Wednesday Creators Explain Season 2’s Biggest Twist: “A Natural Idea and MacGuffin for a Season”

Netflix has officially dropped the second part of Wednesday Season 2, making all episodes of the highly anticipated return available for fans to binge. The new batch of episodes picks up right where the first part left off, continuing to unravel the central mysteries of Nevermore Academy while introducing a host of new threats and shocking twists for Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) and her friends. The season was also dedicated to expanding the world and the lore of its iconic characters, digging deeper into the history of the Addams Family in ways never before seen. For instance, Wednesday Season 2 gives Thing (Victor Dorobantu) an origin story, which series creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar conceived as the emotional core of the sophomore season.

Warning: The following article contains spoilers for Wednesday Season 2.

“There wasn’t a Thing origin story,” Gough explained in an interview with Deadline. “What’s great for us with the Addams family is that there really isn’t any mythology or lore to them, other than the TV show, which is where they first got their names. And, of course, there’s the Charles Addams panels, but they didn’t have names in those. It was just called the Addams Family. For us, it’s a great blank canvas to really delve into these characters and figure things out. People always ask us, ‘Where’s Thing from?’ and ‘Are you ever going to tell Thing’s origin story?’”

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Season 2 of Wednesday reveals that Thing is the severed hand of Isaac Night (Owen Painter), the former roommate and best friend of Gomez Addams (Lucius Hoyos as a teenager) at Nevermore. Decades before the series’ main events, Isaac tricked a young Gomez into powering a machine designed to “cure” his sister Francoise (Frances O’Connor) of her Hyde curse, neglecting to mention that the process would kill Gomez. Morticia (Gwen Jones as a teenager) intervened to save Gomez, severing Isaac’s hand and causing an explosion that killed Isaac and permanently stripped Gomez of his own powers. The electrical surge from the destroyed machine reanimated the hand, which the Addams family took in.

“It felt like a natural idea and MacGuffin for a season,” Millar added. “It was interesting following some of the comments. We thought it was pretty obvious from the very first moment that [Isaac/Slurp] appears, you see the hand come out of the dirt. You think that would be the big clue that gives it away. But I think many people hopefully didn’t see it and were surprised by that ending, and then exclaimed, ‘Oh my God! It was right in front of our faces the whole time.’”

“That’s really the emotional heart of the show, and that’s the emotional climax of the season,” Millar explained. “That’s the moment when Thing obviously separates and stumbles back to the family, his real family, and takes ownership of that. It felt like that was really a moment we were driving to all season. Tim [Burton] directed it so beautifully, and it really does — we think — pack an emotional punch when you see that. It’s very bizarre, because it’s a disembodied hand and it should be moving, and I think it is.”

Thing’s Origin Story in Wednesday Also Solved a Gomez Addams Problem

Wednesday firmly establishes the Addams clan as “Outcasts,” a term for the various supernaturally gifted individuals who attend Nevermore Academy. This framing provided clear classifications for most of the family, with Wednesday and Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) as seers, and Uncle Fester (Fred Armisen) and Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) able to generate electricity. The one outlier was the patriarch, Gomez Addams (Luis Guzmán), whose lack of discernible powers created a narrative gap. The origin story for Thing cleverly solves this problem by revealing Gomez once possessed electrokinesis, the same power as his brother and son.

“It was one of the questions that came up in the writers’ room,” Millar said. “We talked about how, in a world of outcasts, does Gomez fit into this? Why did he go to Nevermore? It led to the idea of, ‘What if he did have powers and they were taken away from him?’, And then it all combined into this moment in the climax, which we see in flashback.”

Wednesday Season 2 is currently available on Netflix.

What did you think of Thing’s shocking origin story in Wednesday Season 2? Let us know in the comments!