After being attacked and kidnapped, falsely imprisoned and accused of double homicide, Tatiana Maslany‘s beleaguered Paula finally seems to catch a break in the Season 1 finale of Apple TV‘s twisty, pulpy crime thriller-comedy. The single mom wins custody of her daughter Hazel and, in a deliciously satisfying full-circle moment, parrots back the venomous words her ex-husband Karl (Jake Johnson) first lobbed at her in the pilot: “You need to tighten your shit up.”

Episode 10, titled “Queens,” picks up from a cliffhanger; in the penultimate episode, a shot rings out, unclear if it caught Paula, the sniper pursuing her or the cop pursuing them both. Still alive, Paula negotiates with Cecelia Vanderwalle, SVP of the Sutter Group, the organization for which Dennis (Murray Bartlett) carries out mass corporate extortion. She bargains for exoneration, leveraging the knowledge that Cecelia enlisted Dennis’ help to force a Yale admissions officer to accept her son Blake into college. “You fucked with the wrong mom,” she bites.

Elsewhere, Dennis is alive (shocker!) and recovering in the hospital — until he’s murdered, his death framed as a suicide, complete with a confession to both Trevor and Sky’s killings. With her name cleared, Paula sets her sights on the custody hearing, facing an uphill battle against Mallory (Jessy Hodges) and Karl and triumphing anyway. With Hazel remaining in New York City with her, Paula also allows herself to explore a romantic beginning with Steve (Raymond Lee), sharing a kiss.

When Detective Sofia Gonzalez (Dolly de Leon) comes knocking during her victory party and maintains that the resolution is all too convenient, it’s the first crack in the revelry, foreshadowing a final bombshell: Portland comes back to haunt her, as footage of her running over her erstwhile neighbor reveals his death was anything but an accident. “We own you,” an unknown entity texts her, before demanding a favor.

“We do have it in our mind, where it will go. We wrote past the finale to make sure what we were doing would add up. But specifics, not really. And hopefully we have a second season, we can talk all about it, but we’re really excited for what’s next for Paula,” says creator, executive producer and writer David J. Rosen.

Below, the showrunner breaks down that finale cliffhanger and hopes for a Season 2:

DEADLINE: I had spoken to Tatiana, and she was talking about this underlying rage that Paula has throughout the show, and I really loved the circular moment where she tells Carl ‘tighten your shit up’ at the very end. Jake was saying that that had been improvised. How did that come about, and did you always know you wanted this tension-release moment?

Yeah, totally. Actually, there’s a lot improvised in that scene, but that line was written full[y]. I was gonna say, I’m so glad you noticed the full-circle moment. At first I had remembered the line wrong, and I had written it down because Jake improvised that line in the pilot, and then it was so good that we wrote it for the finale.

Throughout the show, there’s so much dramatic irony, it almost feels like if certain people talk to certain people, they might come to a resolution quicker. But how do you feel that Paula’s background as a fact-checker and her research-oriented brain help dig her out of this hole? And what about her innate personality helps her versus Hazel being at stake?

I think that Paula is fierce when it comes to Hazel, and she’ll look dumb, she’ll scream, she’ll make a scene — it doesn’t matter what it is, Hazel comes first. It’s real raccoon energy, you know? And I think that the opposite of that is, as her job, as a fact checker, it’s to be sort of cool and contained and look for just the facts and the truth. And in a time in the world where not only is the job of fact-checker going obsolete, but some would say the truth is becoming obsolete. So what was interesting to try is to put Paula on a path where she had to use this skill of trying to tell truth from lies, which, it’s not really a very active skill, right? It’s like, you’re looking into things, but you’re not out there swashbuckling, but some of that would be what she had that she could use to try to unravel the mess that she was in.

At first, Portland is mentioned in such ambiguous terms, and then we see it a little bit, but then we finally find out in the finale what it actually is. Did you always have that seed planted? And if you could speak to what that reveals in Paula.

It was always planned the way it is, from the mentions of it to the first reveal to the last reveal, that you saw one thing that seemed bad, and that’s what it must have been about, but actually, then you see it again, and you see that she kept a secret from Karl way back when. And I think what it reveals about Paula is that she has this inner fire, this inner rage. You kind of see it in the pilot when she finally has had too much of the phone calls and the honking and the kettle finally shrieks, and she hits the gas and drives down the wrong side of the road, and she grabs a hockey stick and goes into a house of someone she doesn’t know. That’s kind of a hint to the audience that maybe she’s done something like this before. And then we see that she has.

I was so enthralled watching this, each episode propels itself into the next. At the risk of jumping ahead: With some creators, when it’s a mystery-box series, there’s an end in mind or concluding moment — is that something that you’ve thought about?

I think I have a rough idea. I will put markers on a map, but we may take a different route or go a different way. I think emotionally the marker won’t change. But what the final moment is may well.

You had mentioned that part of the inspiration was seeing your wife during the pandemic and all of these things that moms need to juggle, or women in general need to juggle. I’m curious if, for the conspiracy that’s unpacked a little bit as the show goes on, there was inspiration from either real-world events or things you had watched that you had also drawn from.

There was a lot of different inspirations that were just coming at me from being someone who’s on the internet more than they should be. One of the inspirations was just being on Zooms a lot and looking into people’s houses and kind of getting bored after a while, especially if you’re on a big grid. You’re kind of like, ‘Oh, wow, they have some cool stuff.’ And then you’re sort of putting together a whole life for someone you’ve never met before, in a way that hopefully isn’t creepy.

But then, beyond that, I’m always really into the sleuthers on a Reddit who are trying to figure something out and are just looking at a photograph, and are suddenly, like, targeting into a country and then a city and then a neighborhood, and you’re like, ‘Wait, how did you guys do that?’ That gave me a lot of inspiration for Paula trying to figure out where Trevor was from the hints that she sees. And that was really difficult to really pull off tangibly, given a small window and not [have] it be in your face. I mean, there’s so many real-life scam stories. I wanted to take one and turn it on its head a little bit, so you, as the audience, are like, ‘It’s going to be this.’ But then it’s not that, it’s that.

Geri and Rudy, I feel like they’re almost in this side-kick, Scooby-Doo world, but there’s also a romance, or really close friendship, brewing there. I’m curious how they came about in your imagination.

Geri and Rudy are super fun to write for, and also, Kiarra [Hamagami Goldberg] and Charlie [Hall] are amazing and just so good in the show. They came about because, really, I didn’t want Paula to have a group of mom friends. I wanted her to be out on an island where, when she needed to turn to someone after the police, the next thing that made sense were her colleagues at work, who happened to be markedly younger than her; they’re just out of school, and she’s got a kid in third grade. That sort of already has a weird power dynamic. And I don’t think the power necessarily is with the older person in that situation where you all sort of have the same job. So I thought that that would be a really fun and interesting pairing. And having worked with a lot of people that were younger than me in my past, I was like, ‘I feel like there’s something I have to say there about it.’

Naturally, people at work do know about their social lives and who they’re dating and who they’re not dating, and they’re both attractive and they’re spending a lot of time together, and it makes sense that there is an attraction between them. And timing is everything, and not everyone’s on the same timing path. I can imagine things might have been different six months before the show started, in terms of the dynamics between them, and [as well as] where we get by the end of the season.

Totally. I’m rooting for them.

I get that.

I really appreciated Jessy’s character, Mallory. She is so, on one hand, very shady, but there is a reasoning for that, and how fiercely she wants to win and what she feels is at stake. How do you view her?

I think that all the characters on this show, an argument could be made that they’re right. Karl is definitely right. And I think Mallory is definitely right. She is shady, but she’s shady for the stepchild she loves, and the husband she loves. I don’t think she’s just trying to win. I think she’s trying to do what she thinks is right, and as the try-hard, cutthroat kid I bet she was when she was applying to colleges, she’s applying that same sort of dangerous intelligence to where she is now. She’s cutting some corners, but she thinks the end will justify the means.

I’m curious also of the police angle of all of this: It seems like as good at the instinctual element Dolly de Leon’s character is she and her colleague are constantly playing catch up and several steps behind. How did you go about characterizing that dynamic?

It’s funny. It was really tricky with those guys, because they’re not, like, boneheads. They’re good police, they’re smart at what they do, but at this point in the story, or again, the first season, they are behind, and Paula is ahead, and early on, by them suspecting Paula, which she — by the way, she should have been suspected, the audience is aware, but if you take our awareness out of it, she looks very suspicious. So in writing them, we really had to find a way to keep them a danger to her still, while knowing that they’re wrong. And so that was the trick of writing them and then kind of getting them, by the end of the season, onto the same page. But by then it’s too late.

You said you wanted Paula to be this island. It seems like the only person reaching out is Steve. I really appreciated how humorous their interactions were, and how delicate and really treated with care it was in the midst of all this darkness. Was that something you always knew you wanted, some sort of lightness in her interactions with other adults, especially when she’s being assailed by the moms and dealing with Karl and Mallory?

We don’t want the show to be bleak, and the world that she’s in isn’t bleak. She’s in a bit of trouble, but there is hope for her. She’s an intelligent, cool woman and so Steve is blissfully outside of a lot of the dynamics, and I think sees all the good things in Paula. The show has an anxiety to it, but as [director/EP] David Gordon Green said earlier, and now I’m stealing from him, it’s an enjoyable anxiety. There has to be these moments of hope for Paula and I think Steve, whether he ultimately is or isn’t, he represents the better choice. If only it had come earlier — if she had only started coaching soccer a week before the events of this and had met Steve, maybe she never goes online with Trevor. That’s a relationship that maybe she would have leaned into. But Steve comes along after the fact, and so, at the end of the season, finally, she’s free, and there’s a possibility, but before that, there couldn’t be.

EXCLUSIVE: Spencer Griffin has joined Levity Live in the newly created role of Executive Vice President, Content & Creative Strategy.

A veteran of the comedy space, Griffin comes to Levity after seven years at Just for Laughs, where he served in senior creative and development roles, most recently as Vice President of TV & Creative Strategy. He will now lead Levity’s content strategy across television, streaming, digital, live events, and audio — including the Improv’s network of comedy clubs — while developing original franchises, expanding talent partnerships, and identifying opportunities to grow Levity Live’s IP portfolio.

Alireza Ghaemian, CEO of Levity Live, told us of the hire: “Spencer has a rare ability to identify great talent and turn creative ideas into successful franchises. As we continue expanding across live entertainment, production, and talent management, bringing someone with his experience into this new role marks an exciting evolution for the Improv and Levity Live.”

During his tenure at Just for Laughs, Griffin served as executive producer on the festival’s flagship franchises — including the Just for Laughs Galas, New Faces, New Wave of Stand-Up, the JFL Awards Show, One Night Out with Alan Cumming, and Roast Battle. He also produced stand-up specials for Netflix and JFL’s digital platforms, launched the talent development program New Faces: Writers with Rob Mac’s More Better, relaunched JFL Shorts and created JFL Pilots — both in partnership with Will Arnett’s Electric Avenue — and established partnerships with Smosh and Dropout.

Prior to his time at JFL, Griffin held executive positions at CollegeHumor, Big Breakfast, and Stoopid Buddy Stoodios. One highlight of his time at CollegeHumor was co-directing a music video featuring former First Lady Michelle Obama, now included in the Barack Obama Presidential Center.

Griffin said, “I’m thrilled to continue discovering, developing, and delivering comedy at the Improv, a thriving comedy brand with storied clubs and a track record of turning open micers into legends.”

Levity Live operates the nation’s largest independent comedy club networks under the Improv brand, with venues in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Denver, San Jose, and other major markets. The original Improv opened in New York as the first club built specifically for stand-up comedy, setting the template that every comedy club since has followed. The company also owns Levity Talent, a comedy management division, and West 44th Digital, its digital marketing agency, and regularly partners with the television production company Center Drive Media.

In the trailer for I Play Rocky, Anthony Ippolito plays Sylvester Stallone playing Rocky in and around, well, Rocky, the instant-classic 1976 film that put one of our greatest action stars on the map. Ippolito’s look for the film is right and the voice, described in the trailer (below) as sounding like “you’ve got rocks in your mouth,” is spot on — it does sound like Ippolito has rocks in his mouth! Stephan James is pretty pitch-perfect and photo realistic as Carl Weathers too.

If Ippolito looks familiar — and not just because he looks like Stallone (or even Jeremy Allen White dressed as Stallone) — it is probably because he’s the guy who played Al Pacino in Paramount limited series The Offer. Yes, Ippolito has become Hollywood’s go-to for portraying young, Italian, breakout movie stars in ’70s films.

I Play Rocky also stars Matt Dillon, AnnaSophia Robb, P.J. Byrne, Toby Kebbell, Tracy Letts, Jay Duplass and Kiki Seto, and is produced by Peter Farrelly, who also directs, as well as Christian Baha, Toby Emmerich and Paul Currie. The script hails from Peter Gamble, though there should probably be an honorable mention to the guy who wrote Rocky — that’d also be Stallone.

It is, after all, the Rocky screenplay that anchors the biopic. I Play Rocky tells the true story of “an unknown actor with an unshakable belief that he wasn’t just meant to write Rocky — he was meant to be Rocky Balboa,” the synopsis reads.

Stallone would end up being Balboa for five decades.

“Told ‘no’ at every turn, Sylvester Stallone bets everything on himself, holding the line on playing the lead against seemingly impossible odds,” the Amazon MGM Studios breakdown continues. “The result is the ultimate underdog story behind the ultimate underdog movie.”

It ain’t about how hard you hit — it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. Sure, Rocky loses in the end, but Rocky was a big winner. Stallone was Oscar-nominated for the screenplay he purportedly wrote in like half a week. Rocky didn’t win that particular Academy Award — it went to Network — but it won best picture in a famously stacked year that also included Network, Taxi Driver and All the President’s Men in the category.

Moreover, Rocky‘s rocketship success birthed a major franchise. To-date, there are six Rocky films and three Creed spinoffs (with a fourth in development). Stallone wrote all of the Rocky movies and Creed II — the one that (spoiler alert) killed off his character.

Watch the trailer below.