The first episodes of The Nevers were a “grand and ambitious prologue”

HBO’s Victorian sci-fi series The Nevers aired its sixth episode a few weekends back, and that’s it for the moment. We were originally going to get 10 episodes of this ambitious series to start, but the pandemic complicated matters, as did creator and showrunner Joss Whedon leaving to make way for Philippa Goslett. The plan now is to shoot six additional episodes and air them as the second part of the first season, but as star Laura Donnelly (Amalia True) told Deadline, “not a thing” has been shot yet.

That could make fans nervous that we won’t get more of The Nevers at all, but Donnelly sounded pretty confident that she’ll be going back to set sooner rather than later. “I’m straight back into this, and that will take up, certainly, I would say, the rest of this year I think. I don’t know exact time frames. So, Amalia’s really me until pretty much next year.”

It also sounds like she and other cast members have been clued in to what will actually happen next on the show, which has already taken a lot of twists and turns. Last we checked in, we’d learned that Amalia is actually a soldier from the far future sent back in time by the Galanthi, a benevolent space alien that wants to save humanity from itself by making people more empathetic (it’s now upgraded to giving them superpowers).

And what does that mean for Amalia going forward? “Well, I think that she has a lot to wrestle with within herself,” Donnelly said. “You know, I think that she’s got a lot of stuff that she needs to come to terms with, and I wonder about that, especially as an emotional arc. You know, she has been plowing on as this soldier, and she’s managed to maintain control in a kind of Army structure way by really holding all of almost the information to herself, or at least sharing it with Penance to a degree, or to a great degree. She has managed to keep everything contained and maintain control, but obviously, that is now going to have to change going forward.”

Indeed, at the end of the sixth episode, Amalia told Penance (Ann Skelly) about her sci-fi past and how they got their powers, which will make an already complicated situation even more so. “And I’ll be really interested to see how she deals with any change in structure like that and how she also deals with kind of the reckonings of her soul that seem to be just coming into clearer focus, especially since this meeting with the Galanthi; the massive flashbacks that she got and then the ripplings forward that she got, and how she’s going to try and connect and marry together who she has been in the past, who she is now, and how to go forward,” Donnelly continued. “I think that’s going to all be worth really looking into, now that we’ve kind of established the narrative as such.”

And there are lots of other mysteries to solve. For instance, what are we supposed to make of Lavinia Bidlow (Olivia Williams), the wheelchair-bound member of the upper crust who takes it upon herself to help the Touched weather they attacks they get from the British elite, but who is also doing experiments on (and the Galanthi) them alongside the twisted surgeon Dr. Edmund Hague (Denis O’Hare)? Is she good or evil?

Donnelly knows a thing or two, but obviously isn’t telling. “I can’t figure out what the audience is necessarily supposed to know as a fact from episode 6, because there are things that I know, and I don’t know whether they’ve been fully implied up to episode 6,” she said. “I think there’s still more to develop there, so I don’t want to say too much about it, but I would say that she is not a straightforward person of either, and I think she and herself has some level of cognitive dissonance about everything that’s going on, and I think that that’s what we’re witnessing right now, is somebody that actually isn’t entirely certain either way.”

Augustus Bidlow will be on his own journey in The Nevers

Lavinia is the older sister to Augustus “Augie” Bidlow (Tom Riley), who’s having a journey all his own. Much milder than his sister, he discovered that he’s Touched himself: he has the power to control birds, which he used for combat in the latest episode. In theory, the sky’s the limit for him.

“[T]he byword for Augie, from the very beginning when I initially signed on to the job, was “patience.” I was told, just be patient,” Riley told TheWrap. “And which then, of course, the COVID pandemic and splitting the season into two made it the most patience I’ve ever required for anything. And Augie’s journey to what this turn is is going to be – he’s going to make a very slow discovery and the audience is going to go along with that discovery of just how potentially powerful what he has inside him could be…So it’s going to be his journey towards understanding what he is capable of – both in his turn and socially and with who he is.”

Augie is also involved in a budding, very polite romance with Penance, although they may have some issues to iron out after Augie chose to help Amalia find the Galanthi rather than help Penance save the deranged Maladie (Amy Manson) from execution. “Obviously, everything has slightly changed – potentially,” Riley said. “I knew why he chose Amalia’s mission in the previous iteration of the show. And I don’t know if it still stands, but certainly for him, it was a chance to show some backbone. As he mentioned, he’s been practicing with the birds. He knows he is needed for Amalia’s mission and he can’t quite get onside with Penance’s.”

"I thought it was the more interesting choice, as well, just from a narrative perspective, not just to put them at odds, because it’s just to show that he’s not going to go wherever the wind blows him for the first time. And I hope they have a conversation about it. I haven’t read the next episodes yet, but I do hope there is a, “Why did you do that to me?” And he gets a chance to explain himself and their relationship can move from a sort of slightly surface “We both are obsessed with things to other people aren’t obsessed with, isn’t that exciting?” into having a little bit more depth to exactly who they are and how they could potentially move forward together."

In general, Riley seems excited by the prospect of giving all the characters more depth. “I do know what direction Audie is going, I’ve known for two years now, since we started,” he said. “As far as the show, I know we want to really dig down into the characters now. We’ve sort of properly set up what felt like a kind of very grand and ambitious prologue. And I feel like we can now really start digging into the characters, which is going to be exciting. Philippa is very interested into digging into who these people are and what their connections are.”

How will The Nevers change after Joss Whedon’s exit?

Will the show change now that Philippa Goslett is in charge? Donnelly thinks so, and she’s ready. “I think, yes, there will, of course, be change because for that very reason, but we have what is a very solid structure of the world that has been created, the characters, the story that we’re trying to tell in its overall sense,” she said. “Same cast, obviously, and we’re getting, I would say, 98% of our crew are coming back. Very few were unable to because of other work that they’d taken on.”

"But I think it speaks so much to the experience that we had first time around that. Our crew especially, who could all go off and take other jobs in this very unknown last year of pandemic and all the rest. All could’ve done that. All resisted that and wanted to come back and be part of telling this second half of the season. So, I think the changes that will be there, I’m looking forward to because I’m really interested to see Philippa’s take, especially as a woman, and a woman who I know had already had very passionate views about many of the conversations that are being had in this series to do with politics and equality and humanity and the environment and all of those things."

It sounds like the pieces are falling into place. Hopefully we get news about more episodes soon.

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