‘The Body’ Creators Address Show’s “Unexplained Mysteries”; Tease Season 2 Hopes

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for The Body now streaming on Netflix.

Though Netflix’s new YA horror series The Body thrives on mass hysteria, or “group think” as creator Quinn Shephard calls it, Shephard and co-showrunner Gina Gammell stress that there are no wrong individual interpretations of the first season’s ending and what happened to Grace.

In the eight-episode drama series, a high school dance team — The St. Bart’s Lions — gather for a party on Halloween night 2004 to initiate their newest member, Grace Franklin (Sofia Wylie), who has won the spot to replace Maddie Delaney (Shirley Chen) after she broke her ankle ahead of their regional competition.

Their ritual, though, goes sideways when Grace goes unconscious, falls to the ground and has seizures, forcing popular girl Anya Butler (Kristina Bogic) and under-the-radar Lisbeth Anderson (Geena Meszaros) to drive her to the hospital only for Grace to be pronounced dead by Lisbeth, who finds no pulse after a major seizure. Grace did ultimately swallow an ecstasy pill as part of her initiation, in which the team members call on Satan to accept their sacrifice (Grace) in order to place at regionals.

A lot of the show’s ending elements are shrouded in mystery depending on how viewers interpret pieces of the puzzle. Grace’s gasp for breath at the end of the first episode and subsequent developments that lead to her revival in the finale always made up the “north star” for Season 1’s coming to a close.

“We always knew that that was where the show was going. From the beginning, that was the arc of the first season, and I think a lot of that has to do with things we would love to do next season and how to keep carrying the story,” Shephard told Deadline. “So I think that we never really talked about deviating from that because it was always how it was going to end,” Shephard said. “There’s really no right way to watch the show. One of our favorite things is hearing people debate out, someone who really believes that the show is supernatural and someone who really believes that it’s a mass hysteria story, and there’s a grounded explanation for every step of the way.”

Despite limited interaction with their newest team member, the girls on the dance team begin to think they see Grace in a ghostly form, haunting them from her comatose state, which is sparked by Elise’s (Sara Boustany) performative fainting at mass. Though many of the Lions eventually reveal that their visions — which brought the mass hysteria to an all-time high between them and those closely involved in their lives — of Grace were not real, the exact combination that brought Grace back to consciousness is still anyone’s guess.

“We’ve had people say that it’s body possession. We’ve had people say it’s the devil. We’ve had people say that she’s just waking up and it’s gibberish,” Gammell said.

“That she’s really God. That there’s someone else’s ghost in her body, or that she just heard them when she was in the coma. But also, isn’t that life?” Shephard added. “I mean, how many how many of us have a friend who’s like, I swear I saw a ghost yesterday, and then you sit with that person for 20 minutes, you try to figure out what the explanation is. That’s this show.”

Anya’s confession to Head Priest Father Franklin (Nnamdi Asomugha), in the finale can’t be ignored as a possible catalyst to Grace waking up.

“That’s a fire take,” Gammell said. “That is Maddie’s prophecy, and if there’s a Season 2 we’ll be all over that.”

The drugs that the whole team took at their Halloween party came into question as a possible cause for Grace’s comatose state. Tyler Flores (Marcel Ruiz), who procured the ecstasy, assured the girls that it was clean while offering up his own analyses about the mass hysteria, connecting it to repressed sexuality and frustration and more. That character began in a very different “first iteration” that Gammell described as a “bro, fuck boy, bad guy.”

“He just sort of started to get born once we saw an image of him in our head [as] a bit eccentric and a bit of a lover boy,” Shephard said. “We did really love the idea that he’s always the voice of [reason] and is speaking the deepest truth of anyone, but he’s always a bit stoned while saying it, and no one’s taking it seriously.”

Tyler hovers between the popular group of guys that associate with the dance team clique while still engaging thoughtfully with students of lower social standing like Leo and Lisbeth.

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“I think it went hand in hand with not trying to use the men as weapons and, actually, the women are the ones who are a little bit problematic in this show,” Gammell said. “It was partly that, and how our collaboration worked. When talking about finding the humor and talking about finding the softness of it or the softer edges of it, I think that Tyler is a good example of that.”

As for whether Tyler and Lisbeth had sex, a potential Season 2 might answer that question. It’s hinted at when the pair are showed on their way to the act and Tyler asks if she has “protection” to which she asks “from what?” leaving the door open for a potential pregnancy angle despite the closed door scene.

“I think if they sleep together, it’s like another great mystery of the show. None of us were there, so none of us really know what happened in that room,” Gammell said. “But I do think Geena has a joke that Lisbeth’s first kiss was the mouth-to-mouth with Grace when she was trying to resuscitate her. So, I don’t know how fast she’s going. She’s just a baby.”

Both Gammell and Shephard identify as Lisbeth defenders, meaning they don’t read her as calculating or with motive in the story as she becomes part of the team.

“We’ve talked a lot a about how there is an interpretation of the character that’s really manipulative or almost teetering on sociopathic, and I think we never ever saw the character that way” Gammell said. “I think that Lisbeth is someone who is deep in survival and has been for a lot of her life. You can feel her heart. People are are like perpetually baffled by her, she’s a little bit unreadable, but I think that there is a sweetness to her and the way that she is with her brother, there is a mischievousness and her humor is so intelligent. It’s a character we’re just scraping the surface of in regards to where she can go. [She’s] desperate to find purpose and place in the world.”

The creators are also defenders of Lisbeth’s brother Leo (Jackson Kelly), who spends the most on screen time with Grace before she becomes unconscious. A drawing of her naked as a sacrificial lamb in his journal circulates as something that connects him to motive for possibly causing her collapse.

“I relate to Leo. He has some of the heaviest scenes of the whole season, and Jackson is such an incredible actor who carried them with so much grace. He is somebody who is so tortured by his scrupulosity. He has a bit of an OCD compulsion around morality that is really hard for him,” Shephard said. “We weren’t trying to make a show that was hyper-critical of religion. Obviously, religion is a theme in the show, and it touches on it in a lot of ways. But I think his character is a necessary and important exploration of someone who takes things quite literally, even more literally than his priest wishes him to, which is like where we get that nice bond where Father Franklin is like, ‘Hey, you’re taking you’re this to be a little too hard on yourself.’”

Leo was also spotted as the last one talking to Grace on the fringes of the party to apologize for the drawing, which she found in his journal.

“That was important to us to show, that he has these very normal, human impulses, as a teenage boy that then he turns, in his own sense of fear, into something really perverted and out of control,” Shephard said. “I actually think it’s quite nice that we see a moment from his priest, rather than an oppressive priest, a moment of friendship between them, and we see the nuance of religion.”

Adult figures like Father Franklin, Coach Shauna Miller (Gabby Windey) and Grace’s father Michael (Motell Foster), provided a more “grounded explanational” presence in the story to represent real-life stakes amidst the girls’ panic over paranormal activity. And Father Franklin falls in the vein of the broader presence of men in the show.

“There’s such an earnest desire to do the right thing in that character. Something that came up really early in this show is, in so many stories about groups of young women, there’s a storyline or a desire to do a storyline about men taking advantage of young women and trying to control them. And I was like, ‘Listen, we we’re not doing that in this show, but we are doing these girls torturing this poor man who is really just trying to do his best,’” Shephard said.

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