THREE’S A CROWD
Killjoys’ core trio are spread throughout the galaxy as season four gets underway...
Killjoys’ resident bounty hunters – Dutch (Hannah John-Kamen), D’avin (Luke Macfarlane) and Johnny (Aaron Ashmore) – stand stronger together than alone. Unfortunately, the trio ended season three scattered across the galaxy and realities. D’avin and Dutch, along with a pregnant Delle Seyah (Mayko Nguyen), were stranded in an elevator drifting helplessly in space. Meanwhile, Dutch and Aneela ventured into the Green to confront a growing evil named the Lady. When the show returns for its fourth season, showrunner Adam Barken teases that the characters will be “on the run”.
“We’ve had Dutch and Aneela heading into the Green, and then when they finally get out and reconnect with the boys, they now know who their ultimate enemy is in the Lady,” Barken tells Red Alert. “They realise just how deep her tentacles and influence go in Old Town, and that they have something the Lady very much wants, which at the beginning of the season is still inside Delle Seyah’s belly. Knowing the danger they are in, the Killjoys basically have to go on the run to decipher a series of clues that will hopefully allow them to stop her. But they don’t have the same things they normally rely on. They don’t have the RAC. They don’t have their normal group of people who support them.”
Dutch and her creator, Aneela, are considered two of the deadliest women in the Quad. What that means is their mission – along with Khlyen (Rob Stewart) – to hunt down and destroy the mysterious Lady should be quick, easy and painful for her. However, their initial altercation doesn’t go exactly as planned.
“Aneela realises the time she was spending in the Green talking to what she thought was her father, was actually the Lady,” Barken explains. “They realise in the Green, where the rules of reality are pretty malleable, the Lady can do things they couldn’t even imagine. They have to learn they can’t trust their own eyes, or their own hearts, in terms of what they are seeing right in front of them. That’s something that we will play out throughout the rest of the season, helping them figure out how to have their final confrontation with her.
“We knew we had the alien Hullen, who were cool, but were very much about you not being able to tell who it was,” continues
They have to learn they can’t trust their own eyes, or even their own hearts
Barken. “It was very much Invasion Of The
Body Snatchers-type creepiness. We knew for the Lady, we needed to have something even more than that, but we were still struck with the idea that what’s always scariest is dealing with a villain who you don’t even know is in the room with you. What we wanted to go for was looking for a way to still have her be represented as a person, but not necessarily a person you can keep track of. I’ll just put that cryptically. We’ll learn that the Lady isn’t necessarily in her original body. We get a chance in [the already greenlit] season five to show what that original body looks like and it’s pretty freaking scary.” The end is nigh
Every season continues to build on the show’s scope and scale, and this one will be no exception. Now that the Killjoys aren’t calling Old Town or Westerly home, there’s plenty of opportunity to explore other familiar and foreign destinations.
“We’re going to places we’ve been before, like we have a fun trip to Utopia, the crazy drug and sex space station out in the Quad,” says Barken. “Then we’re going to get to go back to the Jaqobis’ home planet. We get to go to a very mysterious planet that is ancient and holds a lot of secrets to what the Green is and who the Lady is. Through that, we populate it with different people we haven’t seen before. In season four, we’re really expanding the texture of the J.” Syfy gave fans a thrill last year by renewing
Killjoys for two more seasons, but there was a catch: season five would serve as the show’s last. Still, that gives them time to close out the story in style. Barken treated season four as act one and crafted one hell of a cliffhanger that will eventually pay off the following year.
“One of the benefits of knowing we had two seasons was it really allowed us to imagine what we were going to see at the end of season five, so we wanted to build towards that,” Barken reveals. “In the past, we always ended on a cliffhanger, but also a big victory. We wanted to find a way to reverse that, so we ended on an even scarier note, but also a sense of how we are going to beat this person. It’s tough. We know that the thing our team relies on the most is each other. So we wanted to take the one last thing away from them and then see how they figure out a way to get back together and find each other again.”
Killjoys returns to US Syfy on 20 June. It also airs on Syfy in the UK (date TBC).