Wednesday's Creators Say That Season 2 Death Was "A Hard Choice"
"When you kill off a character like that, you want to make it count."
Spoiler alert: This post discusses plot points from Wednesday Season 2, Episode 4.
The body count just went up on Wednesday... again. Among the many cliffhangers in the Season 2, Part 1 finale, one major character’s fate has finally been sealed, as Wednesday’s own life also hangs in the balance. The murder of Marilyn Thornhill (AKA Laurel Gates) was pretty shocking, and Wednesday’s showrunners have teased how it will have a huge impact on the upcoming Part 2.
Even before her brutal end, Marilyn Thornhill’s return in Season 2 was already surprising enough. In the first season, the Nevermore professor turned out to be more than just a cute Easter egg for superfans (actor Christina Ricci played Wednesday Addams in the ‘90s Addams Family movies). The finale revealed she had secretly been the main villain of the whole season. She was actually Laurel Gates, the Outcast-hating descendent from a long line of prejudiced pilgrims, and she had controlled Tyler Galpin (who could transform into a monstrous Hyde) to carry out her bloody revenge scheme. After Wednesday and her friends found her out, it appeared as though Thornhill might have been killed — but no, she returned in Season 2 (with a questionable new haircut).
Though the now-imprisoned Thornhill seemed confident that she could continue to control Tyler, bartering with his Willow Hill captors to keep her close to her monster, he wound up turning on her in the end. After she freed Tyler during an asylum outbreak, he transformed and killed her, then rushed towards Wednesday to seemingly hurl her out of a window to her possible demise as well.
Co-showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar wanted Thornhill’s death to remind viewers that there are real, deadly dangers within this oftentimes-silly show. “When you kill a character as significant as Thornhill, it reminds the audience that, yeah, people die in this world,” Millar told TVLine. “There are serious stakes, and not everyone is going to make it out alive. I think that’s an important tonal thing for the show, even though we primarily think of it as a comedy.”
“It’s always a hard choice,” Gough added. “When you kill off a character like that, you want to make it count. You want it to lead to something, you know, and it definitely does.” In particular, he teased that Thornhill’s demise will make Tyler’s Hyde more unpredictable than ever in Part 2.
“We established that a Hyde can’t really live without a master, so what does that mean?” Gough said. “Now you have this unhinged monster out in the world, and what’s that going to be? We wanted to make sure that it was an impactful death.”
The second half of Wednesday Season 2 will arrive on Netflix on Sept. 3.
