Each Season’s Big Bad Gets Re-Animated?
They say you can’t keep a good man down. On Wednesday, you can’t keep a good villain dead.
First, homicidal pilgrim Joseph Crackstone was resurrected à la Frankenstein by his descendant Laurel Gates, using the Codex Umbrarüm and some unethically sourced body parts. Then we met Slurp, a zombified Nevermore alumnus whose clockwork heart Pugsley accidentally jump-started. Feeding on mystery-meat sandwiches and later human brains gradually restored him to his original form: Isaac Night, aka Thing’s original body.
As co-showrunner Miles Millar put it: “I will say, in this show, no one is officially dead dead. There’s always a way.”
Which brings us to Season 3 and the possibility of another big bad getting reanimated. The most likely candidate is the mystery character from the cast announcement video, symbolized by an oversized wine bottle bearing a question mark on its label. That bottle may be the clue: alcohol—spirits—hinting that whoever it represents is currently dead. Subject to change, of course.
With the show promising to dive deeper into Hyde mythology, we can’t ignore Nevermore founder Nathaniel Faulkner, who cataloged outcasts in his diary before being killed by a Hyde—perhaps while trying to master it. A page seemingly torn from that diary can be found on the desk in the Principal’s Office at Wednesday: Eve of the Outcasts. It catalogs a rare type of outcast known as a Death Whisper, capable of killing the living or resurrecting the dead with a Latin incantation.
Faulkner could have persisted as a spirit, appearing to the living as Goody Addams and Principal Weems have, and persuaded a Death Whisper (perhaps one of the Nightshades) to restore him to life.
Bringing back Nevermore’s founder—killed by one kind of outcast and revived by another—would be a fitting twist.