Last Resort came to an end this week – a far too quick end for those, like myself, who loved the show. News of the cancellation came while production was underway on the show’s 12th episode, and the one silver lining was that the writers were allowed to complete their initial thirteen episode-order and, hastily, re-write what now was to be the series finale.

Last Resort: Series Finale Review

I spoke to Karl Gajdusek, who co-created Last Resort with Shawn Ryan, and co-wrote the final episode, about the process of quickly using one episode to wrap up so many storylines. We also talked about changes he made along the way to that finale script and storylines the show would have gone on had it continued.Suffice to say,. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about to be ruined for you!

We always knew that we were going to finish a bunch of arcs at 13. And so that episode already had a lot of closure built into it, but it also had new openings built into it. It wasn’t like we said, “We’re done, so we’re going to write a whole new episode that’s going to completely finish the show.” But we had an episode that had that feeling to it and then we had a chance to change it enough to make it a show closer. That didn’t mean reconstructing it from the ground up. It just meant looking at the last couple of acts and where people went and where the story went. And in a few cases, with a few characters, it meant saying, “Okay, this character really can’t do that. They’ve got to do something really different and we’re going to finish them.” And so we reconstructed that.We didn’t intend this to be an episode that featured Christine at all. We wanted to bring her back from her faked death in future episodes. And instead we thought, “Well, we can’t just leave her out of this episode. She’s important.” So we brought her back in after we knew we were done. That’s one. Kylie, we gave a giant arc to where we just meant her to have the beginning of a new dark path. Instead, we gave her this very big story. James and Tani, it was never a big episode for them. We gave them something that I think was a good conclusion for their characters, but we weren’t able to give them a giant story. But those were the big ones. And then Sam and Marcus are obviously huge… Marcus we gave probably the fitting end. I wrote a draft where Sam and Marcus went down with the ship, and Grace too for that matter. While I loved it and it felt very moving and strong, it also felt a little bit like a kick in the gut. So after writing that draft, I sort of slept on it for a night and re-wrote it, to get them home.Yeah, I should have mentioned Prosser too. In the draft I wrote that had the highest body count, if you will, we had Prosser and Grace ending sort of like Vasquez and Gorman at the end of Aliens. They sat there like old enemies now turned friends sort of hand in hand while the missiles came. It was a great ending, I loved it, but it was also pretty dark; pretty tough. I think our audience would have felt a little bit beat up.It seemed right in many ways. I mean, I really fundamentally think that the captain goes down with the ship. It would seem Pollyanna to find a way for everyone to wiggle out of the situation. He always said he was putting it all on the line and I felt it was important that he did.Actually, this is sort of tragic… I did put him into the last episode! And Jay [Karnes], who’s an amazing actor, did fly to Hawaii and did shoot his scene. But the last episode was also a driving, huge episode with so much story and so much plot. And when it came down to the really, really tough decisions in the editing room, the scene was not essential enough to make it through, finally, when we had to start… when we were carving seconds off this cut. He had this great scene where he was with the mucky mucks in the DC story and you could tell he was a little uncomfortable because it seemed like he was getting displaced. All of the sudden, the power was no longer in his hands and for the first time, you start to feel a target on the back of his head. I dug the scene. It was very short, but it finally it was one thing that had to go.No, we were writing for something I felt was going to be quite delicious. The president, in the draft we wrote before we were ending, the president – and this is almost talking out of school because this is not what you see in the finale – but we had decided that the president was mostly unhinged and was being operated by those around him, primarily Kylie’s father, who was positioning himself to take over the reins. So as we moved into the second part of our season, we were going to see a president more and more sidelined with his own mental illness while the Currys and the Barton Sinclairs of the world manipulated him and manipulated the power of the presidency for their own ends. And so the first ending we had for the DC story for the finale episode was Kylie arriving back among the mucky mucks, having sort of proved her place in the pantheon of the bad guys and she’s there with her father. This man comes up and says, “Kylie, someone should dance with me,” and takes her and starts to dance around the world and she looks in the face of this man who is clearly mentally unstable – who clearly shouldn’t even have gotten into this room. And you see his handlers to the side, trying to get him back to his room. And she says, “Why, of course, Mr. President.” You realize the president is an empty shell for those handling and that was going to be our story going on. Now we changed that – we didn’t have time to tell that story, so we changed it when we knew we were doing a finale.[Laughs] Yeah, we sort of go darker and more Cassavetes than we usually do on our show with her in this episode. I thought they did such a great job in those two scenes. It was very different for our show. That little hotel room they did those scenes in is truly a skanky little hotel room in a terrible part of Honolulu. It was a grimy shoot for that and they loved it. She has a big story and her story going into the second part of the season had we gone on also would have been quite big. She would have been… perhaps a villain. I don’t believe in my heart a villain or in her heart a villain, but she was going down a fairly dark path at her father’s side.I don’t think she survives the end. Now that’s just my opinion. Just because I wrote it doesn’t mean I know. I sort of suspect that those secret service people gun her down. But that’s my interpretation. I think it’s a sacrificial ending. I think curiously enough – and if you asked me this two months ago, I never would have guessed this – but I think the two big self-sacrificers of the finale are her and Marcus.

IGN TV Podcast: Autumn Reeser on Last Resort’s End

Listen, we had Kylie’s high heels on the sand in the fifteenth episode. So we had already written that story. But once again, we were stopping and there was no time to do that. That would be opening up new possibilities as opposed to closing down arcs, so we didn’t do that.That was a great Robert Patrick improvisation.Yeah, that was him! I remember we were there and we had already shot the scene and then all of the sudden I hear this voice go, “Roll it again!” And they roll it again and all of the sudden, he did that.

Find out more about where Last Resort would have gone on Page 2.