‘Shadowhunters’ Finale Postmortem: Showrunner Ed Decter on Jace’s Future, Simon’s Predicament, and More

Spoiler alert: Don’t read any further if you haven’t seen Tuesday’s (April 5) Season 1 finale of Shadowhunters.

Tonight’s Season 1 finale of Freeform’s Shadowhunters brought up even more questions than it answered. Clary (Katherine McNamara) and Jace (Dominic Sherwood) are not only at odds over the recent reveal of their similar parentage, but now Jace is off with their father, Valentine (Alan Van Sprang) stuck on a giant ship as he builds an evil Shadowhunter army with the Mortal Cup. Meanwhile, Simon (Alberto Rosende) has been shut out from the vampires and Hotel Dumort for freeing Camille (Kaitlyn Leeb), but it’s all worth is because they finally woke up Jocelyn (Maxim Roy), right? Showrunner Ed Decter helped us sift through the tough questions this finale left us with, and teased what’s to come when the show returns for Season 2.

Now that Jocelyn’s awake, what’s the plan going forward?
Well, there’s a lot of mother-daughter drama to be yet unpacked. From a parent’s perspective, Jocelyn was protecting her daughter for as long as she possibly could, to learn the cold, hard reality of her real identity and her real parentage, but from Clary’s point of view, there’s a tremendous amount of resentment and also danger from not having known her true legacy. So, what you have is a really good story of different perspectives and conflict because of what Jocelyn did. I mean of course, at the very end of the [season] they have a tearful, joyful reunion, but all the rest of this is still to come.

RELATED: Shadowhunters Finale Preview: Dominic Sherwood on the Hunt for Valentine (VIDEO)

What’s going to happen with the whole Clary/Jace situation?
There is going to be some major drama coming from the idea that Jace and Clary are brother and sister, and yet still are so drawn to each other. And maybe it’s just brother-sister drawn to each other. Jocelyn figures in that story, but there’s a lot of drama to come.

Where are Jace and Valentine off to? Do they have a destination or are they just off to build an army?
Valentine is going to build an army and his plan is to take over the Shadow World. We’re hoping that the audience will wonder, and they are right to wonder, whether or not Jace has truly gone over to the dark side, or is this part of a plan of his to do something else? We don’t know.

He seems so unstable in the finale. I mean, he basically goes rogue for like half the episode!
When he finds out that he’s Valentine’s son, he feels that some of this darkness and violence that’s been inside of him is actually evil. And that’s what he’s wondering about himself. The greatest thing about the novels that Cassandra [Clare] wrote, really, are that they’re about identity. Who are you? Are you made from your blood? Or are you made from the people who love you? And that’s really what’s so passionate about the novels, and I think that’s why so many people are fans of the novels, because you discover that her sort of major thesis is that your family are the people you’re willing to die for, but they’re not necessarily the people that are connected to you by blood.

Clary brings up family all the time in the show. She always calls this new group her family now.
Right, right. And they’ve become her family, and they’re willing to die for each other, and actually have risked it already in Season 1 several times. It’s a very passionate statement, that love is more powerful than death, which is really a fantastic thesis to have.

Yeah, that’s very powerful.
It’s the thesis of Romeo and Juliet, by the way.

That casts a really dark shadow on the Jace/Clary situation.
[laughs] Well, yeah! I mean, there’s a lot of dark times ahead. The Shadow World is going to be at war. Clary had made an alliance with all the groups when they were trying to rescue Meliorn (Jade Hassouné), and then it was all broken apart by rescuing Camille. So we leave our story at a big moment of turmoil.

What is Simon going to do now that Raphael’s (David Castro) banished him and threatened to kill him because he set Camille free?
Simon, like Clary, has been ripped away from his life, and everything he’s known. And I will say that at first, Simon’s gonna try to see if, even as a vampire, if he can somehow return to the real world in some way, and sort of live a half-life in the real world. And we’ll see how that goes, because of course, he can’t go out during the daylight. So the question remains: Can you be a vampire and somehow still have your natural family and part of your life back?

There was that weird hug and “I love you” between Clary and Simon. She looked kind of distressed by the end of the hug.
It had nothing to do with Simon.

Is there any chance for Simon and her?
She deeply loves Simon, in the way that you love your absolute best friend for life. And the big difference that happened at the end of the season is that now Clary and Jace, who she clearly loves, and clearly wants to be in love with, is now her brother. So all of a sudden Simon has this moment of hope, so there’s a lot to be played out with that, too.

Did you shoot Valentine’s army scenes on an actual cruise ship?
It wasn’t a cruise ship, it was what they call a “lake tanker,” and so it was shot right outside of Toronto on a gigantic boat. I think the boat was 800 feet long. And you know, sometimes you can do sets like that digitally, but this one we actually shot on a real boat.

What was your favorite part of the finale to bring to life?
Well, we had talked about the Mortal Cup for 13 episodes. I was glad to finally see it get used, and see it work for the first time in 13 episodes, because even the writers were getting tired of writing about the search for the Mortal Cup! I was very happy that it was found and it’s being used, even if it’s for evil. At least we got to see the power of the Mortal Cup and why everybody was chasing after it, and now we’re left to wonder, ‘Uh-oh. If he starts having an army of Shadowhunters, what is to befall the world?’

Shadowhunters has been renewed for Season 2.