THE RESORT Post-Mortem: Andy Siara on Alex’s Trouble, the Tweak He Made to Episode 5, and the Perks of Rewatching the Show

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Thursday, August 11 episode of THE RESORT.]

Noah (William Jackson Harper) and Emma’s (Cristin Milioti) investigation may have finally taken a real step forward on the Thursday, August 11 episode of THE RESORT.

With Luna (Gabriela Cartol) and Baltasar (Luis Gerardo Méndez) now working with them to figure out what the heck happened 15 years ago, the duo were absolutely flabbergasted to learn that Emma had found the phone…and did not investigate her surrounding area. (In her defense, she had just been in an accident, but still…)

The quartet went out to search the area, and Noah found another device. But they weren’t the only ones in the jungle. In 2007, Alex (Ben Sinclair)—who was, in theory, intending to help Sam (Skyler Gisondo) and Violet (Nina Bloomgarden), before he got distracted and ran off—ran through the jungle, scratched his ear, and seemingly planted the phone that Emma found that kicked off the investigation.

So what the heck comes next? THE RESORT executive producer

Emma and Noah’s team is expanded this week when Luna and Baltasar join in their search about what happened in 2007. How did adding to the investigating team impact the dynamic you were able to play with?
It’s the point I was like looking forward to most of the show—and I think we talked about it before, how the first three episodes are all about setting up this villain or these villains, because that’s how we have been trained to think. And then, nope, these are the good guys and we’re going to give you the answers to like 95% of the questions that have been bubbling up by the end of episode 4. And then for this whole back half, it’s let’s change up the team. And if we’re looking at it zoomed out and in this more metaphorical sense, here’s a couple who needs to go to marriage counseling, so throw in a marriage counselor.

And that was a frame or a lens I looked at it through: here’s some marriage counselors to force these two to look inward rather than outward. And they kind of represent these divergent paths that happened based on the events of the hurricane in 2007 and stuff, how this thing affected both Luna and Baltasar’s lives and their paths up to this point.

Since Baltasar and Luna are new to what Emma and Noah have been investigating, they get to be the audience voice for a moment, and there’s a fun scene where they’re like, “What else did you find? You didn’t go back to where you found the phone?” What was the delicate balance like in crafting that scene so it’s funny, but pointed, while also not detracting from the work Emma and Noah have done?
Yeah, it’s tough. Because definitely that was part of the thing in the writers’ room. I was saying, “They would go back to the spot.” I would get in little debates with the other writers and they’re like, “But what are they going to do there?” And I’m like, “That’s what you would do, though. They need to go back there.”

There’s several drafts of episode 2, actually, written where they go back there right away. But it’s right: What are they gonna do? They’re looking around there and have no clue what they’re looking for. Everything happens in such a condensed time frame, so that was like pretty much two days ago that they found the phone. So maybe they were eventually going to get to it.

That balance is tough, because on the one hand, I want to believe them that they wouldn’t go back there. While on the other—and this is where Luis Méndez is just such a gem of an actor—his reaction to that is very much like a spoiled rich kid reaction. He’s been obsessing over this thing for 15 years, and it’s almost like the attention is taken off of their weakness as detectives and put more on Baltasar and his mini-explosion.

The episode reveals that Noah and Emma lost a daughter—who Noah briefly got to meet, while Emma didn’t. How will that loss play into the rest of the season, and how much should fans be going back to reexamine their relationship with the awareness of that grief?
It’s a big part of the series. I would hope that people would go back and watch things through a new lens, because I love rewatching; I love things that I can go back and rewatch, now, and understand more.

We tell episode 4 and 5 and 6 in a different kind of way than we did 1-3. So those were kind of designed to be things that you kind of need to watch a few times to understand. But then on a whole, though, I’ve always been a fan of things that will reward the viewer on a second or third or fourth watch. At the same time, it’s been a long time since I’ve rewatched a TV show. And I think THE SOPRANOS is one of the maybe very few shows that I’ve watched more than once. I know that I can’t ask that much of an audience. And so they don’t need to watch to rewatch anything, but if they did…

To me…I didn’t want to play it as a reveal, necessarily. However, I understand that it kind of is that. [In] the very beginning, one of the first lines of the show, one of the first questions that Luna asks when they’re getting the picture taken at the resort is, “You have any kids?” And Emma says, “That ship has sailed.” Five minutes later, we have a very sad song about memory and time, and we see a C-section scar.

I understand that people miss those. But on a rewatch, I think you can kind of see those things have already been seeded in there and then every interaction is informed by that loss. Because as much as it can be a thing that one can try to forget and move past and and say that it doesn’t mean anything, it’s caused their lives to change drastically.

Then for the coming episodes, it’s a piece of information that hopefully helps give a little more insight into what Emma’s looking for. Some of the things she says in episode 1, especially in that final scene, when they’re at breakfast, I feel like it kind of informs that.

With Alex, we’ve been getting a lot of ear visuals and it certainly seems like he just missed crossing paths with Emma in present time and things aren’t exactly happening in a linear fashion. What can you share about that final moment, how time is working, and what comes next?
The train doesn’t stop moving forward after this. There are some people on the show—editors and producers—who were in post[production] on that episode, and I asked what they thought was going on here at the end of episode 5. There was a little confusion there, and it was different than the intended things. So I put some things in there [now] to make it, to me, even a little too obvious what’s going on.

This is what I told them and what I told my dad, because he watched it and was confused, but now he gets it after he watched it like five times: Episode 4 gives you some answers to questions that you didn’t realize you’re asking yet. And the end of 5, I think poses the question that episode 4 has the answers to, of what Alex is doing there, what’s going on there? And then if it’s not clear enough, the first couple scenes of episode 6, it’s there. And to me—and this is probably going to be the disappointing part—is the Alex side of it all, to me it’s a very closed, very complete chapter by the top of episode 6. But then the train keeps moving forward, because there’s two missing kids or two kids who disappeared that we need some answers to.

Given you got some incorrect theories as you were making the show, what has been your favorite completely wrong theory you’ve encountered so far?
[Laughs.] I’m very impressed by some of the reads and some of the theories that have popped up. And I don’t ever want to say something is totally wrong, because to me some of the fun of just watching a weekly show is exactly that. It’s what I’ve missed in in TV recently, where everything is so bingeable now, and we watch everything at once. I missed the days where I would have to like sit with that for a week. “What was that? What is going on here?” And then the amount of MAD MEN theories that would pop up after each episode…they were fun rabbit holes to go down. Most of the time they were wrong, but I enjoyed reading so many of those at the time, because it just like it kept me leaning in more to the show.

I am a fan of things where you can develop the week in between, and the rewatching, and analyzing can reward that viewer, in a way. It just giving them something to do. So to your question, not[hing] yet, but I want to find a list of what those theories are. I’ve seen little bits and pieces of things, here and there.

To quickly go back to the 2007 era, what can you tease about what’s in store for Sam and Violet next week?
We have left Sam and Violet on the side of the road. It’s later in the day…they’ve probably been driving for a couple hours, and they may or may not be pretty close to the author’s house, where they were initially going with Alex. But then Alex realized what he needed to do in his kind of moment of cosmic harmony and left them. But then, of course, his ear itched and he scratched, and it all kind of all kind of reset for him in a way. And we see in episode 4, we see him crash into the sign. That’s where he goes after he leaves the phones there. So he doesn’t go and pick up the kids. That’s what I can tease about that: They’re close to the house.

THE RESORT, Thursdays, Peacock

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