Given how displeased Ellen Barkin had appeared to be to have been killed off Animal Kingdom within the TNT drama’s penultimate Season 4 episode, it wasn’t precisely a shock that she didn’t return for Sunday’s sequence finale. What was a shock, nonetheless, was that the present didn’t use any flashbacks of her model of Smurf, at the same time as oldest son Pope was grappling along with his culpability in twin sister Julia’s downfall. How come?
“There had been some ideas of the best way to introduce Smurf [into the episode],” showrunner Daniele Nathanson tells TVLine. And any means you slice it, “the present has all the time been about Smurf. Even the lack of her turned the present.”
Leila George did seem because the youthful model of the erstwhile Janine — as she has since Season 4 — in brutal scenes set within the Nineteen Nineties. However, though Scott Speedman “resurrected” Baz solely a few weeks in the past in new flashbacks and as a imaginative and prescient that appeared to Pope, we didn’t get a lot as a glimpse of Barkin as Smurf, even in beforehand aired scenes.
“I believe,” says Nathanson, “as we pushed into Pope [more and more after Season 4] and type of [had Shawn Hatosy’s tortured alter ego] taking the mantel of the highest of the decision sheet but in addition type of the elder of the household, we thought it was higher to remain within the current there.”
Nicely, apart from the aforementioned ’90s flashbacks. Would you’ve gotten preferred to have seen Barkin’s Smurf represented within the finale? Or are you glad with the best way that the sequence ender performed out?
