Freeform’s second season of Stitchers starring Emma Ishta and Kyle Harris premiered on March 22, 2016 and will be airing on Tuesday nights at 10pm ET/PT. At the end of season one, the fate of Kyle Harris’ character was left hanging after he injected drugs to stop his heart so Kirsten and the team could access his memories. And at the 2016 WonderCon in Los Angeles, Harris talked about his reaction to reading the script that left his fate in the air.
“I mean, one can only hope that they’re doing it for dramatic effect,” said Harris during our interview at WonderCon. “I’m like, ‘I thought I was doing okay on this show. I thought I was in good graces with the fans.’ But that thing was like a page turner. It was a great note to end it on and a great way for my character to kind of surmise the entire season into one ridiculous action, to go, ‘Look, I don’t know how else you’re going to trust me. This is it.’ Since I’ve made it through that is a nice launching pad for my character to start with because now that my character’s come out of that it’s a whole different side of this character that we’ve yet to see that I think fans wanted to see a little more of because there were glimpses of the hero last season but more or less catering to her and making sure that she was okay. But now we’re very much eye-to-eye and toe-to-toe when we’re doing field work.”
The events in the season one finale could be a game-changer for the relationship between Harris as Cameron and Ishta as Kirsten. Ishta confirmed things will change, saying, “It almost does sort of a flip flop and swaps around.”
“Now I kind of have the ball for her to be like, ‘All right, it’s your court. Do what you want to do with it.’ Whereas before it was like, ‘I hope you like me,’ but now she knows so it’s dealing with that on top of the work on top of Kirsten looking for her dad,” explained Harris. “So it’s a lot of layers of things and once you kind of brush it all out of the way, there’s the heart of the two characters that no matter what ends up happening will still be the pulse of the show.”
Asked if she knows what’s in store for her character, Ishta answered, “Jeff [Schechter] is great at leaking secrets to us so we often know what’s coming up or have an idea. Sometimes it changes. Sometimes we’ll think it’s going one way…he will have told us it’s going one way but maybe the network had notes or he changes his mind and we go in a completely different direction. But usually we generally have some sort of idea where it’s going and where our characters come from. You have to try to take that not too much to heart because you don’t want to play too much into it where the audience doesn’t know yet. You don’t want to create something that’s not yet there.”
Stitchers involves tapping into the memories of the newly deceased, something that sets it apart from other sci-fi shows. “It’s a technology that’s foreseeable, you know?” says Harris. Ishta added, “It’s stuff that’s all in the process of being built and happening. It’s fairly tangible technology.”
“There’s a suspension of disbelief but also at the same time you wouldn’t be surprised if in the next 10, 20 years this is a thing,” said Harris. “Also, I think the characters are the heart of the show and the cases and what they’re trying to solve on a daily basis might be more deep and convoluted and just kind of heavy-handed, there’s always a moment of lightness that kind of lets you know that we know what we’re doing. At the end of the day we’re essentially 20-somethings working for the NSA doing what we’re doing – and it’s fun.”
It’s bizarre to think a technology like the one at the heart of Stitchers may exist in the future, but it’s possible. “It’s really cool. When we shot the original pilot we had a bunch of people from Google’s diversity program and they were really into the show because it had women in tech and so often you see sort of a very stereotyped version of a women in tech. They’re like the goth girl – like there’s a very particular type of girl that they portray. And so they came by and they were really into the show and they were telling us about people who this is their job, essentially, is to kind of create this technology, very similar to be able to recreate or find people’s memories.”
“They were kind of teasing that if we get to come back for a season three that they would expose the program in which case it would then follow suit to people feeling that we don’t have the privilege to invade their privacy which is their memories and then things kind of unfold from there,” added Harris. “And that’s just hearsay from our showrunner as an idea. But I do think that’s very interesting because who says that we have the privilege or the right to someone’s memories that are private even after their dead.”
