VAMPIRE ACADEMY Season 1 Finale Post-Mortem: Julie Plec and Marguerite MacIntyre Break Down the Love, Betrayal, and Twists in ‘Ascension’

[Warning: This post contains major spoilers for the first season finale of VAMPIRE ACADEMY.]

VAMPIRE ACADEMY’s first season came to twisty (and delightful) end as couples took big steps (forward and back), a new character officially came into power, and the series synced up to a key point in the books.

To help break down the biggest moments, VAMPIRE ACADEMY co-showrunners Julie Plec and Marguerite MacIntyre offered insight into “Ascension,” and a few teases of what could be coming in a potential season 2.

Siblings Andre (Jason Diaz) and Lissa (Daniela Nieves) reunite—only for things to take a tragic turn.

After spending all season thinking Andre had perished in a car wreck—and viewers only learning he was alive and being held by Tatiana (Anita-Joy Uwajeh) in the penultimate hour—Lissa was shocked to see her brother alive and well. But the reunion was very, very short-lived as he was brutally attacked and rushed away. The final moments of the finale revealed that Andre isn’t dead—he is now a Strigoi.

The move is one of the biggest swings of the series, so far, and something they had planned early in the show’s storyline brainstorming. “It was almost immediate,” Plec tells Give Me My Remote in the video above. “When you first start talking about shaping a season, one of the big questions that you pose to the room is, ‘What are our big twists going to be? What things could we put up on this board that our audience wouldn’t see coming?’ [For this show,] either because it wasn’t in the books or just because it’s unexpected. And I think Andre being alive was like week one [of planning]. And then Andre becoming Strigoi was a nice, ‘yes, and’ to that.”

“We had developed this character who was such a charismatic leader in his Moroi form,” she continues. “And so we thought, ‘Well, what kind of leader would he be in Strigoi form? Would he be the one that could mobilize these Strigoi? And if so, holy shit, what are we up against in future seasons? So it was a really exciting pitch that we got on board with right away and never strayed from the whole time.”

Having Lissa and Andre’s reunion be that brief, however, was something the writers debated. “I think we talked about both ways, but I was always for the shock of it,” MacIntyre says. “And that’s one of the reasons why I really, really wanted that episode 9 scene between Lissa and her brother, when he’s encouraging her, ‘Use the thing that you consider your worst problem to be your best asset.’ He’s in her mind, he’s always influencing her. And we’ve sort of seen what that relationship is—and not just the scary guy she sees when there’s darkness and all that. But the shock factor of it and also the cruelty of this system…what they’re up against could not be more evident than what that moment shows you.”

Tatiana finally gets her crown.

With mayhem surrounding them, Tatiana gets what she’s been after all season: she is unanimously named the queen by the council. And while viewers know she had been keeping Andre from his family, it could be just the start of what she’s got up her sleeve.

“Oh, she’s got so much to reveal,” Plec teases. “This woman has a lot going on and we have barely scratched the surface of her. She has a want that we don’t understand. She has a need that we have not yet introduced. She has a plan that is going to be very diabolical, but very intelligent. And she is going to be a very interesting character in season 2. We’re really going to get to peel back the onion layers on her.”

“And she’s also dropped hints along the way,” MacIntyre adds. “We’ve sort of breadcrumb trailed a lot of this stuff. And I’m excited because she’s been such a stone-cold villain for this season, that it will also kind of reveal more of who this person is underneath.”

In a possible season 2, knowing she’s up to shenanigans will also allow the show to live with Tatiana a bit more. “We can [show stories] from her point of view,” MacIntyre confirms. “We were almost never in Tatiana’s point of view [in season 1]; it was how she was affecting our other characters. And so there’s no reason now to not be in her point of view for her storylines in season 2.”

Lissa and Rose (Sisi Stringer) are on the run.

With Tatiana in power, her first move was to put a target on Lissa’s back: the new queen declared Lissa was wanted for questioning about the poisoning of Queen Marina (Pik-Sen Lim). To keep Lissa safe, she and Rose left the Dominion.

“A lot of people were confused, and maybe even a little thrown, when we decided not to start the series like the movie started or like the book started with the girls on the run,” Plec says. “And we, of course, knew the secret, which is that we were going to end the season with that. So I’m really excited. The big question when you’re breaking a run like that is how long can you keep them away from the school before you need to get them back?”

“And that, I think, will be our big struggle, because we want to show these two galavanting across Europe and living in this human world and having real life adventures, but we also know that you can’t keep them away from St. Vladimir’s forever,” she continues. “So our fun as writers in season 2 will be to figure out what that looks like. I’m dying to see them in the human world.”

This won’t be the first time the series took the characters to the human world—they briefly visited in episode 7, but the characters were a little too busy to really indulge.

“I think one of my favorite moments [from that] is when they first walk into that club and they go, ‘I’ve never been in a place where I didn’t know everyone,’” MacIntyre recalls. “Like how parochial is their life? As sophisticated as their style is…they are not worldly young women yet. And so that probably means there’s a lot of fun to have. And there’s also some scary stuff that they’ll have to navigate, having not grown up in that society, because it’s a very different society.”

“I just I love a good fish out of water story, and that is ultimately what they’ll be,” Plec adds. “But they’ll be fish out of water in a world where there are these folks called the Alchemists who exist, who Dimitri, of course, has just warned Rose, if you see somebody with that tattoo, run. So there’s great built-in threat.”

Of course, there’s also a whole gaggle of questions about why and how the humans have stayed so separate from the supernatural beings. “I’m so excited to dig deeper into the rules of this human treaty, the history of Moroi versus humans and Strigoi,” Plec says. “How far back it dates, what St. Vladimir’s purpose was, and all the saints back in the day, in building this truce, why humans don’t know about vampires, and those who do, what they do know? There’s so much to unpack there in the world-build, that is going to be a lot of fun.”

Good news: Lissa/Christian (André Dae Kim) and Rose/Dimitri (Kieron Moore) are crazy about each other. Bad news: They can’t exactly be together.

Prior to Queen Marina’s poisoning, she told a shocked Lissa that the young Royal was technically married to Christian. (Which also meant she had the tools to become queen.) But rather than newlywed bliss, Christian had his own news: He was now a monk.

“It’s all kind of messy,” Christian acknowledges.

Though the couple had to physically split up, for now, as she left and he has to take care of his family, there’s the very real question of where they’ll stand when they eventually reunite.

“I mean, I don’t even know what that means that he’s a monk,” Plec says. “It was such a great moment in that episode, I haven’t even thought about what that looks like moving forward, other than that it’s all about obstacles…does he have to be one of those creepy guys with a face mask now? Like how does his life look like? I have no idea!”

“I’ve actually thought a lot about it, because I wanted them not to have realized that they’ve actually completed the marriage ceremony without knowing it,” MacIntyre adds. “That their intention was to complete it, but that they unknowingly did. And so I love when the Queen reveals that…But also it kind of makes sense given [he’s] the reader, the guy who speaks with Irene and understands the history, and he’s the guy who cracks the code to figure everything out, because that’s what actually what somebody in that life would be doing, too.”

Going forward, “I’m sure there’s a lot of hoops they’d have to jump through for him to not be a monk or [them to] not to be married, or whatever they would do down the line,” MacIntyre says.

A little murkier are Rose and Dimitri, who lamented their could-have-beens, before having to part.

“I specifically didn’t have them say ‘I love you,’ because they haven’t said that yet,” MacIntyre points out. “Tatiana said to Dimitri, ‘You’re in love with that girl.’ And Rose says, ‘You’re everything I never wanted to fall in love with’ and he says, ‘You, too.’ So they actually haven’t said ‘I love you’ yet. So I’m waiting…I’m going to delight in whenever that scene pops up.”

As for their goodbyes, “I love that scene, because they’re very mature with each other,” MacIntyre says. “In that scene…they’ve kind of grown each other up. Rose’s looking ahead; she’s not thinking rashly. Dimitri’s thinking in his heart and soul and not in duty—and is thinking a little rashly. And they kind of come together as this perfect team to make this decision together.”

“For the first time she’s not fighting his root primal instincts of duty,” Plec adds. “And she’s actually recognizing that because of who you are, you are the one who needs to stay behind and fix this and I love that. It shows growth for her.”

Will Rose meet her dad?

Before Rose and Lissa went on the run, Rose’s mother told her if she needed anything to call a number. When Rose questioned who the contact was, the answer was simple: “Your father.”

While the writers don’t have an actor in mind to fill the ole, “that’s an interesting character in the books, because he’s so flamboyant,” Plec acknowledges. “And that, done wrong, could be really over the top and silly. So he’s a character that when we do meet him, we’ll have to make sure he’s got the right nuance so that he’s not a caricature. But it’s gonna be an exciting challenge.”

VAMPIRE ACADEMY, Peacock

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