‘The Midnight Club’: Mike Flanagan on Chances for ‘Hopeful’ Season 2 & Death Personified
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Season 1 of The Midnight Club.]
The Midnight Club may have yet to receive a Season 2 renewal, but co-creator Mike Flanagan is already thinking about the future of the series inspired by the works of author Christopher Pike.
As readers of Pike’s books may have realized, Season 1 utilizes one of his stories as the frame for the show, and each night when a group of sick teens convenes at the Brightcliffe hospice’s library to tell tales, they’re based on other entries from the writer. And while setting a series at a hospice home for young people may seem pretty hopeless, Flanagan is envisioning a more hopeful outcome for the characters fans have come to know.
(Credit: Eike Schroter/Netflix)
In Pike’s original book, all of the teens in the story die, and although Flanagan wouldn’t say if that’s the plan for The Midnight Club, he did address the source material. “The book is sad in that the club dies,” he explains. “But the epilogue of the book is kind of beautiful. And the thing that we have, that the book didn’t have is that as we lose our cast members, we’ll have new ones.”
It certainly makes sense as Ilonka (Iman Benson), Anya (Ruth Codd), Kevin (Igby Rigney), Spencer (Chris Sumpter), Amesh (Sauriyan Sapkota), Natsuki (Aya Furukawa), and Cherie (Adia) weren’t the first kids of Brightcliffe hospice to participate in the unending Midnight Club. And Netflix did purchase several of Pike’s titles to adapt in the future.
Flanagan further shares that he envisions “how eventually Ilonka orients the new kids in if she’s the last one standing.” He adds, “That cycle is something that the book didn’t get to do, and we get to do that.” As for bringing the story to a more hopeful conclusion, the writer and director says, “I always want to end a little more hopeful than the heavy source material. And this one has a lot to say about the cyclical nature of life and death.”
In other words, Flanagan continues, “Death is not something to view as a sad thing. And you’ve met Death on the show… the personification of Death has appeared on the show, but it’s not what you think.” Fans can make of that what they will, but they’ll have to wait for a Season 2 renewal announcement to find out if the question of who death is will be answered.
The Midnight Club, Streaming now, Netflix
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