'The Fall' Set for a Third Season: Creator Allan Cubitt Offers Teases

The cat-and-mouse game between detective Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) and serial killer Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan) will continue. BBC Two has confirmed a third season with a tweet announcing that there’s “one last act to play out.” The final five episodes are expected to conclude the series (which has also streamed on Netflix).

While speaking to Yahoo TV last month for a deep dive into Season 2, creator Allan Cubitt was already thinking ahead. Here’s another look at portions of that conversation, with added details now that Season 3 is officially a go.

Related: 'The Fall' Postmortem: Creator Allan Cubitt's Deep Dive Into Season 2

At the end of Season 2, when Jimmy (the abusive husband whose wife Spector had counseled) shoots both Spector and Anderson (the young detective Gibson has slept with), Stella runs to Spector first. Why?
Well, I might be a bit cagey about that, because I think the question is going to be asked in Season 3 — probably by the detective who’s lying on the ground, I would think.

On the surface, if I’d been asked to justify it to the actors on the day — though no one asked me — I would argue that it’s because he is under their protection at that point. The first rule of any good police officer is the preservation of life, and does she assess in that moment that Spector’s more badly hurt than Anderson? I’m not sure she can, to be honest. But he was in their custody, therefore he is supposed to be protected by them, and he’s just been shot. If you asked me to explore what the psychology below that is, I think she has a deeper connection to Spector than she has to Anderson. I think this is true, that if you find yourself in a situation where all your focus, all your waking energy, is going towards trying to identify and then trying to fathom this individual, then you end up with a very strong connection with them. And it is a connection that Anderson questions in the bedroom [when] he says, “Well, he has a strange allure,” and Gibson says, “You might find him alluring. I find him repellant. I hate him with every fiber of my being.” I think it’s more complex than that. I think that’s Gibson holding the party line, if you like. That’s the right thing to say under the circumstances, because the more complex answer is too revealing of her, and would be too revealing to Anderson in that moment.

So there’s an answer, which is on one level, it makes some sense as a police officer. On another level, it makes some kind of emotional sense for Gibson, but it is extremely questionable. As I say, I think questions will be asked.

Will we learn more about Stella’s father, who Spector read about in Stella’s journal and referenced when she interrogated him?
Yes. I think it’s a challenge that Spector makes in that interview. When other people come to review that material, it will be raised as a question and Gibson might have to give away more about her background. Indeed, her character will come under close scrutiny in the third season because of the decisions she’s made, including going in to interview Spector at all, which is a questionable thing to have happened. So it gives me an opportunity to carry on asking, answering all those sort of questions, I think.

Did you always know Jimmy would shoot Spector, or was that something you thought of later wanting a cliffhanger?
He was always the person I thought capable of violence, should I want that, should I need that. Obviously, one of the things I’m interested in is gender differences within the piece. I think it’s a feminist piece overall, but what that requires is that men’s roles are redefined in some kind of way. Right from the very beginning, he is someone who is incapable of really coming to terms with the death of his child. So he’s in a state of grief, but he can only articulate that grief in anger, which is quite a male trait. When his wife is having a go at him for not being able to articulate the way he feels, Spector says to her, “Men and women grieve differently. Try not to make judgments.”

That’s a very profound piece of advice from Spector, I think. It was always one of the things I wanted to do, to make sure that as a counselor, he gives, as he does to Annie Brawley in the second season, very, very good advice. It’s just coming from a very, very bad person, and it’s often self-serving. There are issues surrounding why he’s so drawn to people’s grief, why he chose that profession. But [Jimmy] Tyler is in real trouble having lost his son, then losing his wife, and he has no way of coping with the overwhelming emotions he’s feeling apart from behaving in a violent manner. He was always the person I thought could be violent to Spector from left field, as it were.

Related: 'The Fall': Gillian Anderson Profiles Her Character Stella Gibson

It’s quite an important part of The Fall in the sense that what’s always interesting to me is trauma and how you either come to terms with it, or you let it rule your life. Whatever traumatic experiences Spector’s had, they have turned into something extremely anti-social, destructive, and repellant — but lots of the characters in the piece are struggling to deal with trauma. It’s all set up to explore those central themes, really: The nature of gender differences, and whether it’s possible to survive those traumatic events and be a fully-functioning, loving, connected person when you’ve been through that.

This is true of Katie [the teen infatuated with Spector] as well. Can Katie come through the trauma of losing her father? What impact will it have on her? I think the problem for Spector is that the abuse, the things that have so scarred him, are really very, very far back in his childhood, and as we know, the most crucial time in your development is the very early years. There’s a lot yet to learn about the characters, I think.

At the end of Season 2, Katie tells her friend that Spector is the killer. Does she truly believe that now? How did that character develop?
I think it developed in the sense that I was pleased with the way Aisling [Franciosi] played Katie in Season 1. The scenes were all there: her provocative dancing to him, she’s lost her father, she’s always been a good girl. She’s not grieved properly for her father — perhaps has never really allowed her emotions out over that — and is immediately kind of fascinated by Spector, and drawn to him, and as we saw, was prepared to expose herself to him on the stairs, stole a photograph of him as she left, and so on. He then lied to her and told her that she was beautiful, and that was the point we left it in Season 1.

In Season 2, their relationship became infinitely more complex. I’m not sure quite what she thinks at the moment about whether Spector’s really the guy or not: that could have been her kind of getting one up on her friend. She seems to believe the story about the hoaxing. Then he seems to have got her to destroy evidence for him. So she must be thinking that there’s something really wrong here. But she creates alibis for him and seeks to protect him, whilst at the same time imagining that there’s some very powerful bond between them, perhaps even that they’re going to go away together at the end of Season 2, before Spector gets arrested…

One of the things that I think is interesting about Spector is that disarming thing. You get this all the time with people who are arrested for crimes, that sense that they’ve never shown you any side of their nature that’s like that. Therefore, you find it extremely difficult to believe that they are capable of the things they’re being accused of. You could say the same thing about Liz Tyler [the abused wife Spector counseled to leave Jimmy]: her experience is only of Spector being kind and considerate and helpful. It would be very hard for her to think that he’s capable of the things that he’s being accused of. Same applies, of course, to [Spector’s wife] Sally Ann and the children. Who stands by someone under those circumstances — who feels that they’ve got the power to rescue them or heal them in some kind of way — is quite an interesting thing. But I think it fits Katie’s emotional and intellectual and physical immaturity that she feels that way… It’s set up nicely to kind of continue exploring why it is that some people disregard the reality of an individual and still feel they have some kind of connection with them or that they might be the person to save them.

Are we correct to assume that we’ll see Rose (the victim rescued right before Spector and Anderson were shot) again?
Rose is crucial for the third season in terms of how she’s going to overcome the ordeal that she’s been through and what she’s going to have to say about it.