Wide Finale: Creators James SA Corey and Naren Shankar explain the big decisions

Over the weekend, The wide ended for the second time—only this time, showrunner Naren Shankar and franchise creators Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham (collectively known as writer James SA Corey) closed the series on their terms. The popular television adaptation of James SA Corey’s novels once faced an untimely end after original broadcaster SyFy refused to renew it past its critically acclaimed third season. Against all odds, the series found a new home on Amazon Prime, which has just wrapped up an abridged six-episode season that plunged its characters into what they’ve been trying all along to avoid: war.

As the show wrapped, Polygon got on the phone with Shankar, Abraham, and Franck to talk about how there’s no clean way to end a war and the importance of accepting that the universe is full of things we do never will really understand.

Polygon: The whole season is one big war story, was that your goal from the start?

Naren Shankar: Yes absolutely. That was the intention. We’ve talked about it in those very terms. This is a war story. It’s these guys who have been at war for eight months, say at the start of the season. It’s a war of attrition, and the whole season has been sort of a crawl, agony, climbing the ladder – getting out of that hole and taking the fight to the final battle.

Despite being a major war story, the show’s final season builds towards that very optimistic place; Was this something you always wanted to end up with?

Shankar: When adapting the books, we tried to stay very close to the spirit of the books. So that kind of mix of optimism and hope and admiration for humanity, and also anger and darkness and an awareness of all the failure that humans are prone to. For me, that’s part of the project from the start. You know, Ty really is the one who created the story in all its different forms. And I think that was in the DNA from the start.

Ty Franck: Yes, everyone who knows me knows that I am very optimistic and almost as sweet as candy.

Daniel Abraham: Yes. His favorite line is, “If you die, can I have all your stuff?” [laughs]

And yet, despite a bittersweet ending, there’s also a nod that things aren’t getting any less complicated – Holden is quite undermining the compromise between the UN and OPA, things are tense!

Shankar: One of the things we’ve always worked with in this project is the idea that things are always complicated. War is complicated. And reconciliation is complicated. And it has always been complicated and always will be complicated; The part where things get really easy is usually when some kind of atrocity is going on.

Frank: Yes, it’s easy to stop fighting if you just kill everyone on the other side.

Abraham: For clarification, we are against it! [laughs]

Yeah, one cool thing about this season is emphasizing that institutions resist reconciliation, and the Rocinante crew is just being dragged around.

Shankar: The Roci has always been that third alternative, you know? From the beginning people asked are you martian Are you Earther or are you Belter? That was always a sign that they misunderstood, because the Cancer is always – once you decide on a tribe, you’re wrong.

Abraham: Holden talks about it in Season 1, he says “That’s the whole problem: When people take sides.”

Can we talk a little bit about these prologues? Ultimately, what did you want to get across by breaking up this short story in every episode?

Shankar: These opening vignettes are all based on the novella that Ty and Daniel wrote Strange Dogs. And it’s about people living on Laconia under the rule of these Martians creating this independent state. For us, it was a way of connecting the events of Season 6 to the big questions that ended Season 5 about the alliances Marco made with these renegade Martians to get warships. He gave them the proto-molecule as payment and the scientists who knew how to use it and they took it through the ring to do something mysterious and the ship is mysteriously eaten at the end of season 5. There was a way to deal with all these questions while not losing sight of the protomolecule that has always been the focus.

And one thing I’ve always really appreciated about the show and its story is how that Protomolecule is still so unknown. Was it important to keep it that way?

Frank: I’ve always felt that detailed explanations of the unknowable are either bad or annoying because the story is, “Here’s this dramatically unknowable thing,” and then the reader or viewer conjures up an image in their mind – you’ll never become the thing be who they imagined. And if you try that, are you either disappointing or just plain bad?

The reality is that we are still struggling to figure out the big questions about the universe. So any answer you give that claims completeness is usually a lie. And that’s okay. It’s okay to leave a secret in the world, it’s okay to say, here are some clues or clues as to what’s going on. Here are some striking details that certain answers might imply. But if you sit down and give us a dissertation where you say, “I’m going to go ahead and tell you all the mysteries of the universe in my five-minute talk” — that’s usually not a happy ending.

Shankar: Ty always put it like this, what I loved: The protomolecule was the rock that broke people. And by that he meant every time people thought they knew what it was and tried to bend it to their will, they found it was something else. And it was just that we couldn’t understand it. And that runs through the story from the beginning.

Frank: Yes, and in the first book we address that because we say the protomolecule is like a bunch of monkeys that found a microwave. One of them figures out how to open the door and says, “Oh, that’s a box to put things in.” And another realizes that a light comes on, and they’re like, “Oh, that’s it a light to light up the darkness.” And another says, “This is really hard and I can break things with it.” So it’s a handy weapon to get stuff.

Everyone is wrong because a monkey has never reheated a frozen burrito. So you have no context. So when people find the protomolecule, we’re going to go, “Oh, that must be it this.” And we’re always wrong. Because with the context in which the protomolecule was created and the species that created it, we share no context. And like Naren said, we’re always wracked with it because we don’t understand it. And in many ways we will never be able to understand it. So we just kill ourselves with it because we think it’s a big rock.