[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Revival Season 1 finale “Rend the Veil.”]

Revival, in its first season finale, does as executive producer Aaron B. Koontz promised us it would: It gives us answers.

The cause of Revival Day and Em’s (Romy Weltman) death are linked: Aaron (Gianpaolo Venuta) and Lester (Peter Millard) killed her, and that was the detonator to blow the door of immortality off. Dana (Melanie Scrofano) comes to her sister’s aid once she’s in Lester’s clutches, but it’s Em who kills him, tearing out his heart with her hand. But then Em dies … or so we think. A time jump of 35 days reveals that Aaron’s wife, Nithiya (Gia Sandhu), who’s been undergoing treatments for cancer, went out of her way to ensure she was Em’s therapist — and is with her in a cabin somewhere!

Below, executive producers Luke Boyce and Aaron B. Koontz break down the finale and tease what could come in a second season. Plus, how long do they see the show lasting?

The cause of Revival Day — who’s involved — is similar to the comics, but in the comics, Em is pregnant, and that plays into it, right? So why change that, and how did you settle on the ending you did?

Luke Boyce: There’s a lot in the comics that I would say, it’s not so much that we change, we sort of just refashioned a little bit. And there’s a lot more that I think is involved in Revival Day that Aaron and I talked about that we feel is part of the story that is not even said in the finale. So what I’ll say is that there’s a lot to this. There’s an onion that we want to peel back the layers of as time goes by. We’ve added more there. So it’s not so much that we’ve changed it, we’ve actually added to it, if anything, or we plan to add to it.

Aaron B. Koontz: And the pregnancy is still an open opportunity for future seasons, and that way we can separate it from — what I can say is the pregnancy is not the cause of this, right? So it’s not going to be like the opening of Season 2 is because she was pregnant, right? We’re not holding a reveal of that. So the idea was to take that, which was an interesting element, build our own myth and lore into what actually caused Revival Day and what ties around Em, and there’s more there than what’s in the comic for sure.

It looks like Em dies. You have her dying in Dana’s arms, you have the time jump, then you have that ending. Why?

Koontz: The easy answer in a finale is you kill someone, right? That’s a thing, that’s a trope. So the entire construction of this show was us looking at what are the expectations of what people are going to think is happening, and then how do we maybe start to push you in that direction, you start to think that’s what’s going to happen, and then at the end kind of swipe you in a different way? But I will say something is dying in that moment. It might not just be Em as we understand her, but something is dying, I will say. I think we also wanted to show that it’s never quite — the entire show has been, you think you understand, you have all the answers, you think you’ve got it all figured out, and then there’s one more thing and there’s one more thing. And this was meant to be, there’s one more thing potentially with Nithiya, and where are they? Why are they there? How do they get there? There’s a lot going on there.

Boyce: The adaptation process of turning the comic into the show was an interesting one because the comic itself is 47 issues of a murder mystery, and what we didn’t want to do is we didn’t want to stretch that murder mystery, Em’s murder mystery, through multiple seasons. We wanted to complete the murder mystery. The problem with the murder mystery is that the reason for Em’s death is also the reason for Revival Day, and we didn’t want to change that. That we felt was a core element of this comic that we wanted to keep. So it led us to a place where we said, let’s tell most of the story in Season 1 and let’s get there. Now, at the end of the comic, Em dies. It puts us in a position to say, okay, are we going to actually kill our main character off? So we reframed the idea in our heads to say, okay, let’s see how we can actually change this a little bit and give this an opportunity for more stories to be told, both from the comics and even original stories in the Revival world eventually.

Was Nithiya behind everything from the beginning or did she take advantage of the situation that Lester and Aaron were setting up?

Koontz: That’s the question we want to leave you with to wonder and to ponder: What does that mean, and what was going on? There’s a lot going on there, we will say, that is not fully seen or known flat-out at this moment.

Naomi Peters/Lavivier Productions/SYFY

Does anyone else know Em is alive?

Boyce: I think we can answer that. I don’t believe so.

Koontz: Yeah, I don’t believe so either. I mean, there are a couple things. There could have been a sighting, so there might’ve been a rumor or someone’s thought they heard something. But no, the family and everyone believes that Em is dead.

It seems like Dana and Ibrahim (Andy McQueen) are still kind of taking baby steps to a relationship, and, to me, he seemed a bit cautious in their post-time jump scene. So what can you say about where both of them are when it comes to that?

Boyce: They start out pretty hot and heavy, so there’s an interesting dynamic to the will they/won’t they thing where you start them out basically almost sleeping together and then you end it with them, sort of like you said, taking baby steps into a relationship. Now, if I was Ibrahim and I just dealt with what I dealt with with the Cypresses, I would probably be a little cautious myself, so I think there’s a little element there.

Koontz: It’s also, too, in the writing of that scene — what I thought was really fun was the very first time you’re meeting them, what’s happening is actually they dent a car and he’s like, “No, this is the right thing to do. We should leave a note.” And she’s like, “Shut up. You’re going to do this.” And that right there is a microcosm of their entire relationship and everything that’s going to happen. And it all starts with him giving in to the whims of a Cypress, of what it is they want to do and they’re the driver in this scenario. And then she jokes, “We could dent a car.” And he’s like, “Ugh. That was the domino that started all this. What is going to happen from the new dented car?” I think he’s just an analytical person, so he’s going through his head, but he also can’t resist Dana at the same time. So I think it’s that push-pull.

How are you feeling about the chances of a second season?

Koontz: If more people like you talk about it, that’s going to help us, right? We had this all envisioned this entire time with three seasons with a fourth optional idea. But three seasons is what we really, really want to do and have something really special that we think could be really special of a story to tell. So yeah, the fans keep talking about it… I don’t know. The TV business is so hard, it’s so fickle and what’s there, and we did figure that if absolute worst-case scenario happened, at least you’re solving the core story. There’s still a beginning and middle and end that can still happen in the season, but obviously we’re alluding to so much more that we want to be able to peel back.

Speaking of that, what could we see in a Season 2?

Boyce: One thing we did very differently than the comic is that there are still revivers, right? Revival Day didn’t end, essentially. So we have a whole town full of revivers and we sort of see that there’s been some political things changing in the 35 days after those events. So we’ve got that.

We’ve got a lot of characters that we are going to want to find out more about. I personally want to see more Nella [Lanette Ware], more Randy [Graeme Barrett], more of those characters, and then new characters and characters from the comic that we haven’t explored yet. There’s Derrick, Cooper’s dad, which we specifically held back to tell more stories from this world. So yeah, there’s a lot to do. And then there’s a big question that we didn’t answer in this, which is, who are the Checks working for? Because I can tell you it wasn’t Lester, right? That’s another story that we plan to tell as well.

Koontz: I think that there still is going to be a central mystery to the second season. So there’ll be a central mystery to solve, but there’s also still details of this mystery that are still left unsolved. I think you’re going to go back to where this all happened, to the Gristmill, and try to unearth, how do they get this to happen? How do they cause this to happen? I get that’s where Em was murdered and revival happened, but why Em, what happened here? Why was he wearing a mask and why does he have this thing on his chest? There’s a lot of things that are not fully answered there. You’re just seeing the aftermath of it. So I think there’s some fun investigative beats to discover there. Then there’s also more stories to be told with revivers and then also a central mystery that we don’t want to say what that might be yet going into Season 2.

Dana and Wayne (David James Elliott) seem to be in a better place. How hard is it for her for that to be the case considering how her son feels about him?

Koontz: It’s interesting to hear your take on that they might be in a better place because I don’t know that they necessarily are. She just learned in Episode 9, the end of 9, that the reason that Patty’s [Lara Jean Chorostecki] death was he was with Diane Dillisch [Precious Chong] having this affair. She’s been beating herself up about this, about Patty’s death this whole time. I think there’s just a lot that’s happened here that might be really hard to reconcile. And we definitely wanted to leave Wayne in a bad place. He’s lost his job, lost his family, his own grandson won’t even talk to him. But I think what could be fun is if they are in a bad place is in Season 2, if you force them to have to work together again, which I thought was really fun in Episode 7 when you see them working together, and maybe there could be something that forces them to have to come together in the future. I think that could be a really interesting story to tell. I don’t know that they’re in a good place, I will say that.

I wouldn’t say good place. I just meant that she’s not trying to flee town and get away from him.

Koontz: True, true. And I think that’s part of it. I mean, that’s part of the parallels we really, when we constructed Episode 10, wanted to look at the pilot and look at this and talk about these beginning and end. There’s literal shots that are the same shots and the whole thing and how those are constructed to, she wants to get out of here and now she’s realizing that there is something here for her. And I think that’s not necessarily all on her dad as much as I think it’s about Dana realizing that she doesn’t have to run from situations anymore. And I think that that might’ve been something that has happened in the past a lot with her.

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