So I treated this second season like a second act. Now it’s time to really get these characters in trouble. What I really wanted to do was expand the characters and challenge them more in the second year now that we know them. What I thought was interesting is that the character that is the most set in his ways is obviously Stan, so I wanted to give him a temptation that he couldn’t resist. So the arc of the second season involves him going behind Evie’s back and trying to bring his wife back to life. As a result, Stan has to cut deals and interact with people and entitles that he normally would be fighting against. He’s sort of playing a double-blind game, which I thought was an interesting direction to take these characters. All of this also set me up in the position that it gave me a great idea for season three, if we’re fortunate enough to get that far.

The way I do the show is sort of like The X-Files in the sense that there are both mythology episodes and standalone stories. The mythology ones have a bigger scope and are usually a little heavier and you can just have a lot of fun with the standalones. In terms of how I move the mythology, I’d actually say that I steal more from Battlestar Galactica in terms of how they really put their characters through the wringer and push hard all the time. I’m often like, “How would Battlestar Galactica handle this situation and then what’s our version of that?”

I’m glad you touched on that dichotomy of episode structures because mythology is great, but you shed some light on how this show goes about breaking its more episodic entries. Were there any crazy ideas that you guys couldn’t crack or decided to shelve in the end?

There’s one that I don’t know how I’m going to do yet so I keep kicking it down the road. It’s a story that involves a number of entities at once and it’s a situation where you join forces with an enemy because there’s another enemy in common between the two of you. They did this really well in Blade II. I want to go in that direction with it, but with our smaller budget it may be more like the school play version of Blade II.

Is there any sort of monster or horror trope that you haven’t featured in the show but would like to at some point?