What We Can Expect If The Midnight Club Gets A Season 2
Mike Flanagan is known for his heady, deeply emotional ventures into horror, with projects like "The Haunting of Hill House," "The Haunting of Bly Manor," "Midnight Mass," "Doctor Sleep," and "Gerald's Game" all generating massive fan bases and solidifying Flanagan as a modern horror master. His latest venture takes him out of his usual realm of adults dealing with the most and puts him into "The Midnight Club," inspired by the Christopher Pike novel of the same name. The series sees a group of terminally ill teenagers living at the Brightcliffe Hospice facility run by the mysterious Dr. Georgina Stanton, who meet at midnight to share ghost stories that become terrifyingly real.
Critics and audiences alike can't seem to agree on how to feel about "The Midnight Club," but with over 80 books to adapt from Christopher Pike's catalog, there's nothing that says "The Midnight Club" has to end after its debut season. In an interview with Collider, Flanagan talked about a potential second season, and how "The Midnight Club" differs from his usual Netflix output.
"This is the first time we've ever designed anything to be ongoing, and it's strange, it's a whole new vibe," he said, "because you want the season to wrap up and be satisfying, but you need to leave enough on the field that people might want to come back. Usually we're done with the show, we can talk about it, it's in the past, but with this one, we have no idea if it's going to come back or if we're going to be doing more." Flanagan described the waiting game as "suspenseful" but lauded it as a chance to "experience the tension for a change."
The trouble with terminal characters
Season 1 of "The Midnight Club" ended on an intentional cliffhanger but poses the unique challenge of how to return to a series where the main characters are at risk of dying at any moment. "If season 2 includes any time jump, we might have seen the last of some of our favorite characters," Flanagan said. While Netflix has not given an official go-ahead for the second season, Flanagan told Collider that if the series were to return, they wouldn't jump pretty far ahead in time. "For a lot of our characters, they don't have too much time for us to burn," he said. "So we would be coming in relatively tight, I think to where we left off."
Regardless of how much we love the characters, their deaths are oddly part of the show's internal timetable. "That's the thing, though, about this show is if it does continue, there will have to be a new cast," Flanagan said. "And they'll have to kind of come in one at a time as people go."
As deeply upsetting as this thought is, terminal illnesses are an unfortunate part of life. When dealing with a character diagnosed as terminal while they're still very young, it's hard to say goodbye to someone we're just starting to get to know. As show co-creator Leah Fong described it, "Hopefully, we were able to have some nice emotional arcs that fulfill themselves, but then, you know, mythological stuff."