[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Irrational Season 1 finale “Reciprocity.”]
After the events of The Irrational Season 1 finale, we have to see a different Alec (Jesse L. Martin) because he now has the answers he’s been after for years.
As he, Marisa (Maahra Hill), Kylie (Travina Springer), Phoebe (Molly Kunz), Rizwan (Arash DeMaxi), and Rose (Karen David) discover, the bombing that left Alec scarred was to cover up one of Senator Sanford’s (James Tupper) staffers dying during one of his events a couple days earlier; she was one of the victims at the church. One of his war buddies, an FBI agent and Marisa’s mentor Bob Caswith (Garry Chalk), is Mathias—and was the one to kill (yes, he died) Jace (Brian King). The tag of the finale takes us to six weeks later, with Rose kidnapped and thrown into a van, just after she gets off the phone with Alec.
TV Insider turned to showrunner Arika Lisanne Mittman to break down the episode and tease Season 2 (which was picked up in November 2023).
That cliffhanger with Rose—can you say if that has anything to do with anything we saw this season or if it’s connected to something we don’t know yet about her?
Arika Lisanne Mittman: I would have to say tune in to find that out. In all honesty, we’re breaking the story in the room right now, so it’s all happening in real time.
At what point in the season did you know that was the cliffhanger you wanted to end on?
We knew for a long time how we wanted to wrap up the church bombing story. In terms of what tag we were going to give viewers to come back and tune in next season, we batted around a lot of different things for a while. It wasn’t until we started breaking the finale that we landed on that piece of it.
What did you want to do with Alec and Rose’s relationship leading up to that?
We weren’t sure what was going to happen, honestly, originally with Alec and Rose. We cast Karen David in Episode 104, and she did a wonderful job, and we thought, let’s see what happens with this relationship. Let’s see where this goes. And so we wrote Episode 107 where they went on their 24-hour date, and it was a test for us as much as it was for the characters to see, how does this play? We love Karen, and we love how those characters play together, so we felt like it was definitely something worth exploring. Also from a character standpoint, it’s really interesting to see how Alec navigates his first relationship post-divorce.
Sergei Bachlakov/NBC
You did seemingly close this church bombing case. And earlier this season you had said that you planned it as a one-season story, but is that completely closed, at least for now?
For now, yes. For now, it’s completely closed, and we want to see where Alec goes from here because so much of Alec’s life has been not knowing exactly what happened. It’s really taken up such a big piece of him and now he is able to move forward in his life in a lot of ways. That’s what we’re going to get to see next season. And how does he move forward now that he has the answers that he sought for so long?
Talk about how you decided who would be responsible, both Sanford and Bob, when it comes to how you wanted Alec and Marisa to deal with the revelations, the aftermath, and the start of closure that we got.
It was really important to us that the answer to this big question of what happened be rooted in something psychological, and we really liked the idea of loyalty and of this notion that you had somebody like Bob, who—we talk about it in the episode—generally would’ve considered himself to be a good and moral person, and what happens when our morals start to conflict and if something that he’s considered to be a moral imperative, like paying back this man who saved his life, conflicts with another moral imperative of do no harm and don’t kill anyone and don’t break the law. We wanted to explore the idea of what happens when those things come in conflict and how we resolve that cognitive dissonance.
The six-week time jump at the end—was that, at least in part, to move Alec and Marisa forward in how they’re coping since you’ve set up that Season 2 probably has to pick up relatively soon after that cliffhanger?
You got it. Yes. We wanted a couple of things. We wanted Alec and Rose’s relationship to be a little further down the road, and yes, we didn’t want to be starting Season 2 kind of still in the wake of Jace’s death and we wanted to give some of these things time to settle. But obviously with the ending with Rose, it’s going to be a pretty direct pickup. So we wanted to make sure we built in that time jump so that we could give the characters a little space and distance from what happened.
Will we see Phoebe again? Is Molly going to be a series regular in Season 2?
Molly will continue to be a series regular in Season 2. … We wanted to be honest to the character and honor what she’s going through mentally and not have her panic disorder solved in an episode and have everything just go back to normal. We really wanted to put her character through something, but she is taking this other position. She will have stories there, and we’ll go from there, but she is definitely going to continue to be a big part of the fabric of the show.
Is this other professor going to be a major part of the show, or is it more about Phoebe’s stories she’s relaying to Alec?
We’re still breaking Season 2, so I can’t really answer that question yet.
How’s Rizwan going to do stepping up now that Phoebe has moved on?
We’re going to challenge Rizwan, and I think he’s ready to rise to the occasion, but there’s definitely going to be lots more for Rizwan do next season. I think Rizwan’s gotten a lot more confident than he was when we first met him, and I think it’s going to be fun to see Rizwan come into his own.
Talk about putting Kylie in the FBI.
Travina is such a fantastic actress, and we just adore her, and we adore the character of Kylie. While we love all of the scenes with Kylie and Alec at home and we never want to lose any of that, we also felt like we wanted to give the opportunity for Kylie to get out of the apartment and be more involved in some of the storylines. It’s really just a testament to how much we love that character and that actress and we want her to be able to be more active in more stories. We also thought it’s an interesting thing for her, a character who is a little bit suspicious of law enforcement, who never saw herself working with law enforcement, to grapple with that. We have some exciting stories that we’re planning to tell with her as she reconciles her new life with her previous world and her old friends.
You said you don’t want to lose the Alec and Kylie scenes at home, so does that mean he’s just never moving out?
[Laughs] Well, time will tell. Like I said, we’re in the early stages of breaking Season 2, but at the moment, Alec and Kylie are still living in the apartment.
Sergei Bachlakov/NBC
Why kill off Jace? He could have been seriously injured. Something else could have motivated Marisa—and she was already pretty motivated, too.
It’s to keep the dramatic stakes as high as possible and to really have the impact we wanted. So far the people who have died for the most part are people that we didn’t really care about or have an emotional connection to him. It was just one of those things where we felt like it would have the most impact on Marisa. We always just want to maximize emotionality and really give our characters something, give Marisa something weighty to deal with.
Is there anything you can say about Season 2?
Only that we’re going to try to keep doing what the audience has really enjoyed with these fun episodic stories, and we plan to keep giving all of the psychology-based histories that people have loved about the show.
Is Alec going to have a new intro for his class now that he knows what happened?
[Laughs] Well, we’ll see. Like I said, we’re still in the early stages of breaking the new season.
The Irrational, Season 2, TBA, NBC