‘Dead Boy Detectives’ Bosses Unpack Lingering Finale Questions and Muse About More ‘Sandman’ Cameos in Potential Season 2
Max Gao
Netflix's ‘Dead Boy Detectives’ showrunners talk Edwin and Charles’ relationship, whether Niko is dead, those ‘Sandman’ cameos and a second season.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-hollywoodreporter-2021/assets/app/icons/favicon.png
The Hollywood Reporter
[This story contains major spoilers from season one of Dead Boy Detectives.]

For the better part of the last 30 years, the Dead Boy Detectives — Edwin Payne (George Rexstrew) and Charles Rowland (Jayden Revri) — have specialized in helping ghosts whose cases would otherwise go unsolved. But in reality, these two teenagers — who were killed decades apart at the same boarding school in the U.K. and befriended each other only in death — have only just begun to unravel the mysteries of their own identities.

In the season one finale of Netflix‘s adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Matt Wagner’s DC comics Dead Boy Detectives, Edwin and Charles find themselves entrapped in the clutches of Esther Finch (Jenn Lyon), an evil witch in Port Townsend, Washington, who threatened to exact revenge on them in the pilot episode. After decades of feeding little girls to a magical snake to maintain her youthful complexion, Esther, a local sorceress who was granted the gift (or curse?) of eternal life but not eternal youth, has set her sights on an even more powerful elixir. By hooking Edwin up to an inhumane, man-made contraption in her kitchen, Esther is able to extract a magical potion from Edwin, who endured over 70 years of anguish and suffering in Hell, that will grant her immortality and untold power over the city’s residents.

Upon discovering that Esther blew up Jenny’s (Briana Cuoco) butcher shop and captured Edwin and Charles in a magical glass box, the clairvoyant Crystal Palace (Kassius Nelson) and her bubbly bud Niko (Yuyu Kitamura), who are technically the “Living Girl Detectives,” take it upon themselves to save their new best friends — even if, as Niko puts it, “it’s scary, and the odds are bad, and we may die horrifically.”

Using her clairvoyant powers, Crystal is able to summon Lilith, the goddess of scorned women, who bestowed the gift of eternal life upon Esther. Lilith, it seems, is not best pleased to learn that Esther has been killing children for her own vanity. Before eventually getting her comeuppance, Esther claims one last victim: Niko, who sacrifices her life to save Crystal from a deadly dagger. (But as viewers discover in the season’s big cliffhanger, Niko may not be gone for good.)

By the end of the season, after formally welcoming Crystal to the agency, Edwin and Charles decide to jump through a mirror back to their London office, where the Night Nurse (Ruth Connell) has been waiting impatiently to send them to the afterlife. But in a twist that not even Edwin and Charles could see coming, the head of the afterlife’s Lost & Found Department (Tamlyn Tomita) realizes that the Dead Boys were responsible for closing some of the department’s most difficult cases, and she grants them indefinite immunity to continue their work. To add insult to injury, the Night Nurse, who looks like she would very much like to be anywhere else, is now forced to oversee the operations of the Dead Boy Detective Agency.

On the morning of the eight-episode drop on Netflix, executive producers and co-showrunners Steve Yockey and Beth Schwartz discussed with The Hollywood Reporter the emotional arcs of the show’s core four, the future of Edwin and Charles (who, at one point, looked like they could be more than friends), whether Niko is really gone, and the likelihood of future crossovers with The Sandman.

***

Edwin has a number of people around him — Niko, Monty (Joshua Robert Colley), The Cat King (Lukas Gage) — all instrumental in his journey of self-discovery in the first season. What narrative purpose did some of the supporting characters serve in helping Edwin reach that place of self-acceptance about his sexuality?

STEVE YOCKEY We sort of built a triangle around him, and you hit the nail on the head. There’s Niko, who’s very supportive of an identity that Edwin doesn’t even know he’s allowed to have at the beginning. There’s The Cat King, who brings in almost an oppressive sexuality, in terms of the degree of aggression [that he preys on Edwin]. And then there’s Monty, who brings the young romance quality that unlocks some of those new feelings.

Edwin doesn’t end up wanting any of those people; those people all help him realize and understand that the feelings he is having for his best friend are something other than friendship. He’s just never had to name it before, because they’ve never had the existential threat of him going back to Hell so immediately. Crystal’s presence really triggers the entire thing, because he doesn’t understand why he’s jealous [of Charles’ crush on Crystal].

BETH SCHWARTZ I feel like Niko is so opposite from Edwin, just loving love. It’s not even just about his sexuality; it’s about being open to overt emotions and feelings. She basically says everything that’s on her mind, and he’s so buttoned-up. I think through her, he learns a little bit to be himself.

YOCKEY Something that was important to us in the writers room — and we obviously had several gay or queer people in the room — was the idea that Edwin has to come to understand that it’s a lifestyle he can embrace, but it’s not being gay that he has the major issue with in [this] season. As opposed to the entire story being about, “Oh no, I can’t be gay. That’s not allowed,” the thing that he’s grappling with are these feelings for his best friend.

Viewers get the first glimpse into Charles’ tragic backstory in episode three, when Edwin and Crystal are working desperately to free his spirit from a nightmarish loop inside a haunted house where a man killed his wife and children and then himself. We come to understand that Charles’ happy-go-lucky façade belies the scars of the abuse he endured at the hands of his father, who is still alive. How did you go about crafting his arc?

SCHWARTZ For us, the introduction of Crystal was the inciting incident for Charles’ journey. With Edwin, it’s just been the two of them for so long. So once he started having a living teenage girl that he had a crush on, that changed the dynamic and also made him realize all the things that he’s missed out on. Even though he obviously loves his relationship with Edwin, how [Charles] died was very tragic, and he’s never really dealt with that, because he and Edwin don’t have that kind of relationship. They say they tell each other everything, but they don’t really get underneath the surface as much as they should.

Having Crystal be an outsider in this friendship is what makes him question that. Also, she’s observing that, “Oh, there’s something not quite right going on with him during this murder loop” [in episode three], which was horrific for everyone, but obviously took a much more personal toll on Charles.

In episode seven, Charles takes it upon himself to rescue Edwin after he is taken back to Hell. On the never-ending staircase out of the underworld, Edwin finally confesses his feelings to Charles, who reassures his best friend that, even if he does not feel exactly the same way, he is still the most important person in the world to him. How would you characterize the state of Edwin and Charles’ relationship by the end of the season? We don’t really see them address the elephant in the room.

YOCKEY It was really important to us that Edwin be able to fully accept himself by telling Charles how he feels. He obviously does it in a very harrowing moment, but I think he feels like if they get to the top of the stairs and go through that door, he’s never going to be brave enough to say it in the real world. So that’s why he picks that moment.

But it was so important to us that, instead of Charles revealing that he is also deeply in love with Edwin, which would not make sense with Charles’ character [based on what was established in the first season], we did give him the best possible response that you would want from your best friend if that kind of thing happened, which is, “I love you. I can’t say that I’m in love with you, but we’ve got a lot of time to figure out how this can work.”

So they’re starting something new going into the season one finale. Even in episode eight, there’s a brief mention from Edwin [about how he told the boy he liked that he liked him], but obviously, they have bigger fish to fry. But the question is, after this confession and the acceptance, even though they’re both comfortable with it, will that change their friendship moving forward?

SCHWARTZ I feel like this is so relatable, whether you have a crush on your best friend or there’s just something in your friendship that changes. Throughout your life, when you have these close friendships, there’s always something that changes a friendship. So exploring exactly how this confession will change them going forward — whether it makes them grow closer or further apart, and what kinds of obstacles they’ll have [to face together] — is what we’re hoping to explore, if we’re so lucky to get a season two.

YOCKEY I do think, based on what Beth just said, Edwin is the more likely of the two to be neurotic about it.

SCHWARTZ Charles is like, “Everything’s fine!”

YOCKEY Charles has a chill vibe, for the most part. (Laughs.)

Viewers will likely be pretty evenly split over who Charles should end up with: Edwin or Crystal. So, as the architects of this love triangle, can either of you make a case for one relationship over the other?

[Yockey and Schwartz both laugh nervously.]

YOCKEY Look, when you’re a teenager and you’re still trying to figure yourself out, you can attach yourself at the hip to somebody else, and [that person] can change the next week. So it’s not that the relationships aren’t fundamentally strong; it’s just that feelings ebb and flow, and we’re having a lot of fun with that. I do think that the end of season one is very satisfying. But our characters are left emotionally up in the air. So we’ll see where they end up landing…

On a show called Dead Boy Detectives, it’s easy to overlook the importance of living characters like Crystal and Niko in the story, but they form the other half of the core four and have a particularly special friendship of their own. How would you describe the evolution of that relationship? What binds them together?

YOCKEY When they’re [sitting] on either side of the bathroom door in the second episode, Crystal was relating to what it feels like to be ostracized, or what it feels like to be outside of your life. But she tells the story about not being able to find her parents and not knowing if her parents can find her, and how traumatizing that is. She’s talking to a girl who she doesn’t know has recently lost her father, and the grief has kind of severed the connection to her mom. They’re both young girls who are missing their parents, and I feel like that is how they connect. I will say that, instead of Dead Boy Detectives, those two girls could easily be Live Girl Detectives, and we could have a spinoff. (Laughs.)

SCHWARTZ They have not a great track record with friends in general. With Crystal, as we find out [in episode eight], she’s not been very nice to her female friends. Niko was so nervous and didn’t really put herself out there. So I feel like they are each other’s first real, true friend where they’re actually themselves around each other. I think that’s an extremely special relationship that they found while dealing with all these crazy ghost boys and magic.

In the last three episodes of the season, Crystal taps into the collective power of her female ancestors to defeat and bury her demonic ex (David Iacono), to save Edwin and Charles from a giant supernatural mushroom called Teeth Face, and to summon Lilith to help end Esther’s never-ending quest for immortality. What were you looking to accomplish with Crystal’s emotional arc?

YOCKEY It was always envisioned from the pilot that Crystal’s relationship with David the Demon would essentially mirror an abusive relationship. [He’s] an abusive ex who took pieces of her with him that she can’t get back, and she can’t figure out how to move forward. So it’s not a subtle metaphor, but it’s effective.

We crafted the season so that Charles hits his emotional apex in [episode] five, Crystal hits it in six, Edwin hits it in seven, and then we got the finale. We knew Crystal was going to be episode six, which Beth wrote, where everything was going to come to a head with David. We knew we were going to introduce “Ancestor Island,” which is a concept that Kristin Layne Tucker, one of our writers, brought into the room, which we lost our minds over. We were like, “We’ve got to figure out how to put this in the season.”

SCHWARTZ There was the piece with David the Demon, where she kind of puts that to bed in [episode] seven, but then finishes her arc when she realizes her identity. She sees herself in Esther, [in the sense that] she could have been her if she didn’t find these amazing group of friends through season one. Crystal can really relate to Esther because Esther had been through hardships, and that’s why she tries to, in the finale, speak to her as someone who also felt like they were wronged.

YOCKEY She almost gets through to her!

SCHWARTZ She almost gets through to her, but Esther’s too far gone.

At the end of the season, [Crystal] realizes that she’s got to figure out who she is, because she has these memories of someone that’s very different from the person she has become all season — and that is 100 percent because of Edwin, Charles and Niko. She’s going to go back to London and figure out which Crystal she’s going to be, which she’s obviously very nervous about.

In retrospect, you did foreshadow Niko’s tragic fate a number of times, but the great thing about the world you’ve established is that no one can really be killed off because they can be brought back as a ghost or another being. The final scene shows a figure resembling Niko huddled up in an igloo with her parasitic Sprites (Max Jenkins, Caitlin Reilly). What’s up with that?

YOCKEY Wherever Niko is in that final scene with the Sprites, she has a very long journey ahead of her to get back to her friends. … I guess we could also say, it’s a really good thing that Tragic Mick gave her that soapstone polar bear.

By the end of the season, there are at least two new additions to the agency, but viewers are left to wonder whether Jenny will also be making the trip to London with Crystal since Jenny can see spirits now as well.

YOCKEY We were always excited about Jenny’s eventual inclusion. I think Beth and I are still unsure exactly what’s going to happen with Jenny because she could very well come into season two, or she could stay in Port Townsend. We’re going to decide what’s best for the show moving forward.

I think our goal with the Night Nurse is that at some point, she would be sucked into the world of the boys and become essentially the [Rupert] Giles to their Buffy [the Vampire Slayer] gang, if you will, but a very reluctant one. If we are lucky enough to get a second season, Beth and I have talked to the writers about having a lot of fun with that dynamic of someone who actually has a lot of information and a lot of insight, but isn’t thrilled to be there and doesn’t really feel compelled to share it.

SCHWARTZ What’s so fun about the Night Nurse is she’s the reason why she’s staying there, because she kept having these small moments of empathy for the boys. She’s not used to things that are not black or white; she’s used to things that fit in categories and are filed. But these boys, for whatever reason, got to her.

YOCKEY There’s also more to find out about the Night Nurse!

As someone who just recently began reading the Dead Boy Detectives comics after watching the show, there is one detail that I’m still trying to figure out: What are the various rooms in Hell meant to represent? Why do Edwin and Charles come face-to-face with so many different people on their way out?

YOCKEY Charles goes in through the door [to Hell], goes down the stairs, goes through limbo, goes through lust, and then goes through gluttony. And when he gets to gluttony, he takes a left turn and goes behind the machine, and that’s how he gets to where the horror is. But he’s moving through Dante’s levels of Hell. They are being chased by a giant spider made out of doll heads, so I understand if you missed this part. (Laughs.) But when they’re coming back out, Charles says, “None of this was here on the way down.” And Edwin says, “You have to have been in Hell to see what’s really here.”

Because they’ve been in Hell, now that they’re on their way back out, they can see what was going on. Charles walked past all that stuff, but he just couldn’t see it. For instance, he hit the little bell and made all of those people in limbo scream in pain, but he didn’t realize that’s what he had done until he was on the way out. So that’s the mythology that we’re dealing with there, and the layers of Hell are actually labeled in [Edwin’s] notebook that [Charles] is looking at as lust, gluttony, limbo.

We don’t actually hear about how Edwin got out of Hell in the first place. Is that something you are hoping to reveal in a future season?

YOCKEY We will be talking about it eventually if we do get future seasons, but right now we just say he escaped because our show takes place alongside The Sandman, and The Sandman hasn’t gotten to [adapting] Season of Mists yet, which [explains] how Edwin got out of hell. So we had to manufacture our own [reason]: He escaped by perseverance, instead of Lucifer leaving the door open. We’re making sure that our show fits in continuity with The Sandman happening at the same time.

After the show was moved from HBO Max to Netflix, what were the Easter eggs from The Sandman that you fought to include in the first season of DBD?

SCHWARTZ We were most excited to have [Kirby Howell-Baptiste as] Death. We wanted Death from the beginning, and it’s constructed where we always planned to talk around the world of Sandman, because we couldn’t legally use anyone from Sandman. In the original iteration of the pilot that Steve wrote, in that scene where [Edwin and Charles] are hanging outside the window, hiding from Death, we just didn’t go inside [the office].

YOCKEY We just saw the Wing.

SCHWARTZ It was built-in for her to be on the show. So then when we moved to Netflix and they were like, “Can you use some Sandman characters?” We were like, “Yes! And we have the perfect spot for Death.”

YOCKEY I was also obsessed with the idea of getting to use [Donna Preston’s] Despair, especially at the point that we use Despair [in episode seven], which is when Edwin’s about to become something dark and gross [and mock his former bully’s punishment in Hell]. She’s there as a little bit of a reality check, but hopefully setting up future interactions with Edwin. But we were so excited to get to establish her gallery because they don’t ever show it in The Sandman. [Production designer] Tony Wohlgemuth did a dead-on, comic-book accurate version of her gallery of mirrors, and we got to do the scary version of Despair — not the Desire [played by Mason Alexander Park] sidekick version of Despair. That was really important to me because I think she is the scariest of the Endless.

How would you approach future crossovers with The Sandman? Would those characters have to slot in specifically for the story that you’re telling, or would you look to build specific cases or plots around certain characters in the world?

SCHWARTZ They would have to make sense for our characters first to build that crossover, because our shows are two very different tones. But knowing from the beginning of the next season that we can use people [from The Sandman] definitely feels like we have a lot more opportunity [to do so].

YOCKEY Both of us would love to get to hang out with Gwendoline Christie and have Lucifer in the show, but we would only do that if Lucifer was interested in a specific case that the boys were investigating. Our show is much smaller in scope than The Sandman, and having those giant characters can easily drown our show. We can’t really move around them because they’re so powerful. So it would just have to be well-positioned cameos, but obviously, we’re excited about the opportunities.

Dead Boy Detectives is now streaming on Netflix.