SIMON BENNETT: It was made before filming started. It takes, more than a year to write a season. And once filming starts you haven’t finished (writing) all the episodes. But you need to be at least two thirds of the way through all the scripts. Otherwise, production will catch up with the writing process and you’ll run out of things to film. We did know about (the two season order) before we went into production.
The arcs across all 44 episodes are the same arcs that we had planned across 22 episodes. We just had to create new little scenarios to flesh out the big arcs like Lord Zedd’s arrival. The three episodes that featured Lord Zedd were not part of the original plans, as an example of that.
One of the one of the running threads that finally came to a head at the end of the season was Amelia being revealed as a Rafkonian. How did you and the writers develop that plot and seed it throughout the show?
That was always our plan from the very first conception of the series. I posted to my Instagram a picture of a whiteboard which had our very early character relationships and sketches from which all the stories flowed. All the names that changed apart from Amelia, Pop-Pop, and Mucus. But the relationships and the characters, by and large, stayed as originally envisioned.
The idea was always that Amelia was looking for her parents or wants to find out who they were, and that there was a mystery surrounding them. Pop-Pop was the friendly woodcutter, in fairy tale trope language, who had rescued her and brought her up as his own, and that she never knew her parents. We knew exactly where that story was heading.
The decisions you make once you’re underway (on writing the season) is how you ration the story. Where you actually place things within the season. It all came out in those last two episodes, the story of Amelia’s parentage and Pop-Pop rescuing her from Area 62. It’s good because it makes it climactic. But we did have the option of releasing that information a little bit earlier in the season. But there’s something to be said about all the threads coming to a head in that finale. What happened with the Rafkonians was dealt with in the third to last episode.