Vampire Academy's first season has now wrapped up, with all 10 episodes available on Peacock. Though the show hasn't been officially renewed for a Season 2, the Season 1 finale set up a world with a lot of potential and a lot more to explore, not just for these characters but for ones viewers haven't met yet. That wasn't all the finale did, however. It also delivered some pretty big moments of payoff after a really hard season for everyone in the dominion.
CBR had a chance to talk with showrunners Julie Plec, one of the minds behind The Vampire Diaries, and Marguerite MacIntyre about the season finale. The pair dove into their long-term plans for the show, the storylines they'd like to go into in future seasons, and, of course, stumbling upon the perfect actors to play the main ship of the show, Rose and Dimitri.
CBR: As a fan of the book, you sort of come into this with a sense that you know what's coming, and then Andre shows up at the end of Episode 9, and you're like, "What?" So that's a twist.
Julie Plec: That was fun for us, too, to try to come up with a good story twist that the book fans would not expect. That felt like a good one.
Absolutely. Even as Tatiana was walking and we sort of knew it was her, I wasn't expecting what was coming. So that's also a fun place to leave fans for a week.
Marguerite MacIntyre: Well, that's the goal. We want them to be. I mean, I do love it myself, too. It's that good suffering, where you finish an episode, and you're like, "Why is there no the next episode? I want it right now." That's a good feeling, too.
Episode ten also ends like that, though with things more settled. Was that the intent?
MacIntyre: Absolutely. We've said this, but Episode 9 felt like such a big finale, like you could have ended on that image in Episode 9 and been like, "Whoa." Because we had that good feeling there, the opportunity was there for [Episode] 10 to just close some doors and some stories and really launch [what's next]. So it makes people crave a Season 2 to be like, "Where does this lead? Where does this leave the entire dominion? What the heck is going on here?" So that was the hope, is that people walk away getting some satisfaction, but also wanting to know where this all goes.
The last episode has a lot of setup that only book fans are going to get, even stuff about the Alchemists! Adrian was in Season 1. So is the intent to do the Bloodlines storylines with the Vampire Academy ones or to get to the point in Vampire Academy where Sydney appears that much faster?
Plec: When we first started adapting, we realized that the bulk of book one is really about a high school party and a lust charm. Then the bulk of book two is a lot about a ski trip. When you're adapting for television, those are more like single episodes than they are whole seasons. It really opened the door for us to say, "Okay, we will want at some point to see this ski trip, for sure. We will want to do all these things, but we don't have to do them in the order that they happen in the books."
So we'll see about Sydney. She's one of my favorite characters. I read all the Bloodlines spinoff books, so I'm very excited to introduce her. It's a matter of when. And Adrian, when does he come back, and what do we do with him? There are a lot of questions for us to take into the writer's room of Season 2 when we start to really think about all that stuff.
In a perfect world where you get as many seasons as you like, what does that look like?
MacIntyre: Five?
Plec: I think five. I know we have three.
MacIntyre: We have three for sure.
Plec: Then, once you introduce Sydney and Adrian back into the world, they really open up a lot. So you could get five -- at least five.
Some of the stuff you set up in the last three episodes you didn't get to pay off or explain, like Dimitri's loss of faith arc and his kiss with Tatiana. Is this something you're planning to go back and explain, because why did he kiss her? What made him be on Tatiana's side, even for a moment?
MacIntyre: Yes, I think that his faith was one of the great deep storytelling things for the season, and all faith, if you dissect it, feels a little like, "Huh, that's weird." Anybody who practices any faith knows that stuff can seem confusing, and maybe what's more important is where it leads you than the actual mechanics of the faith itself, which I think will be the journey he'll have to go on because it really unsettled a real pillar of his life. Duty, rule, faith -- it's what he says on the ferry to Rose in Episode 7. All those things are anchors, and now, in many ways, the only anchor he really has is Rose and the duty he has towards the vision that she has and that he's now having of this system that's fairer. So where does that lead him? That's a good journey.
Plec: I'm also excited to see him... You know, he's been so stringent in needing to follow the rules, but his eyes have been opened to the corruption within the society as well. Now that he's going back into the province to work against the Queen, and the leadership of the Guardians has collapsed, it's brand new territory for him, and it's going to be a brand new Dimitri in that way.
MacIntyre: He's also just been accused of treason and busted out of jail, so he's got a lot there's a lot there to jump off from.
Is that connection with the Queen something he might be willing to use going forward?
MacIntyre: [smiles and nods]
Will that sort of bond him with the rest of the boys? We haven't seen much of Dimitri with Christian or Mason, and Mason is alive, right?
MacIntyre: Well, he's in surgery.
That means there's hope! All fans need is hope.
MacIntyre: I agree.
Good characters and good ships are a combination of things, and Rose and Lissa really work, but Rose and Dimitri also really work in a way that's almost surprising. Their chemistry feels like it's grown. How was it to put their relationship on the page and see the actors bring it to life? Is there a moment of, "Oh, this is really working for the two of you?"
MacIntyre: We cast this off zoom. Let's just go back to that. We hadn't met anybody in person, [and] were like, "Hello, everyone's in Spain." We just hoped everybody liked each other, and this made sense, but it felt right, and we were lucky. They are really committed actors and also really genuine and generous. So the alchemy between actors, when that happens, when they're open to really working to become those characters and really understanding the arcs and really being deliberate about that homework and just being kind of delightful humans... I was very proud. I was very proud of the growth.
You're right, it was on the page, but of course, unless it comes to life between these two actors, it won't mean anything. So it was partly who they are as people, and it was also a lot of hard work. I really honor that work that they did, and then, Julie, you can talk about that moment you can't write, the moment in [Episode] 8. You can't write that boxing scene in if you don't have what you've just described -- it won't work. It will be mean and horrible and unpleasant instead of dramatic and emotional, and this last lifeline Rose feels for their relationship. So I feel like we earned our way there and our way out of it. Julie, I mean, I wasn't on set when you directed because I was prepping [Episodes] 9 and 10, but how was that when you were directing them in that scene? What was that work like?
Plec: Well, it was just an intense physical experience for them because Dimitri... Kieron [Moore] is a boxer, so he was in his element. So he never swapped out for his stunt guy. He was in every frame of that. Sisi [Stringer] is not a boxer but really likes to do her own stunts, so it was a combination of working her as hard as we could without breaking her and Kieron just wanting to be in the whole thing. They were just so excited. So it was a lot of really raw emotion and raw, raw enthusiasm, I think. So it made the scene quite easy when all was said and done right.
Then you sort of end Dimitri and Rose's arc in a moment where they want to be together. He basically says, "I love you," and she basically does the same. Then she has to leave, and they're working for the same thing, but separately. It took them a really long time to get to this place in the books, but we're here.
Plec: Yeah, the books are six books of obstacles in their romance. They just get greater and more and more intense. Even for us, having hinted that "I love you," but now they can't be together because she's going off to the human world, and he's staying behind to fight the queen... It's just this beautiful tension that is keeping them from having what they really want, which is [the] drama.
All ten episodes of Peacock's Vampire Academy are now available to stream.