[This story contains spoilers for the season finale of The Changeling.]
The Changeling showrunner Kelly Marcel, and author and executive producer Victor LaValle, say last Friday’s season finale was never designed to be an ending for the adaptation. But, they did want viewers to come away from the Apple TV+ series’ first season with a “what the fuck” feeling.
The duo, who appeared on a Saturday panel for the show at New York Comic Con, spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about the season finale, which saw Apollo (LaKeith Stanfield) and Cal (Jane Kaczmarek) — the leader of a band of women who have had their babies stolen by a Norwegian male-led cult called the Kinder Garten — joining forces against a cult member named William (Samuel T. Herring) and a giant, destructive “Fairy.”
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Apollo escapes on a boat towards “the only forest in New York City,” just like his wife Emma (Clark Backo). But before he goes, Cal promises Apollo that “the only real magic … is the things you’ll do for the ones you love” in a departing speech that also sees her discuss the tale of Callisto and her son Arcas — who in the stars are transformed into the constellations of the Great Bear and the Bear Warden. She wishes to be back with her son like Callisto, and stays back to fight William — whom she kills, before throwing herself from a cliff to avoid the giant monster.
Apollo eventually makes it to land, just as Emma does. But they arrive in two different locations. Emma happens upon a glowing merry-go-round, beckoned by the sound of a baby’s voice. Apollo stumbles on something more sinister, a tomb of his baby boy where he’s met by a changeling — the show’s supernatural creatures — who bites him before he dashes through the caves to a dead end. There, he’s met by an enormous eye.
“The show was really about the choices that we make as parents and how those choices go on to affect generation after generation,” Marcel told THR. “That’s what the penultimate episode is really about: Lillian’s (Adina Porter) journey in the past having an affect on Apollo’s life later. He is ultimately paying for the sins of the mother. In the same way that, I think, we all carry these generational patterns from our parents. I know that as I parent my child, I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m like my mom.’ (Laughs.) I think we all feel that way. But really, for me, and I think for Victor [LaValle], too, this is a story about family, and it is the story about the lengths you will go to if you love somebody.”
For LaValle, The Changeling author and show EP, fans should also see the ending as a message around the tests of parenthood and what coming out of the other side of that test can mean for a child.
“We meet Apollo and Emma in the beginning of the season, and you hope they’ll be good people. You hope they’ll be the kind of people who would fight for their child no matter what. But as is said, in the third episode, you never know until you’re tested,” he explains. “This is a hell of a test what they go through. But by the end of the season, you see that both of them get back up again, and keep walking. They are looking for that baby, and they’re not giving up on that baby. There’s something very beautiful about the idea — we’d all like to imagine — that our mother or father would never stop searching for us.”
It’s a season about exploring parental trauma from various perspectives, something Marcel and LaValle say the related to, together. “When Victor and I first met, we really bonded over our childhoods, which are weirdly similar,” Marcel says.
“There was the question of: How did we end up well? Then, once we had our kids, it was, ‘Oh wait, did we end up well?’ (Laughs.),” he tells THR. “All of that brings up those questions, and then you have to answer. But part of parenting is that you’re answering them while you’re keeping something alive, and that’s really high stakes. It makes for a lot of stress and fear.”
“Apollo and Emma are not perfect. They are a regular couple going through — even before all of the crazy stuff happened — the very stressful job of parenting,” Marcel adds. “We didn’t want them to be perfect. We wanted them to be fallible, and we wanted them to be real.”
Like much of the season, the finale focuses heavily on the power of women and what they’ll do for their children, tracing Apollo as he follows Emma down that path. Yet, despite its understanding of the power of women like Emma, it’s a narrative where Apollo remains the central eyes through which audiences see everything. That’s something LaValle and Marcel said was guided by a personal experience, particularly for the author, who calls the series an “it’s time to grow up” tale for Apollo.
“The heart of the book was my wife, and my wife giving birth to our first son. Even though we’d been married, we’d been dating and all the rest, there was still a layer or two of her experience that I was unaware of because I could be. That was my freedom as a man to not know about the various ways she sacrifices; the various ways she’s at risk; the various ways she gives; and the various way she’s powerful,” he says. “It’s about Apollo’s journey waking up and realizing my wife is so much more complex than I understood, even though I thought I was being a good husband … It’s not until she goes through this and [Emma] says, ‘Now I really need you,’ that Apollo is pushed beyond his own selfish needs and his own selfish desires.
“You can’t die once — heroic sacrifice — and then it’s done,” he continues. “You have to show up every day. And that felt like a new model for an Apollo character to depict on the screen.”
“What’s so interesting about Apollo’s journey, is he doesn’t believe and doesn’t believe,” adds Marcel. “He’s forced to believe. He admits he didn’t listen, and he’s got to come to terms with that.”
The end of that journey as it stands in the season one finale is a major cliffhanger, and not the ending of LaValle’s book. That’s because the duo always had a two season plan for the show. “One of the things Kelly did in the adaptation that was so great was that she expanded, in particular, Emma’s story, Lillian’s story. We got to have so much more of their journeys, but there was no way to just jam all of the book and all of that into eight episodes,” LaValle says. “Then people would be like, ‘It was just too rushed.’ So it felt like two seasons to tell the whole story, make everything bigger, wilder and even more disturbing.”
For showrunner Marcel, she “wanted people to end season one like ‘What the fuck?'”
“If there is a season two, which we obviously hope there is, we would continue the story from where we left, but you will also be taken back. Season one was a setup of a lot of questions, and season two is the answer to all of those questions. There’s so many secrets and Easter eggs and hidden things in the show that I’m sure people haven’t seen. I’m surprised at how many people are not seeing that there’s something in the water. Every time you see the water, there’s something in the water. But we’ll go back and have a look, and then we’ll answer all those.”
“A season of answers is maybe a simple way to put it,” LaValle adds. “When Kelly and I were talking about this idea of splitting the show up, I think one of the things that seemed so exciting and bold to me is the traditional way is to set up a question at the beginning and answer it by the end of the episode. But another to way to storytell is to say: ‘Sit down with us and we’re going to tell you a tale. It’s going to some take time.’ But we’ve built all these questions up, I promise, it’s not because we’ve forgotten about things. It’s because we think when all these things start to hit, you’re going to be sitting there going ‘Oooh, that was a fucking story.'”
The Changeling season one is currently streaming on Apple TV+.
