[This story contains major spoilers from the season two finale of Poker Face, “The End of the Road.”]

Hopefully, you kept watching after Poker Face nearly ended its second season with a big “To Be Continued.” Creator Rian Johnson was confident viewers would stick with the episode — but he says Peacock was a little nervous.

“I was just giggling in the edit room getting the timing of that exactly right with Natasha,” Johnson, who created, writes and directs on the Natasha Lyonne-starring series, tells The Hollywood Reporter of the finale’s cliffhanger gag. “Peacock was a little nervous. They were like, ‘Do you have to put To Be Continued?’ I was like, ‘I think it will be fine.’ It’s another great harkening back to the commercial break cuts that I grew up with [on TV shows] as a kid. A car would go off the ramp at the Universal backlot, the show would freeze frame and it would be like, ‘How are they going to get out of this one!’”

Taking inspiration from the finale’s episode title — “The End of the Road” — it sure seemed to be the end of the road for Charlie, both literally and spiritually, when the protagonist played by Lyonne and this season’s surprise antagonist, played by Patti Harrison, drove off a cliff in Charlie’s iconic Plymouth Barracuda. As her vintage, sky blue 1969 ride was mid-air — and all hope seemed dashed for the heroine of this murder-of-the-week series — those tantalizing words appeared onscreen: “To Be Continued.”

But after the show cut to black, the Barracuda returned onscreen and Poker Face played out the rest of the ending to reveal that Charlie escaped before the car took its cliff jump. Unfortunately, Harrison’s villain, Alex a.k.a world-famous hired killed “Iguana,” also wasn’t killed in the accident (at least, we never see a body). But damage is done. Charlie’s FBI pal (Simon Helberg) gives her a head start in the season’s most heartbreaking scene as Charlie downloads the fact that she is now, once again, a wanted fugitive by the FBI. She ends the season exactly where she began the series — on the run. Only this time, she doesn’t have her Barracuda. Viewers last see her hitching a ride to Kansas, dog in tow (played by Lyonne’s real dog, Root Beer).

A third season hasn’t yet been greenlit, so Johnson and Lyonne, along with season two showrunner Tony Tost, have some time to figure out what Charlie’s life will look like back on the run. In the meantime, Johnson talked to THR below about casting Harrison as the unexpected big bad this season, how Lyonne dove into both playing out and directing this surprising season-ender, and why they decided to blow up their show’s format yet again.

***

You told me I would be surprised by these final two episodes and I was, thanks for the tip!

Oh, good. Good, good, good.

We spoke at the beginning of the season about why you guys wanted to shed the big bad-chasing-Charlie plot of season one, and this season largely played out as standalone episodes. But then these final two episodes introduced a surprising villain, someone who can actually lie to Charlie and go undetected, who sets up this ending of Charlie being a fugitive again. When in the writers room did you land on this arc to end the season?

It was around the middle of breaking the season and writing the episodes. It was a build up of us wanting to try out a couple of different things and see if they would work in the Poker Face world. The first was: could Charlie have a sidekick, a Watson? The idea of doing a two-parter was an idea I was interested in. It was very much like the [classic] TV that this show is based on, and we wanted to see if we could pull that off with a Poker Face episode. Then it was Laura Deely, who ended up writing the finale, who came up with the pitch: “What if we introduce a character who seems like Watson, but ends up being Moriarty?” Another thing floating around in our heads was what a character would look like who could actually lie to Charlie.

So all of those things came together. Now having seen that it does work to have Charlie a little more static, it also seemed fun and invigorating to then shake the box at the end of the season and put us in a place where we can be some place fresh [when we come back].

Natasha played this ending so devastatingly. It’s written all over her face in her final conversation with FBI Agent Luca (Simon Helberg) when she realizes, after an existential but somewhat lighter season where she had this second lease on life, that she now has to go back to a life on the run. Did Natasha take any convincing when you landed on this ending?

No, she was really, really into it. Having an uprooting and a real emotional place to play the final episode, Natasha was really, really into that. [Note: Lyonne also directed the finale.] She likes to dig in. She likes to have something to really chew on. In her direction and performance of that final scene between Charlie and Luca, she brings so much to it. You can see that she is just diving into the pool, so yeah, she was really excited.

You cast Poker Face in the unique way of calling up a lot of your friends to play guest parts. Did you audition for the Iguana/Alex role, or did you have Patti Harrison in mind for this villain?

We auditioned different actors for this part, and Patti was someone who I had met before who had read for other things and who I had always liked. Clea DuVall really suggested that we think about Patti for this part, and Patti first shows up in episode 10, which Clea [who also played Charlie’s sister in season one] directed. But casting Patti was a much bigger thing, because we knew where this character was going to go and how big of a part she was going to play. We were describing all the traits we wanted the character to have — you have to genuinely buy them as someone you want Charlie to be with, and then it also has to make sense when they make the turn — and Clea said we should really look at Patti and she was right. We read a bunch of actors and Patti had that combination of factors.

After Iguana/Alex revealed that she could lie to Charlie, and when she was trying to lie to her in their final drive, I was analyzing Patti’s facial expressions and realized it would be a fun task to go back and try to spot her tells. Did you want to drop us hints along the way, would we notice if we went back?

A little bit. Patti asked me about that. When I met with her before we cast her, I pitched her the character so she knew where it was going, and she asked how ambiguously she should play it and if she should drop hints. My take was for her to just play it straight. I thought there would be ambiguity if you go back and watch it, but this woman is incredibly good at her job. If she’s good enough to fool Charlie, then you have to fool the audience as good as you can in those few episodes. I’m not sure if she personally threw a couple hints in there, but what we landed on was playing this as if it is what it is on the surface.

We don’t see her body after the car crash. We see that Charlie escapes, but Iguana has disappeared. The rules of television tell us that means she is not dead, at least not yet.

(Laughs.) Yes, that’s the cue!

Is your hope to bring her back, and how much does this open the door to what you can do in a third season with her, considering she can successfully lie to Charlie (who is a human lie detector)?

Yes, it absolutely does. The notion that this person is out there somewhere in the world and Charlie Cale has her Moriarty, her Lex Luthor, is very exciting. It opens up a whole realm of possibilities, and also I adore Patti. I think she’s so talented and wonderful, and the idea of finding a way to loop her back in would be very, very cool.

Can you talk me through how you landed on your “To be Continued” cliffhanger — which you then pulled back and answered by showing us that Charlie escapes before her Plymouth Baracuda goes off the cliff? Did you have fun messing with us, Rian?!

(Laughs) I was just giggling in the edit room getting the timing of that exactly right with Natasha. It brings me so much joy, because I know that we are going to play fair after that break. I hope nobody stops watching after that! Peacock was a little nervous about that. They were like, “Ehh, do you have to put To Be Continued?” I was like, “I think it will be fine.” But it’s another great harkening back to the commercial break cuts that I grew up with [on TV shows] as a kid. A car would go off the ramp at the Universal backlot, the show would freeze frame and it would be like, “How are they going to get out of this one!”

“Tune in next week!”

Exactly. It was something that I thought was delightful, and hopefully it wasn’t too temporarily frustrating!

Did you actually destroy the car?

No, we didn’t. I’m sure it was briefly discussed and our line producer, Jeff Bernstein, pulled us back from the edge.

Does that mean you could revive the car, or are you putting that ride to rest?

I don’t think so. I think we’re going to put it to rest. It’s a beautiful car. It’s also a car that means a lot to Natasha and me. But it also was a huge pain in the ass to film with! It would really never start right when we were losing the light. The instant it started raining, the windshield wipers would not work. The idea of getting Charlie a nice, reliable Honda Accord — an iconic Honda Accord — that sounds perfect for next season.

Your final shot of the season left us looking at the road, after Charlie hitches a ride with a trucker who is heading to Kansas. Why did you want that to be the final shot?

It felt really good ending it by putting Charlie back on the road. It was a little bit of an experiment for us in the writers room about if the show could function with her being in one place with the pressure off, and I think the answer, for us at least, was that it could. I thought it was a really fun season. The show, at the heart of it, still really works. But at the end of the day, there’s something about her character that just feels nice being out on the highway and the Americana of that. I thought Natasha did that so beautifully with the wintery road and with her [real] dog, Root Beer. Even after all of this, Charlie can’t let this pain-in-the-ass little dog freeze in the road. It just seemed like nice Americana energy to end with. And Root Beer is such a ham.

Where are you now with talks about season three? And did you approach this finale like it could be the end of the show?

Well, you never know how something is going to do, and honestly, I have a feeling those conversations are just about to start, so we’ll see. I don’t want to count any chickens. But you never know, especially with television today, and that’s the balancing act. You leave it open in case you’re lucky enough to come back, and have it end on a place that is satisfying if things don’t go that way.

The episodes dropped weekly, so this season got to play out over two months. You get to engage in the viewer reaction and also, I imagine, get some viewership feedback from Peacock along the way. How do you feel this season was received?

First of all, I love the [weekly] rollout, because the show really does function almost more as an anthology than a serialized show, and it gives each guest star and guest director a chance to shine each week. It’s also the type of show that benefits from space. I don’t think this is a show that’s necessarily suited to binging or watching a bunch in a row. I think watching one and then taking a week to watch the next, there’s something old-school TV about that that feels right.

I also love the idea that there’s now 22 episodes of it on Peacock, and someone who discovers it can watch ones they’re interested in and go back and watch more. Ultimately, that’s also the way that a lot of us discover TV now. It’s on a streaming service, you can go through and there’s a massive menu of all these great actors in all of these great episodes. It’s fun to get time-released week by week, but I love that they are all up right now.

You and Natasha are both busy with other film projects. If you come back for a third season, do you imagine you would come back quicker than the two year-plus break between seasons one and two?

There was too much time between seasons one and two. But you are right. We’re lucky enough to be very busy people. You just kind of dive in and see what you can figure out, but I would hope that we’d come back with a little more speediness. I know Peacock would hope that!

You typically have ideas that don’t make it in that you put aside for the future. You spoke before about the excitement of creating the show’s unique format with season one and then breaking that mold with season two — and now you broke it again to end the season. What excites you for season three?

At the heart of it, what I’m excited about is the same thing I’ve been excited about from the start, which is not so much the trajectory about where the bigger story is going to go, but the blue sky of so many different types of episodes left to do. There are so many different worlds, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood-style worlds, to explore. We could do a different profession every week and show the kids how the Post Office works. There’s an element of that to the show. So it’s less about the bigger direction for me, and more about how it’s a massive, open sandbox. The notion of all the different types of episodes we can still do is really thrilling.

Looking back, are there season two swings you took that you are learning from for a third season?

Having just put it all up there, I’m still absorbing it myself, but I feel really proud of some of the bigger swings we took, like the grade school episode that I thought was really unique and fun. But then some of the more meat-and-potato episodes, like the baseball episode for example, is just a regular home-plate episode of what I always imagined the show would be, and I love that too. In the writers room, I try to encourage the writers to not think about what worked in the past year, but to think about, with each new episode, how can we surprise and delight the audience? How can we stretch what the show is with each one? So while I’m proud of them this season, that also means hopefully not repeating them next season.

You left Simon Helberg, Taylor Schilling and Patti Harrison as viable actors whose characters could return for a season three. Would you like to dip back into your supporting cast pool, or recruit new?

We did expand the roster a little bit. I love all those actors and, like you said, it’s set up that we can use them down the line. They can definitely come back. But the one thing I really wanted to avoid doing was building ongoing characters and a bigger mythology that the audience had to keep track of. Part of the delight of the show for me is that if someone tells you, “There’s a great episode with Simon Rex and I think you’d love it because you love baseball,” you can dive in and watch it and you don’t have to know what happened in the past two seasons to enjoy it. It’s important even as the ongoing story continues that you don’t even need to know it as you continue the show, and to lift that burden off the audiences’ shoulders. It’s balancing those two things.

Coming from Orange Is the New Black fandom, the idea of Taylor Schilling chasing down Natasha’s Charlie Cale next season is fun. Are you keeping that option open?

She’s so awesome. Look, that would be an absolute blast. Taylor was someone who Natasha really wanted to bring in and we were really lucky to get her for that part. Maybe they all end up in jail together and we have a true reunion, we’ll see!

Next up you have the highly anticipated Knives Out movie sequel, Wake Up Dead Man. Anything you can tease as a little tittle for fans?

There are lots of tittles to come very, very soon. I don’t want to speak too soon on it, but it’s very different than the last movie in a way that I hope is going to be exciting for audiences. More to come!

***

Poker Face is now streaming all episodes on Peacock.