TVLINE | You have a habit of killing off major characters in your season finales, but even before we lost Kelly, we’d already lost other big players this season, including Ed. How did you come to the decision to have Kelly die now, as well?
WOLPERT | It was a very difficult decision, honestly, and one that took a lot of discussion and weighing what the best path forward was. For us, it wasn’t about, “Oh, it’s the finale, we have to kill someone” — even though we have done that many times. [Laughs] But it was really about the evolution of Kelly as a character. You really saw her, in this season, take on the mantle of being a Baldwin and making some questionable choices, to put it mildly. In Episode 7, she basically forces that ship [to Titan] to land when they were going to turn around, without anybody else knowing. She’s carrying the weight of that, and the audience knows she’s carrying the weight of that. And seeing her still-maniacal pursuit of finding these microbes — we definitely had a few discussions about Captain Ahab [from “Moby Dick”] with her, and the question of, “What are you willing to do for that ultimate goal?” Having her reach that goal and then sacrifice herself to ensure the thing she’s been chasing for decades is able to get back [to Earth] — and to protect the lives of the people who she put in a dangerous situation — it felt like a great culmination of her character, and a way to show the toll of these scientific pursuits.
TVLINE | But how much of her decision to stay on Titan is driven by guilt? She and Walt never do have a conversation about how she interfered in the Titan mission.
NEDIVI | Honestly, I think [guilt is] most of what’s informing her decision. We had talked about having that confession [scene] and how the truth would come out, and actually, the best way for it to come out is through this sacrifice. She gives the reason of family, which is also a very good reason — that Walt’s got three young kids — but what’s really driving her is the guilt. If not for her earlier decision, they wouldn’t be in this predicament. So even though they’ve made this big discovery, that’s a lot of what’s going through her mind in that great scene with the three of them.
… There’s many reasons that Kelly had [to make that sacrifice], which, by the way, did not make that decision easy by any means. We’ve grown really attached to Cynthy [Wu, who plays Kelly] and the arc she’s had since playing a teenager in Season 2, and now she’s at the end of her life. And I have to say, the fact that Kelly’s father died earlier in the season made it even more difficult. We kept asking ourselves, “Can we really kill both the father and the daughter in the same season? That’s nuts!”
WOLPERT | Can we do this to Alex?! That poor kid! [Laughs]
NEDIVI | But in the end, that’s also what made it feel right. What we’ve learned is, the more painful it is for us, the more painful it usually is for the audience.