Revolution Creator Eric Kripke Sounds Off On [SPOILER]’s Shocking Death

Please be aware this report contains spoilers for NBC Revolution’s March 25 episode, “Stand Off.”

Fans tuning back into Revolution last night were rocked by a second significant death in just eleven episodes. After months of failed rescue attempts Charlie (Tracy Spiridakos) finally managed to rescue her little brother Danny (Graham Rogers) only to lose him to machine gun fire from one of Monroe’s relentless choppers.

Danny’s death came at a crucial moment in the show’s return episode “Stand Off” when the rebels were pinned down and outgunned. Miles (Billy Burke) had suffered injuries from an explosion and while Charlie and Rachel (Elizabeth Mitchell) ran to rescue him, Danny, relegated to safety by his family until now, took the opportunity to blow the chopper from the sky and rescue his friends … but not without suffering multiple fatal injuries from a spray of uncontrolled gunfire from the wildly spinning helicopter. Danny’s death, just one episode into the show’s second half has left many fans stunned, and wondering just what the show’s writers have in store over the coming weeks.

ScreenSpy spoke to Revolution creator Eric Kripke some days before the episode aired. Although Kripke swore us to secrecy on the show’s spectacular “thermo-nuclear” secret, he did talk openly about Danny’s tragic death, saying, “I think it’s exactly the right type of shocking development that really ramps everybody up emotionally in their mission and also for the second half of the season. It really emotionally escalates everything.”

With the show on hiatus for so long, was there ever a doubt that Danny’s death, on the first new episode in four months, might produce a negative reaction among fans?

“Any time you’re off the air for four months you hold your breath and you hope fans come back,” Kripke admitted. “We take solace and encouragement from a few things. There’s a long history of genre television taking these huge breaks – like Walking Dead or Game of Thrones – and because the second half of the season is such a different mission, with different quests and a different energy than the first half, it really does feel like a natural break. It feels like it’s its own particular season of television. The first half and the drive to find Danny was a prologue to it opening up into a much larger and epic and exciting story. The break really gave the writers and the producers and the actors a minute to really explore what was working about the show and what wasn’t working and how to make it better.”

What do you think? Was Danny’s death a necessary story development? What did Rachel remove from Danny in the episode’s closing moments and how will the shocking events of Revolution’s first new episode help open up the story over the weeks to come?