'Stan Against Evil' Creator Reveals the Season 3 Premiere's 'Twilight Zone' Ties

Tonight, Stan Against Evil returned to IFC for its third season -- and quickly it became clear that the post-apocalyptic setup was not going to run the length of the season. By the time the season's second episode -- an homage to The X-Files -- hit the airwaves half an hour later, Stan (John C. McGinley) and Evie (Janet Varney) were back in the more familiar version of Willard's Mill.

Despite the ominous ending of season two, Gould told us that he never had any intention of carrying the post-apocalyptic version of the show for more than a week -- partly because there was no logistical way to make it as good as he would have wanted to.

"You can watch that show; it's called The Walking Dead, and it's great," Gould joked. "There's no reason for us to do our shitty version of it. I was inspired in this episode by the Twilight Zone episode 'A Game of Pool,' where Jack Klugman finally gets the chance to play the pool shark that's been haunting him all his life, and he beats him, and he realizes that he's in Hell and everybody he plays, he beats, and that there's no challenge for him anymore. I just thought, 'what a great idea, that if it's Hell on Earth, then all that means is that everybody is trapped in their own private hell.' That's what that became. If I had an unlimited budget, I might have spent a couple of days in post-apocalyptic Willard's Mill. I had some ideas. I like the idea of Denise in a motorcycle with a sidecar and World War I goggles, but our budget limitations are extreme and that wasn't a realistic option."

That was not the only strange and intriguing image that popped into Gould's head while working on the season three premiere.

"I write from images: I had an image for that episode of Gerard Duquette just standing in the middle of an abandoned freeway with a Victorian horse and wagon," Gould said. "I didn't know what it meant, but again, you can do that but then you can do nothing for three more episodes, budgets are so tight. This is a situation where the budget restrictions forced me to come up with something and I'm pretty happy with what we came up with."

The show is one of the strangest and funniest on TV, and part of that is exactly because of the low production value, which creates a show Gould compares to Doctor Who.

It's Dark Shadows, it's Doctor Who. We know what we're doing, we know what it looks like, and it looks good enough but not too good," Gould explained. "I don't want any giant, digital cthulus. I don't find them scary. That's not what turns my motor. It's like The Outer Limits. There's a lot of The Outer Limits that's just like 'What's the monster this week? That? Great.' Because it's a man in a suit and you can tell it's a man in a suit, that helps the humor. The way that comedy works, it requires a suspension of disbelief in and of itself and it has to be the same one that you're using for the monster stuff. That's why if you ever saw the movie Evolution with David Duchovny and Orlando Jones, it didn't work. They went nuts with the CG, and you knew that nothing was real, so the wisecracks weren't grounded in anything."

"If you admit that you don't take yourself seriously, then people will let you say something serious. If you take yourself serious, people tend to dismiss what you say."

Stan Against Evil airs on Thursday nights at 10 p.m. ET/PT on IFC.