Colony Season Finale Preview: “Gateway” [+ Sarah Wayne Callies Interview] 

Last week saw Broussard and Katie join a new cell. Their plan to kidnap the minster didn’t go quite as planned, but in accidentally killing every human on board the train, they discover what at least one of their invaders looks like.  In “Gateway,” The Resistance kidnaps that high-value target. Is it dead? Do their hosts know who’s responsible?. For now, it’s safe to say that the cell isn’t done with this “being” yet. But will they be able to get any information from it? As all hell breaks loose in the bloc, things are going to get very, very bad for Proxy Synder.

While Bram gets lost in the chaos, at least Maddie is able to get the other two children to safety. But what will happen with Katie and her cell? Is there anything Will can do to keep the people he loves safe?

This is a Carlton Cuse show, so don’t expect to read any spoilers about the finale here. But earlier this week, Sarah Wayne Callies talked to press. It was great to hear her give insight into Katie and Will’s relationship, how her character is like Joan of Arc, how Colony compares to other occupations stories and more.

On the fight Katie has with Will at the end of “Zero Day” where they declare that they each saved the other.

Sarah Wayne Callies: “In way, the whole first season builds to that conversation. Will and Katie learn that love is not all you need, that these ideological differences really may become profoundly problematic in their marriage. There’s a [breakdown] of trust over the course of the season that really culminates in that final argument. It’s a tough thing to come back from.

When Will says to Katie, ‘You put the noose around those kids’ necks,’ meaning Rachel’s son — that’s a huge bomb to drop on someone. Certainly people say things in the heat of the moment that they don’t mean, but that’s one of those arguments in a marriage that’s going to take them a long time to recover from.”

On why Katie didn’t tell Will about her role in The Resistance.

Sarah: “Nelson McCormick, who directed episode six, came to me at a certain point during the filming and he said, ‘I don’t think your husband should watch this episode.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘No man wants to know his wife can lie this well.’ And that gave me something to think about.

First of all, I don’t think Katie was very significantly involved with The Resistance until Will was forced into collaboration. These were people in her orbit. She might have taken a flyer from here to there, but she was not neck-deep with them. I think she makes the decision to join their work fully as a response to Will’s forced collaboration. It’s partly as a means to protect him, but also a need [for] balance, ‘I can’t stomach the thought of being a collaborating family. That’s just more than I can take.’

She doesn’t tell him, because it’s the best way to keep him safe. Juan Campanella, the director of the first three episodes, grew up in Argentina under a dictatorship. He talked to us quite a lot about just those conditions of knowing that people disappear all the time and knowing that information can be an extremely powerful, but also very dangerous currency. For Will to have plausible deniability, if he was ever questioned about his wife’s activities, could save his life. And Katie would never want to put him in a position of having to withhold information that could kill him.”

On if Katie should quit The Resistance and follow Will

Sarah: “Should the French Resistance have given up and followed the Nazis? The history of civil society is the history of resistance. I think Katie’s perspective is it’s not enough to just raise children. You have to raise children that are free.

You see it in her daughter that this little girl is getting used to it. She’s only eight. The longer this goes on, her memory is more and more a memory of checkpoints and breadlines and curfews and people being afraid of their government. Katie feels very strongly that the greatest act of love is fighting for her children’s intellectual and creative and spiritual freedom.”

On taking inspiration from her character from a real person.

Sarah: “This is going to sound a little crazy: Joan of Arc. Katie is from New Orleans, which is why the bar is what it is. Another term for a bartender is a barmaid and so the Maid of Orleans is what they used to call Joan of Arc. I watch[ed] a movie about Joan of Arc and I went in the back and I reread Saint Joan. I think there’s something interesting to the idea that Katie, like Joan, is a true believer. Katie, like Joan, runs face first into that role where your ideology meets the reality of trying to mount a resistance.

I think they both go in [thinking] they’re doing ‘The Lord’s work.’ I am doing the moral, ethical, right thing, and I have no qualms about that, ‘I might be afraid, but I won’t let my fear stop me from trying to do the right thing.’ Then all of a sudden, these are women neck-deep in politics and ethics for which they’re not equipped.

Juan Campanella also had us watch a movie called The Battle of Algiers that immediately became one of the best films I’ve ever seen. There was a lot in that film about femininity as a tool of war, which is why I put Katie in dresses and try to kind of articulate a femininity in her characterization.”

On playing Katie

Sarah: “I feel more exposed in her skin than in anyone else. But, she’s sensational and Ryan [Condal] and Carlton [Cuse] have articulated her so well, with such complexity. It’s a huge gift. I love playing her.

She’s closer to me than anybody I’ve ever played, which is a little terrifying, to be honest. That scared me enough that it made me want to do it. I tend to walk towards things that scare me. But Katie also was every bit as fully developed and articulated as Will in this story, and I think often wives and mothers are accessories to leading men. It felt to me, reading the pilot script, that Katie’s philosophical universe was as fully represented as Will’s, which made it a really exciting exploration because you can present two very different ethical responses to a dictatorship, to an occupation. You could have a real dialogue because they were two fully articulated human beings. One happens to be a woman. One happens to be a man.

I think that dialogue actually is the reason that I wanted to take this job, because it’s a really important time right now to be talking about the role of citizens in resisting oppressive governments.”

On Katie and Broussard’s relationship

Sarah: “Broussard and Katie got to know each other before it all happened. I always imagine that he’d come into the bar between deployments and she recognized in him a man like her husband — someone who’s a military man, somebody who’s been through some stuff, someone who needs maybe a little bit of space to deal with what he’s been through and what he’s seen, a space not to be judged and a space maybe not for anyone to say I know how you’re feeling, because in my experience, a lot of vets feel things that no one can understand.

I think they developed a respect and a friendship before it all happened, before it all went down. I don’t know if they will go this route or not, but something Tory [Kittles] and I talked about is a possibility that when the arrival happened, he was in the bar and he was one of the people who helped Katie get out. We shared it with Ryan and Carlton. I don’t know if they’ll build that into our backstory.

I think we all have a gut feeling about the people in our lives that we can really trust. Sometimes it happens right away. Sometimes it evolves over time. But there are people in your life that you just go ok, I’m all in. I trust you. I think Katie brings that trust out in Broussard and it’s a trust he doesn’t have for many people. She just absolutely trusts him, which is why Quayle’s orders to have her killed really shake Katie to her foundation, because she sees that Broussard is contemplating it. It’s his nature as a man who follows the chain of command.

So when he emerges up the other side of that as a human being, I think that does bring them, ironically, closer together.”

On how Colony compares to other occupation stories.

Sarah: “In the great tradition of science fiction, Colony draws very heavily from history. When I first read it, the first thing it put me in mind of was Sinn Fein and the IRA during the trouble. When I spoke to Ryan about it the first time, he told me that it was based on the Nazi Occupation of Paris. Juan Campanella has brought wonderful insight into life under dictatorship, which is how he grew up.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a country that doesn’t have either a history of being an occupier or being occupied. So hopefully this story becomes portable in that sense in that it feels personal to a wide audience who bring their own history and their own experience to it. There are probably indigenous communities in North America who would watch it and feel like they’re living in a colony right now.”

Edited for space and content.

The season finale of Colony airs Thursday, March 17th at 10/9c on USA Network.