The season finale of SyFy’s Chucky series aired last week, and some are wondering just how some of the new mythology introduced in the show even works.
Luckily, Don Mancini, who created the franchise centering around a killer doll, shared his insights on the particularly confounding doll horde teased in the finale.
The main antagonist of the show is serial killer Charles Lee Ray, played by Brad Dourif, who placed his soul in a children’s doll in the events of the original Child’s Play film from 1988, which Mancini penned.
In this new show, Charles aspires to splinter his soul into multiple Good Guy dolls using the forbidden voodoo magic that put his soul in the toy in the first place, creating an army of evil killer dolls.
This raises the question: just how does this doll army even work? If Charles moves an arm, do they all move an arm?
According to Mancini, each killer doll is more individualized than you might assume.
“It’s definitely not a hive mind. I considered both avenues when I started putting this together,” the showrunner told Bloody Disgusting in a recent interview. “It was important that they not have a hive mind because I think it’s more interesting to do this and, again, turn Brad on subtle variations of the Chucky persona,” he added.
Far from each doll replicating their behavior in real-time and in tandem with the main Chucky doll, Mancini explained that Dourif’s take on the plot element was essentially the dolls acting like they freshly hatched into the world.
“One of the things that I know was important to Brad was that they seem sort of like fresh out of the egg. There’s a kind of innocence about them. We played a little bit with that in Cult, but I think we went further with it in this one, and I think he did an amazing job,“ Mancini said.
Chucky will return for a second season sometime in 2022, at which time we’ll likely be in store for even more fun from the insidious doll army. In the meantime, you can stream season one on Peacock.