Walker Boss, Jared Padalecki on Series Finale’s Surprise Cameo, Cordell and Geri’s [Spoiler], More Season 5 Plans

TVLINE | Looking back on the episode, is there anything that you would’ve done differently or changed? Or are you pretty satisfied with the way it ended?
Well, it’s probably a two-part answer. We did not know the fate of the show when we wrote the finale. I wrote the finale with Blythe Ann Johnson. We did know, as always, things are uncertain, and so we tried to, as always, write a cliffhanger, write some twists, leave some threads for an upcoming season. We were given the chance, a little bit into either the prep or the filming of the finale, to change anything, just in case, and we did not yet know the fate of the show. So it was sort of like a gamble, and I wrestled with that decision for many days, and talked to the writers, and talked to the producers and to Jared [Padalecki] about what we should do, if anything, and basically, ultimately, we didn’t want to insert a last-minute scene that would sum everything up. It’s 42 minutes of television. We didn’t want to summarize a whole series in one scene, or a few changed lines, or anything like that. So we, ultimately, decided to leave it as it was, which was a tough decision, but I still feel like it’s a good finale. It’s satisfying in many ways. It does not tell the full tale. This show was supposed to go on for 10 years, in my brain, and so, it doesn’t sum up everything, but I didn’t want to rush it, if that makes sense.

TVLINE | You still get a sense of where these characters are going to end up, even though we don’t actually see it.
One thing we did get The CW to agree to, which I’m super grateful for, [is] we do have an extended finale by a few minutes, which is a huge deal in terms of scenes, because there were scenes that we had cut that we put back in, which was huge. So we do have that closure, and everyone is in a good place. When I was discussing the finale with our producer/director, Steve Robin, who I adore, we were talking about like, “It’s a good finale, but is it the-lights-off-at-Cheers?” which is, for a certain age group, like the ultimate finale. [Laughs] And it’s not the-lights-off-at-Cheers because I wasn’t prepared for the end. Had I known I had been writing for the end, I would’ve taken the whole fifth season and really written to the end. But I don’t feel like the characters have been robbed.

TVLINE | You set up some really fun cliffhangers for a potential Season 5, especially with the reveal of James Van Der Beek as the Walkers’ new neighbor. How did that come together?
That whole process was so exciting. We always wanted to leave some threads for Season 5. We were going to do the cult next door. So he was supposed to be a cult leader. Ever since James Van Der Beek moved to Austin, we’ve been like, “How do we get him into the show? What can we do?” and this just seemed like the perfect thing, and we finally got him for this part. A small-known fact is that we had actually approached him to be Clint West [in] Season 1, which Austin Nichols, ultimately played, and Austin was so excellent in that role. I would not have it any other way. But James had been on that list for a possible villain. We were sort of circling him, like, “Is this possible? Can we get James?” and Jared and James are friends, and Dawson’s Creek was, of course, my first job in this industry. So it was a very beautiful full-circle thing.

TVLINE | Of all the cliffhangers in this episode, that one was the most like, “Oh, darn, I wish I could’ve seen this play out.”
I’m not going to lie, part of me wanted to leave people mad. [Laughs] Part of me wanted to have like a big, splashy ending, so then people would be like, “How could you end this?!” No, it was going to be a lot of fun, and to me, personally, I think there was something profound in James Van Der Beek with Jared on this show, sort of like a great throwback to the original WB, and the commentary on the evolution of this network, which I was maybe reading too much into, but I enjoyed it. [Laughs]

TVLINE | What would the dynamic have been like between James’ character and Cordell? Had you thought that far ahead yet?
Oh, gosh. I talked to James, and it was so last-minute. He’s a saint. I think it was truly like the day before we were shooting. It was really, really insanely last-minute, so thank God he lives there. He loved the idea of the cult leader, and I think, actually, half those clothes are his own clothes. [Laughs] He was super into it and super into the dynamic he would bring, and he was really into the idea of playing a fun character, an interesting character, a bad character. He was going to be kind of quirky bad, but amusing. He was going to be a really whimsical, amusing character. We were not going to do blood cult, bad, bad, bad cult. We were going to do like kooky cult.

TVLINE | There was a moment, earlier this season, where I thought Luna might be The Jackal, but then I was like, “No, they wouldn’t do that to Cassie.” But then you killed him, which is, I think, even worse.
I know, it’s so funny. So many people thought he was The Jackal, which I love. The crew gets the scripts when all the department heads get the script, so they didn’t know, and so there were crew speculations, all season long, about who The Jackal was, and Luna was up there. Some people thought it was Sadie, which was a good one, too. [Laughs] It was devastating to kill him, but it had to be done for drama. I have a joke about all of our best guest stars, like Matt Barr, Austin Nichols, Justin Cortez Johnson, we just kill them all. But it doesn’t mean anything on our show. You can come back as a ghost. It’s fine.

TVLINE | You did give Cassie a bit of a hopeful note there at the end, when she got the promotion, and it leads to this interesting dynamic of she’s now Cordell’s superior. What were you excited to explore with that, if the show had continued?
I was really excited to explore exactly that, her being his superior, but it wasn’t going to be a desk job with her. She was going to still be on the streets. But I was excited to see the dynamic of her having to discipline or corral or whatever Walker and Trey, and sort of be in charge of them a bit, and make calls with Captain James. We’ve never seen him have a number two. So that would’ve been really fun. And just seeing her have that dynamic of taking control of a job that Cordell, himself, never wanted, and just seeing her take charge would’ve been really fun.

TVLINE | Geri and Cordell went through their struggles this season, but they ended the finale in a much healthier place. Is it safe to say they were definitely going to get engaged?
You know, it’s funny. We had a joke in the writers’ room about the end of the series, and truly, I thought it was going to go 10 years. Walker says to Emily in a flashback, I think, in Season 1, Episode 6, I think he says, “Going to marry Geri and work at the Side Step,” if Emily ever dies. And so that was sort of the end goal, but even when I was given the chance to alter the finale in any way, I didn’t want to get there. It was too fast for a proposal. So I didn’t want to do that right away. The engagement ring box was a very last-minute add. It was truly on the day of filming that scene. We went to the props department and said, “Hey, do you have a box? Can we put it in his pocket?” We shot it as an insert so that we could cut it out if we needed to. We didn’t want to be married to it, literally. I didn’t want marriage to be the end-all, be-all for her. I wanted more for her. So I didn’t want to rush to an engagement for that reason, and it just seemed too fast. I think, ultimately, yes, they end up together. If we’d had a fifth season, we would’ve made a story point out of the engagement, as in, like, he didn’t ask, or he did and it went south, or something happened. We wouldn’t have done that off-screen, for what it’s worth.

TVLINE | When she calls out to him, he says in this meaningful way, “I’m ready,” and it’s obvious he’s talking on another subtextual level. But it sounds like Geri’s not ready, she’s not in the same place.
For sure. I was always, like, “Geri’s not ready.” I was always very interested in the character of Geri, of she wants more, and she wants something else. So even if he was ready to propose, I don’t know that she was ready to say yes. That was going to be a whole other thing.

TVLINE | How might have this time away from work have changed Cordell with the leave of absence?
That’s interesting. Part of me wonders, in a fifth season, if he ever goes back. Because I never thought, in my mind, that he went to the grave a ranger. I think, at a certain point, he stopped it, because to me, his struggle has always been the work/life balance between family and work, and where is he going to end up? I think that, ultimately, hopefully, he gets more invested in his kids and steps away from that, and from the get-go, he wasn’t gunning to be captain, lieutenant, anything like that. He’s not trying to climb that ladder. So what is it for him? And I don’t know. I think he would’ve gone back for a season to be partnered with Trey on the streets, just doing the daily grind as a ranger. But I don’t know if he would’ve gone too much further beyond that. I think he would’ve maybe gone on to something else.

TVLINE | What can you say about what the governor wanted Liam’s help with?
The governor’s daughter was kidnapped. Liam has a very particular set of skills, and the governor wanted Liam’s help. We were going to get Liam back into the halls of the political offices and dealing with that stuff. So it was going to be fun, Liam-doing-high-stakes-government stuff.

TVLINE | One of the other things that you hinted at but was kind of left dangling was the business proposal that Geri made to Sadie and Stella. Any details you can share about that?
It was going to be the Side Step expanding and just keeping it in the family, and also, just keeping Saylor [Bell] on the show, because we love Saylor, we love working with her. We could only have so many series regulars, but we really loved working with Saylor. So it was sort of dangling a carrot of if there’s another Side Step, do we open this up? Do we have another storyline with the expanded Side Step? And what that opening is like, and what pursuing Sadie’s music is like at the same time. We just wanted to keep her in the mix.

TVLINE | Have you changed your mind, at all, about Cassie and Trey? [Fricke previously told TVLine there were no romantic feelings between the characters.]
[Laughs hysterically] No. I never want them to be together. [Laughs] That’s so funny, Vlada, that you would ask that. Oh, my God, I’m like crying laughing. That was an ongoing argument in the writers’ room.

TVLINE | I remember you mentioning that. So I wondered if maybe somebody had swayed you by the end of the season.
No, I did not want them to be together. Here’s the thing: In my mind, if we had gone 10 seasons, in the finale, maybe they would’ve gotten together, yes. Certainly not in this timeline. Ultimately, sure, but no. If we had been on 10 years, and she had gone on to the FBI, and blah, blah, blah, and they revisited each other, sure. But not when they were working in the same office. No, no, no. In Season 5, he was going to have an old Army friend, a female friend, calling. He was getting mysterious phone calls. He was going to have an old Army friend calling him for help that was going to cause some complications for him. So that was going to happen there.

TVLINE | Were there any other Season 5 storylines that you were excited about?
I’m sure we had a ton. The cult was going to be fun. August was going to fall in love with — That was our in: August is going to fall in love with the girl next door, get dragged into the cult, have to be extracted. That was going to be fun. The governor stuff, leading to a proposal at the end of Season 5 with Walker and Geri… It would’ve been great.