[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for The Resort Episode 5.]
In The Resort, director/actor Ben Sinclair (High Maintenance) aimed to make us “feel all of the formless stuff while the form was taking shape.” Sinclair plays Oceana Vista owner Alex in the series, in addition to directing Episodes 1 through 4. He caught up with TV Insider about his time on the Peacock dramedy, explaining how he and creator/writer Andy Siara (Palm Springs) collaborated to help this vacation mystery unfold. Siara also chatted with TV Insider about all things Episode 5, streaming now, breaking down how its plot poses the questions that were answered in Episode 4. Trippy, we know.
For starters, as a director, Sinclair said, “I saw my service as being one of tone and mood, making this thing funny on top of being a mystery” in order to avoid letting the mystery be told in the typical “one clue leads to the next” way. “When it feels like you’re just checking off a list, that’s when it’s procedural town,” he explained. “And that’s not the town I want to live in.” To that end, he threw in spontaneous funny moments, like Baltasar (Luis Gerardo Méndez) farting on Luna (Gabriela Cartol) as the hurricane loomed above.
“I actually think the dance between the form and the formless is what those cloud tank things are. Those ink blot [shots],” he added. The ink blot-like shots that cut through the episodes sporadically are one of The Resorts many so far unsolved mysteries. But one thing that becomes more clear in Episode 5 is time travel.
Throughout the episode, Sinclair’s Alex treks into the jungle with Sam (Skyler Gisondo) and Violet (Nina Bloomgarden) in search of the author of “The Disappointment of Time,” which he is now convinced is about him. He leaves Sam and Violet at a fruit stand, taking their phones with him, after warning them not to go to Pasaje as Violet plans. Alex clearly knows something they and viewers don’t, and his seemingly crazy ramblings start to make more sense in the last 10 minutes of Episode 5 when we see him time travel for the first time. It appears that the eccentric hotel owner’s inability to remember his life could be an effect of him jumping through timelines involuntarily. But “when it comes to the time travel,” Siara posed the question, “Is it time travel?”
“I like the idea that people can have their own interpretation of it for sure,” Siara said of the supernatural elements. “But to me there’s really just one answer. And that is I think if you were to look at the painting, and that moment on the beach where Alex he sees something, and we go into that wide shot. If you were to look at that wide shot, and then pick out a couple lines that he says along the way throughout Episodes 4 and 5, I think it kind of says exactly what’s going on.”
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“It’s how he perceives time. There are glimpses that he gets,” Siara clarified. “For example, that shot at the beach [in Episode 4], there’s the meteor, but if you were to look down the beach, you see some dinosaurs. And in the front of the frame, you see some dinosaurs. And if you look on the right of the frame and look at the hotel, it’s the abandoned hotel, it’s the hotel in 2022. The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs hit that spot of the Yucatán [Peninsula in Mexico] 65 million years ago or so. And so in this single moment, there’s 65 million years ago on the left side of the frame to 15 years into the future on the right side of the frame, and in the center is Alex and his team in 2005.”
Basically, Alex doesn’t necessarily time travel. Rather, he doesn’t experience time linearly. He sees things from the past, present, and future happening all at once.
“For everything at the end of Episode 5, there are intentionally scenes and things that aren’t being shown there that Alex is seeing through pretty much the final 10 minutes of the episode,” Siara said, “Which is what gets him to go into the jungle and leave the phones where they are.”
Indeed, Episode 5 revealed that Alex had placed Sam’s phone in the jungle just seconds before Emma (Cristin Milioti) stumbled across it when crashing her ATV in the pilot. He placed Violet’s phone just a stone’s throw away, which Noah (William Jackson Harper) discovers near the end of 5. And as it turns out, that moment — and the reveal of Emma and Noah’s backstory on the trail with Luna — was made possible because of a last-minute, spontaneous change Siara made to the script.
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“When the four of them are at that trail head, and they split up, Baltasar says, ‘Me and Emma will go down here, and you guys go walk the trail.’ Initially it was Noah that says, ‘I’ll go with Emma.’ And then Emma says, ‘No, I’ll go. You go with Luna.’ We shot this out of order. And seeing how the scene with Emma and Baltasar turned out when she’s lying down on the ground there, which we filmed the day before, I switched everything around so that instead of Emma rejecting Noah there, Noah rejects Emma.”
“It feels like a tiny thing, but the ripple effects are clear,” Siara added. He continued: “There are things in [Episode] 4 that make more sense after you see 5. And then things in 5 that make more sense after you see 6. Like what Baltasar’s doing at the end of 5, talking to Emma. When they go in the jungle, he doesn’t know what he’s going to find there exactly. But there’s this hope that when getting her to remember the things that she’s trying to forget, that might have an effect on other things that are in the same area.”
Emma is trying to forget that she and Noah lost a baby a few years prior. The baby lived for only one hour, and Emma was not awake during that time, leaving Noah the only one of the pair who saw their daughter’s face. The heartbreak of that turned Emma in an emotional fortress who ignores talking about and feeling her feelings altogether. She has convinced herself that solving the Sam and Violet mystery is about only that, but there’s clearly something personal at stake for her as well.
Siara explained that Noah rejecting Emma on the trail is an emotional turning point for the series at large, because we’ve now learned the root of the couples’ distance, and now they’re being sent on different paths. “No longer do you have the more passive Noah after that. Emma realizes ‘Oh, I was looking outward for my answers, and if I have to look inward, that’s not what I do. I don’t do that.’”
Sinclair and Siara both said that The Resort is very much about nostalgia. Sinclair said, “We all have our own personal nostalgia. That’s why Baltasar’s investigation of people’s motivations, it is a subjective reality that these characters have.” And as Siara explained, “we have a bunch of characters who are trying to recapture the feeling of home, and what is home for you, or what is that feeling? And I know what that is to me, and if I lost any piece of home, to what lengths would I go to get that feeling back even if it’s just for a second? Just for a brief moment?”
“As much as we want to believe that something doesn’t matter, that doesn’t impact us, it does cause our path to change a little bit, and becomes a part of who we are,” he continued. “They’re trying to go back to a point in their life before the sh*t that is thrown at them is thrown at them.”
Find out if they can when The Resort Episode 6 comes out Thursday, August 18, on Peacock.
The Resort, New Episodes, Thursdays, Peacock
