Revenge - Season Finale - Interview with Creator Mike Kelley

Thanks to artuR for the heads up.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What were you thinking when you went in to writing this episode?

MIKE KELLEY: I think we set a record for storytelling pace, and so I don’t think fans would have been satisfied — or I would have been satisfied — if we didn’t turn over some pretty significant cards at the end of this season. So, I went at it and I had an idea where I wanted it to end, with one exception — I wasn’t certain about who I wanted to reveal as alive. I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell the audience about Emily’s mother at the end. I wanted to perhaps save that for next season. But I find that in telling the story of Revenge, that any time I try to stretch out story, it feels false. It doesn’t feel like the show. I decided let’s just trust ourselves to keep the pace going and reveal all at the end of the season. We definitely went in wanting to keep it going.

Speaking of Emily’s mother, that was a great reveal — and we don’t know much about her. Are you thinking about who is going to play her? What can you say about that character?

What we really want to do is find the perfect actor for the role. It would be really great for her to be as formidable as Madeleine [Stowe], but it’s a completely different part. What you’re going to discover about the woman who was Emily’s mother is the circumstances under which they were separated and you’re going to find that there’s some deep psychological issues with her, which I think is going to be fun for us to explore. For Emily, she’s going to start seeing some of the psychological damage that her mother has in herself. So she’s going to start doing a lot of soul-searching about who she is, what part DNA has played in her life choices and how she’s going to move forward, whether or not this person is going to be part of her life or if this is going to be someone that is going to disappoint and hurt her.

Alright, there’s a much larger conspiracy going on. Did you know that you were working toward this much, much larger conspiracy?

We did definitely know that was going to play a larger role. You have to continue to expand into season 2, we need a larger palette. We don’t want to get repetitive. We need new discoveries and new sinister twists and new villains. So we definitely knew that there was going to be a larger thing at play. What’s going to be fun is that we’re going to reveal is that we’ll find out that Emily’s involvement about what’s about to happen in season 2 was not by chance. There is a lot happening here, a larger plot is at play and she’s part of it. She’ll become more mad than ever, and with the help of Nolan, she’ll really plan to do something significant to bring down a very large, very evil, very untouchable force.

Source: Full Article @ EW