PRODIGAL SON Bosses Break Down the Fall Finale Twists

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Monday, December 2 episode of PRODIGAL SON.]

PRODIGAL SON’s Bright (Tom Payne) search to track down the Junkyard Killer (Michael Raymond-James) took a dangerous turn in the fall finale, “Silent Night.”

With the help of a retired cop, Shannon (Sean Pertwee), who was once very close to catching Martin’s (Michael Sheen) The Surgeon, Bright was able to track down the former home father’s former friend—whose real name was John Watkins.

Luckily for Shannon and Bright, John’s grandmother lived there, and she welcomed the men in with open arms, gushing about her “sweet grandson.” Unfortunately for the duo, John’s grandmother knew the truth and clued him in that they were there…which led to John killing Shannon while Bright went to snoop, and Bright ultimately being knocked out and kidnapped.

So what comes next? PRODIGAL SON bosses Sam Sklaver and Chris Fedak tease what’s ahead…

Malcolm has been taken, and John seems pretty confident they’re going somewhere where they won’t be found. What comes next?
Chris Fedak: It is going to be one of the most intense hours of television you’ve seen.
Sam Sklaver: It’s really scary.
Fedak: It’s exciting and thrilling. It’s directed by our producing director Adam Kane, and he’s fantastic. It really is a one-part psychological thriller, another part mouse trap of a movie. And then we have a not too unsubtle of a reference to THE SHINING. So it’s going to be one of our craziest episodes yet, and definitely our most intense.

Bright is someone who has people who care about him in basically all corners of the show’s world–law enforcement, prison, media, and a wealthy family. How different will the responses to his kidnapping be?
Fedak: It’s all hands on deck. The other thing that’s really exciting for us is that Michael [Sheen’s Martin] plays such a big part in episode 11. This is a little bit of a spoiler, but [the storyline] also give us an opportunity to put Michael Sheen and Lou Diamond Phillips into the same scene.
Sklaver: We’ve been waiting so long to get other people with Michael. We were very lucky enough in episode 7 where we got to bring Halston [Sage’s Ainsley] back in. We got to have Bellamy [Young’s Jessica] visit him in in episode 3. We’ve just been dying for the right situation for Gil Arroyo to visit his old friend Dr. Whitly. When their surrogate son and their real son gets kidnapped, it’s a pretty good time to meet your old nemesis. So really, the crux of the episode is the two of them; it’s amazing. We wrote it, we shot it, we edited it, and, still, every time I watch it, I’m just amazed that it happened.

Things didn’t end so well for Shannon, but this is a show that really utilizes flashbacks and plays with memories and time. Will we be seeing Sean Pertwee back again as Shannon in any capacity?
Fedak: We’d love to bring him back and put him into the flashbacks. Love to. I think that that’s the neat thing about the show: it lives between two times. And now with the back nine [order] we have more opportunities to go back to the 1990s. We go back to when these characters met, when they were young. And with someone like Sean, it’s great to kind him bring him back into that world and see how close he may have gotten to Martin Whitly back then. It’s a well that we were excited to go back tp. We really, just now, scratching the surface of it. So if we were so lucky, and he was available, we’d love to have him back.

Jessica has thrown a little bit of a bomb into kind of the investigation into the girl in the box by going to the press to try and appeal to the public for information—especially since that kind of life-changing money could bring out a lot of false leads. How will that ripple out later in the season?
Fedak: I would say that no good deed goes unpunished.
Sklaver: Yes, Jessica is is literally opening up the floodgates, like you said. Good stuff can get in through the floodgates and bad stuff can get in through the floodgates—and both of those things will. She has the right mission in mind, which is she needs to get Martin out of this cushy psychiatric facility. And we are going to explain in upcoming episodes how that all worked out [to even get him in there]. Jessica needs to put Martin away and sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures. This is going to lead to more than a little trouble for Jessica as we go on in season one.

Will Gil and Malcolm view this as a betrayal of their trust?
Fedak: It will definitely have an impact on it. The kidnapping of Bright will be the focus of the [first] episode [back].

But I think it is understandable that Jessica wants to do something. She wants to be there for her son and to believe him, because she wasn’t there for him for all those years. And so I think she wants to do good and to help—and she has means that the police don’t have. I think Sam and I would both agree that there’s definitely a downside to what she does and we’re going to explore that. But we are also exploring that there’s an upside to it as well. And Jessica really is an impressive person on her own: she’s smart, and she is going to get things done. When you have Bellamy [on your show], we just want to write to her. Exploring a character like this—and how confident she is—is definitely a part of the back half of the season.

Looking ahead to the 2020 episodes, what has you most excited?
Sklaver: It’s funny only because [as we’re speaking on November 25], right now I’m sitting in a trailer as we’re about to do a big explosion. I’m always very proud of big explosions! We’re prepping our episode 13 right now that’s going to air on the Monday after the Super Bowl. And we are doing everything. [Laughs.] It is our biggest, baddest, craziest episode yet.

PRODIGAL SON, Mondays, 9/8c, Fox

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• PRODIGAL SON: Lou Diamond Phillips on Gil’s Paternal Relationship with the Team, ‘Complex’ History with Jessica
• PRODIGAL SON: Fox Picks Up Full First Season
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• PRODIGAL SON Cast Teases the New Fox Drama
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