ALCATRAZ Producers On Season 1's Juciest Mysteries, Big Heavy Door

In this new interview, Alcatraz executive producers Jennifer Johnson and Daniel Pyne shed light on some of the show’s juiciest mysteries, including the identity of the powers that be, Hauser and Lucy’s love triangle, the hidden allegiances, and — the heaviest mystery of them all — what’s behind the Big Heavy Door. All that and more coming up.

The following contains very mild spoilers for upcoming episodes..

On the importance of Tommy Madsen:

Pyne: Everything’s building towards that in midseason. That would be the question that’s answered in the last episode.

Johnson: A lot of things are going to come together having to do with the inmate’s blood, Tommy Madsen and what’s behind the Warden’s door.

Whether there’s a reason Alcatraz became the subject of the disappearance:

Johnson: Yeah. There are theories that our characters have. We’ll talk about what those theories are by the end of the season, but they may not be the real ones. We’ll understand what Hauser thinks about it and what his think-tank thinks about it, but that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. We may meet a character by the end of the season who does know that specific answer, who probably has a lot more answers than any of the characters we’ve met so far.

Whether we’ll learn the identities of those pulling the strings by the end of the season, or whether it’s a series long arc:

Pyne: Well, it’s a little of both. I think by the end of [Episode] 13 we’ll have an understanding of who that might be.

Johnson: That’s the character that we were referring to. He might be part of the powers that be.

Pyne: But definitely by the end of the season there will be more of a sense of the game that’s afoot. We won’t be coy about it and keep holding back. There will be a better sense of what’s going on. We may not understand what the endgame is, but at least the players will become a little bit clearer.

Johnson: It’s complicated because they don’t all have the same goals, which we’re going to hit upon before the end of the season. There’s almost a secret war happening between the ’63s, too. That all interplays with what their relationships were in the past when they were imprisoned or working on Alcatraz.

On Lucy’s role in the puzzle:

Pyne: She definitely is a puzzle piece, yes. We may not stick with this forever, but right now, everything that’s happened in the past has happened chronologically in 1960. So, there’s still three years left before the jump. Clearly, allegiances change. Stuff happens in those three years between the time when Lucy comes to prison to start her experiments and 1963 when she obviously disappeared along with everybody else. Certainly, she has some answers to what might have gone on, but she also may not even understand. She didn’t understand at the time what was going on. It may be just now looking back at it that she can start to unravel what she saw.

Johnson: Yeah, helping the team unravel by knowing the psychology of the inmates. But the Warden (Jonny Coyne) is very Machiavellian. He does not want the left hand to know what the right hand is doing. So, he may utilize different players for their different challenges. But part of his M.O. is not to let any one person know too much of what is going on.

On when we’ll find out what’s behind the Big Heavy Door:

Johnson: That we’re going to open it before the end of the season. We’ll understand by the end of the season what’s behind that door, at least one layer of it. It was very important to the Warden. There may only be one person that he shares that secret with.

The pair also offered the following tidbits:

There’s a reason why some of the 63s appear to have gone against mission.

There are indeed number clues — 3 and 47 is are important numbers (editor’s note – number 47 is a recurring number throughout Bad Robot productions. Ernest Cobb uses the number 47 as part of his sniper attacks).

Did the warden really die, or is he part of the 63s? “It’s possible.”

We’ll see more of Lucy and Hauser’s relationship in the past and how they came to work together in the future. They describe their relationship as a love triangle between “Hauser, Lucy, and the jump itself.”