Karen and Nikolijne Troubetzkoy Preview Sight Unseen Season 2

Karen and Nikolijne Troubetzkoy Preview Sight Unseen Season 2

[Warning: General spoilers ahead.]

Sight Unseen is back for Season 2 on CTV, and last week I caught up with series creators Karen (Kat) and Nikolijne (Niko) Troubetzekoy to chat about it. Here’s the first pare of our conversation, where we unpack what to expect for Tess and Sunny.

As Season 2 begins, it’s back to business for Tess and Sunny, with the story resuming a few months past the Season 1 finale that established a rift between the characters when Sunny’s backstory was revealed.

Kat says that will be explained. “We do fill in the gaps. We devote a whole episode to it,” Kat shares. “We keep pressing forward for the most part, but yes, you find out what happened to Rigby, and why.”

This season, the creative team was able to dive right into the cases now that viewers have a baseline understanding of Tess’s sight loss, her relationship with Sunny, and how Sunny fits into her investigations. “I think it was easier in a way because the characters were up on their feet. And with Tess and Sonny’s relationship, it just feels like it lends itself naturally to a bunch of different crimes,” explains Niko.

“There’s always a new, interesting viewpoint on something that we may have seen on another show, with the particular mechanics of their relationships. So it was super fun this season. Last season was fun, too, but we were feeling out the parameters of everything and this season we were able to just go.”

“[In Season 1], we had to explain how the seeing relationship worked between Sunny and Tess,” Kat adds. “And now it does seem to describe itself visually and it just seems natural. I think every year we get more embedded into living life virtually and seeing people virtually.”

“Rather than make a call, people on the street are FaceTiming each other, so it’s a very natural interface between Sunny and Tess. And we’re able to just leap into the crime stories with a new angle, a new perspective.”

As the premiere established, beyond the crime stories, Tess and Sunny are also working through emerging remnants of their past. For Tess, that’s meant having visions of floating embers and fire, a callback to losing her mom.

Sight Unseen Season 2

“We had a big Zoom with a lot of people who are watching the show. And they gave us this whole new angle, which we had never known despite all our research and which allowed us to get under Tess’s skin in a visual way and into her past. And that’s what’s called Charles Bonnet Syndrome, which is visual hallucinations that 30% of people who have serious sight loss experience,” says Kat.

“And we use that to kind of get under the skin of Tess’s past, something we touched on in the first season, but in the second season we’ll pay off fully, which is this house fire in which she lost her mother, who was also sight impaired.”

“We tease that going forward and Tess has these, what seem like visions, but are actually part of her sight impairment, but also reflecting her obsession and concern about the past and this quest that she has never been fulfilled, which is to find out how her mother died, how she was killed, which she believes is a suspicious fire.”

“And we tease that out over the season and, and pay it off in the last two episodes, particularly the finale.”

One other lingering finale question is what exactly is up with Bennett, and can we trust him? Niko says yes. “We love Roger Cross and we love Bennett. So we do redeem him fairly quickly in the season,” she explains. “He becomes an ally and helps us pay off Sunny’s story from Season 1 by episode four.”

“One of the things that’s really important for us is to keep Sunny as a bit of an unknown quantity for Tess. And one of the things I love about the relationship between these two women, and I think we want to continue to preserve onward into future seasons, is the idea that each woman is a bit of an onion.”

Sight Unseen Season 2

“So even though they’re so close to each other in each other’s ears, constantly up close and personal to each other, they are always, as we do in real life, even with people who are extremely close to us, constantly unpeeling another layer and revealing another part of themselves to the other. And that’s something that’s very much at play in Sunny’s storyline sort of near the end of this season.”

“You start to see a whole different perspective on the woman that we’ve grown to know very closely over this season.”

This week, in “About a Boy,” Tess and Sunny team up for a child abduction case that surfaces old parental wounds for Tess. Sara Canning and Niall Matter guest star in the episode written by Brendan Gall and directed by Stefan Pleszcynski.

Sight Unseen airs Monday at 10 PM ET/PT on CTV. You’ll also be able to stream it online at CTV.ca and Crave every Tuesday. The second season premieres in the US later this year on The CW.

Photos courtesy of Bell Media.

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