How Persons Unknown would have progressed – Interview with Rémi Aubuchon

With that said, and with leaving viewers such a looming cliffhanger in the first season’s finale, what was planned for the second season, had it been renewed?

“Much of what season two was going to be about was trying to find them. Trying to figure out how to get to them and rescue them and get them out of the town, and try to break the back of this sort of strange shadow organization that is keeping them there. That was our general sense of what the drive and ending was going to be for the second season.”

But,really, what was this show about? What was keeping these people in the town, on a ship or in a strange prison camp? Who were these people and why were they seemingly chosen to become part of what we learned to be “The Program?” Here’s a whole lot of what Mr. Aubuchon had to say on that:

“What they’re stuck in is a kind of giant Skinner Box. B.F. Skinner is a famous behavioralist who believed that there was no such thing as free will, and that it was just about modifying behavior. Our backstory is that in 1953, a young associate of B. F. Skinner had decided that there must be a way in which we can prevent another Hitler from coming into power. This is just in the middle of the Cold War or right after World War II; how could we prevent it? The premise was that if we had caught Hitler early enough in his life, with proper behavioral modification, we might have been able to take his evil genius and have turned it into something positive for the world.

“So he was given permission and a sort of carte blanche task to go and develop an algorithm by which, through public record, it could identify individuals all around the world who had potential for either becoming evil or having the potential for doing great good in the world. And by utilizing this algorithm, and identifying these individuals, they literally were kidnapped out of their lives, brought basically to a program in which they could be turned. It had to be right at the right moment of their lives where that they could be turned to good. But, sadly, that doesn’t always work, and when it doesn’t work, at first they just wanted to return those people that they had an unsuccessful attempt at to the real world.

“Unfortunately then we wound up with Lee Harvey Oswald and other people that weren’t turned into the program and eventually just started to become evil and bad. So they decided that really the only way they could deal with an individual that wasn’t going the way they wanted them to, they would eliminate them. Once they began doing that, the program became corrupted and it started to eat itself from within, and suddenly some things started to get tight.

“Eventually they had to find other ways in order to justify their organization — the Madame Director being the current director of that program — and before they knew it they were suddenly starting to do behavior modification to develop assassins and they would modify them so that they would have some control over the political scene all over the world. In order to gain power they basically started eating themselves from within. And whatever benevolence they had and whatever goodness that program had at the beginning just began to become, in essence, a utilitarian, somewhat cold and evil institution that is constantly stealing people out of their lives and bringing them to this program to do it.”

Clacked by Keith McDuffee
on Apr 03, 2012 @ 11:00 EST5EDT