HUMAN TARGET: Matt Miller Teases the Chance-Ilsa Relationship and the Season Finale

After nearly a season of dancing around each other, HUMAN TARGET’s Chance and Ilsa shared a kiss to close out last week’s episode.

With the season finale airing Wednesday night on Fox, I chatted with HUMAN TARGET showrunner Matt Miller about the fallout from the Ilsa-Chance kiss, where the duo go from there, the “nefarious, dangerous plot” that threatens the entire team and whether the season will end on a cliffhanger…

When we last left off with HUMAN TARGET, Chance and Ilsa had kissed. Is it safe to say that will be addressed in the season finale?
Matt Miller: Yes, that will certainly be something that we’re going to deal with in the finale. Basically, the whole finale on some level or another is about that, but it’s masked behind a very large bad guy — a nefarious, dangerous plot, which is hopefully the most formidable opponent these guys have gone up against in two seasons. And so what happens is that Ilsa and Chance desperately need to try to come together and discuss or work out what happened in the last episode, but they can’t because of all the circumstances that come up.

And they’re choosing to deal with it in different way — Chance, because he’s a guy that’s not that comfortable with his emotions, has chosen to ignore the situation as if it never happened. Ilsa, because of who she is and what she’s gone through with her husband and all of that, has chosen to deal with the situation by moving back to London. She’s just going to take off and go handle her charitable organizations there. And in this episode, it’s both of their desire to not conflict those things and having it have to play out in a very big, epic, action sequence kind of way.

And the big enemy they’re facing in the finale has a connection to Ilsa’s dead husband, correct?
MM: Yeah. What happens is that Ilsa says, “I’m going to go back to London and not deal with this and what happened with Chance and what I’m feeling.” And since Chance is ignoring the whole thing, we have Winston, who is deeply suspicious that something has gone on between Chance and Ilsa, but he can’t quite put his finger on it. And what happens is the woman from the photograph, the mistress that Ilsa and Guerrero and whoever else has been quietly looking for, she ends up coming back into our world. And so that pulls our whole team [together] and makes Ilsa not able to leave for London. And it suddenly puts Chance and Ilsa on this mission to find out what these bigger, darker forces were behind the murder of Ilsa’s husband. And if in some way, Ilsa can move on from the murder of her husband, maybe that would make her a little bit more emotionally available to start a new relationship with Chance.

It sort of feels like in order for them to pursue their relationship, two things have to happen: one is Ilsa has to be able put her husband behind her in order to have a new relationship with Chance. In order for Chance to have a relationship with Ilsa, he has to be able to put behind a whole bunch of [his] past, all the things he’s done in his life and be able to open up and emote and make [himself] emotionally available to have a real relationship with a real woman.

In season one, he had that relationship at the end of the season with Katherine — that was really a short-lived, met her, thought she was great, but suddenly she was out of his life. This is someone who has been in his life for a long time — for at least a year — and you know, has proven herself on many levels to be someone he actually knows and actually is compatible with and could be something real. So for him to take that step forward and have a relationship with her would be leaving himself exposed — and this is a guy that, as you know, is professionally very dark.

When we talked in the beginning of the season, one of the things you mentioned you wanted to inject into the show was romance. Did you intend to have the Chance-Ilsa relationship turn romantic all along or were you just fortunate the actors had chemistry and it made sense for the series to go there?
MM: I think it was a combination of the two. I think at the beginning of the season when we were thinking of these ideas, we knew we wanted something to click romantically with Ilsa and for Chance — the whole season has sort of been about them coming to a place where they can be a little bit more emotionally available. And through the season it kind of evolved to such a place where he was more of a regular kind of human being. And we knew that we wanted to draw that arc out for him.

What ended up happening was that the Chance and Ilsa relationship proved to have quite a bit of chemistry [between] those two that we didn’t realize necessarily that we would have that. And if it wasn’t there between them, we would have had to have found that with a new female, bring a third character into it. You never know. You put this stuff in your head, but the Ames character came in and maybe she was going to be a romantic interest for Chance [if Ilsa hadn’t worked out]. But it ended up working out through the actors, through the writing, through the way the chemistry worked, Ames has become a little sister to the whole team and doesn’t feel any way romantically connected to them. So that sort of stuff you can think about, you can think it out, you can map it out, but ultimately you have to go with what’s working.

Understandable. So let’s talk about the rest of the team. Do they have any of their own storylines aside from Ilsa’s husband’s case?
MM: Yeah, well the idea was to try and make in this episode as much of the stuff as we had [from] the early part of the season come to fruition and come full circle. And so what happens is the whole team is involved in helping Ilsa find out who these people are and because of their relationship and their involvement in trying to protect Ilsa, they all end up with targets or bullseyes on their head halfway through the episode. So halfway through it, they’re all on the run. And they end up having to go on the lam, and Ames ends up on the lam with Guerrero. Which that combination of Ames and Guerrero proved to be our money this season with their constant bickering. They don’t end up getting very far — they were supposed to go to Mexico to lay low, but Ames’ constant talking into Guerrero’s ear makes him so crazy that he realizes he’d rather stay and die than spend another minute alone with Ames. So they end up getting back into the fray.

We also play the thread of Guerrero’s child — where the bad guys are trying to find pressure points on all of our characters, one of the things that they discover when they’re going through this is that little nugget that we planted a few episodes earlier in “Cool Hand Guerrero,” when we learned that Guerrero has a child. So they’re able to attempt to use that as leverage against Guerrero, which is not an advisable thing. We have a very satisfying conclusion to that [threat].

I can’t imagine Guerrero will react well to someone threatening his child…
MM: [Laughs] He does not react well. We’ve seen Guerrero handle people very unkindly that he didn’t even have an emotional connection to. If someone is actually targeting his child, he ratchets it up a notch. It may be my favorite shot of the season — there’s a shot in Act 5 of Guerrero handling his business with this character and a pretty cool song is playing. I won’t give away anything else, but it’s a pretty cool moment.

I cannot wait to see it. Can you say whether the season ends on a cliffhanger?
MM: No, it doesn’t. Season one ended very much with a cliffhanger with Winston being taken and the helicopter and a lot of things. My feeling is networks never pick you up [for the next season] based on a cliffhanger. If the ratings aren’t there or financially they don’t think your show works for the network or whatever reason, you’re not getting picked up. You can have your guy dangling in the air or any other thing happening and that would just be the end of it. If you’re not looking at it in the point of view of “we’re going to try and force their hand in some way to make them pick us up” and just go with what is the most satisfying conclusion or open-ended [finale that] sort of paves the way for season three — but in the same way feels like a satisfying ending to season two — that is hopefully what we have done by the end of the episode. I would classify it as more of an emotional cliffhanger as opposed to a person hanging from a cliff.

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Are you looking forward to HUMAN TARGET’s season finale tonight?

Make sure to check back with Give Me My Remote after the episode airs for more from our interview with Matt Miller!

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