, there’s a lens you can look through this whole first season as like Baltasar Begins.
DEADLINE: As you’ve noted, The Resort’s Season 1 finale ties up most loose ends. That being said, are you looking at a second season for the show? Do you have any updates, as to the potential for that?
SIARA: Yeah. The important thing to me was to close out the emotional arc of this season and these characters. I feel like Emma, Noah, Luna, Baltasar, Sam, Violet and Murray — like, the core seven there —all of their arcs are complete. They were all trying to recapture a feeling of their past, in a way, and they’re all on different degrees of commitment to that. Then, the final four that are going in there — Baltasar, Murray, Noah, Emma — they’re the ones that are most committed for their own reasons, but by the end, I feel like those are all complete.
So, I have ideas for a second season, for sure. But I look at it more like a sequel to a movie. Now that this has all happened, how do we take this forward, rather than continuing these same emotional arcs? As for will there be a second season, that’s up to Peacock. If they want one, I’m all for it, obviously. But we will see, so give them a call.
DEADLINE: So, should you make a second season, it would explore the same setting, but with a new set of characters?
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SIARA: TBD. All being discussed at the moment.
DEADLINE: Are there other projects you have in the works that you can speak to at this point?
SIARA: Yeah. There’s one, I want to say it was announced a year ago or whatever. There’s another thing with Andy Samberg that’s over at Apple, and it’s with 26 Keys and Red Hour producing. I’m working from a story [by] Raphael Bob-Waksberg, working very closely with Andy and Raphael. So, hopefully that moves forward. That’s a movie, and I have some other TV things that are in the works at the moment. But I’d say that’s the big one right now.
DEADLINE: What are your goals as you look ahead in your career? What kinds of projects are you looking to take on? And what are you most interested in examining, as a storyteller?
SIARA: I like going back and forth being TV and movies. It all kind of depends on the size of the story. For The Resort in particular, I always felt like to me, it was a little too big for how much ground I wanted to cover, a little too big for a movie. But it was never a show that I wanted to be a total ongoing…Like, there’s a thematic through line that I would like to pick up for a second season, and maybe a couple of the characters for sure. But I wanted to make sure that I was able to close the door at the end of this one with these characters’ stories. So, I guess the size of the story is kind of what dictates that. Whereas Palm Springs, I felt like that story is complete 85 minutes. But between The Resort and Palm Springs and this Apple one, I feel like marriages are properly explored now. [Laughs] I have two kids. Everything I’m doing now is really exploring what that is like, I guess. That’s the kind of stuff that I’m really leaning into. On top of that, I’m always excited by things that I find kind of unpredictable as I’m writing them, that can keep me on the edge of edge of my seat, so I don’t get bored working on it.
That’s where [there are] these sometimes-bigger tonal swings, as you see in this show. Like, we always had this idea of Murray’s character in there. When Nick Offerman came on board, the back half hadn’t totally been written yet. But I said “He’s going to come back, and we’re going to meet him at a bar as his phone’s ringing, and you’re going to first see this hat. And now, you are the guy who never left, because you could never truly move on from this terrible year of your life.” But it is one of the biggest swings we’ve taken because we crafted a whole 15-year adventure that if you want it. Or if Peacock ever wanted to do like a spin-off series, you can do maybe like a trilogy of Murray, Indiana Jones stories that just cover all that time of how he became that guy, how Baltasar saved his life, now four times. But those are all the things that I think I want to make sure are maintained in whatever I’m doing next, is that there’s still the fun, wild, chaotic side to it all, with big swings.
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