SPOILER ALERT: This post spoils the entirety of Sterling Point, which is now streaming on Prime Video.
One of the final twists in Sterling Point’s first season involved a personal touch from co-showrunner and creator Megan Park’s own life — the rarity of colorblindness in girls.
Park and co-showrunners Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage (The OC, Gossip Girl) pulled from the creator’s experience with colorblindness to pave the way for a big reveal and one of the family-centered bombs dropped throughout the eight episodes, the identity of Ramona’s (Amélie Hoeferle) biological father.
From the moment Ramona crosses paths with Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Joe, viewers may suspect that he is her father, meaning he had an affair with Goldie, the adoptive mother of Annie (Ella Rubin) and Connor Jacobson (Keen Ruffalo). The idea is devastating for Annie and Connor’s adoptive father Steven (Jay Duplass), whose infertility led to the adoption of the twins, until Ramona connects the dots that her colorblindness could be a result of Steven’s.
“We wanted the reveal that Steven is the biological dad to be a subtle thing that didn’t feel like a ‘dun dun dun.’ Because we knew the trope of a paternity test, it can be totally played in a very different way. We wanted it to feel real and natural,” Park told Deadline. “At some point we’d been talking about color blindness and [Josh and Stephanie] knew that I had it ,which is quite rare for a girl, and that came up, and then we were like, “That would be interesting,’ because it really narrows it down quite quickly in terms of who that person’s going to be.”
“It was a seed that was very delicately woven throughout, which we thought was interesting and fun. But yeah, that was definitely based on personal [experience],” Park added. “I knew who my biological parents were, but I didn’t know that there were very specific genetic things that had to happen in order for me to be colorblind, or chromosomal things, I guess I should say.”
For both characters, the condition becomes hinted at through their mismatched socks, which first seems like a throwaway line for Ramona until Annie reveals that she organizes her dad’s socks so that he doesn’t mix them up due to his colorblindness.
Park credits Schwartz, Savage and the writers’ room with helping her plant such seeds throughout Sterling Point to keep the story going and branching out from the pilot she originally wrote. Their asking “So where do you see the show going?” during Park’s first meeting with the Gossip Girl duo prompted Park to realize she hadn’t thought ahead that far.
“You have to really plant those seeds. We kept joking [about] propulsion, such an annoying writers’ room word, but it really is necessary. And they are so incredibly talented at knowing exactly how many seeds to plant and how much to plot, but also to balance it with story,” she said. “They knew that, for me, the payoffs for this show weren’t going to be huge bomb-drop reveals every second. It was going to be bomb-drop reveals that had to do with family and emotional elements. That’s what was different for me, and so they were really guiding. I could not have done it without them, and so many others, but they’re geniuses.”
Below, Park weighs in on the “fallout” of the sister swap, Annie’s love triangle, Ramona and Una’s (Bo Bragason) breakup, Connor’s search for his and Annie’s biological parents and more elements though could lead into a potential Season 2, which hasn’t yet been greenlit by Prime Video.
The Sister(hood) Switch-Up & Swap
The bond between Annie and Ramona, a real throughline for the story, gets flipped on its head much like Ramona’s biological father search, in the final episode as a result of Ramona’s investigation with the paternity test, which determines that Steven didn’t “shoot blanks” while he and Goldie were trying to conceive. This means that she is still, if not even more, Annie’s sister, but her connection to both of Annie’s parents has changed.
“We thought it was going to be interesting with this idea that Annie’s so quickly accepting of Ramona as her sister [upon first meeting Ramona]. She’s never had a thing about biological or adopted —she’s always like, ‘My mom is my mom, and it doesn’t matter.’ And Ramona was the one that was more like, “Wait a second, you’re not really my sister,’” Park said. “And then when Annie finally finds out that Ramona is biologically related to both her mother and father, she starts to have a crisis, which is a natural reaction all of a sudden, but it’s not the expected reaction.”
The 180 pivot falls more in line with what Annie’s twin Connor and her father Stephen expect from her, which Park also touched on. More on that later.
“I think the audience is going to think that Annie is like ‘That makes us even more sisters,’ but all of a sudden, for the first time, she’s starting to feel like the outsider and like the adopted one instead of just their daughter,” Park said. “It’s just something that I wanted to explore throughout the whole show as nature versus nurture and people’s different reactions to that. It felt like a good way to break them up, so to speak.”
The uneasy ground on which the pair now stand is compounded when they ultimately decide to swap places and lives in a way, with Annie remaining on the island and Ramona going to New York to live with Steven and get to know her biological father. This agreement was easier to come to than Ramona’s complete change of mind and desire to sell Sterling Point, which she had no intention of doing when Annie first arrived. Annie, Connor and Ramona inherited the island from their grandfather Gordon, whose daughter was Goldie.
“They also completely swapped views on what this place means to them as well. So it was an interesting, and, I think, necessary way for them to sort of end up by the end of the season. And also — if we were to get a Season 2 — sets us up for like a really great jumping off point,” Park continued. “Ramona is so protective of [the island] at the beginning, and then by the end, she’s thinking ‘Wait a second, do I really love this place? Do I really want to be here? Do I really believe in the things that Gordon, my grandfather, believed in, or is it just that my world has been so small?’ Which I think every young adult goes through that moment where you’re like, ‘My parents are just parents; they have their beliefs. Do I really feel the same way, or do I not?’
Annie’s Love Triangle
Park also credits Stephanie Savage and Josh Schwartz, “masters of all things, but especially teenage and YA content” with plotting out the love triangle in which Annie finds herself with potential love interests Ellis (Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie) and Rory (Daniel Quinn Toye) “that gets you really invested.”
Rory knows Annie from high school, so they have a bit of history there, and he knows the old version of her. With Ellis, though, there is an immediate spark.
“Rory is the expected, safe, the old Annie option, where he is a really great guy, and, especially in terms of the landscape of a lot of the guys that she was normally exposed to in the city, he is really kind and he is really gentle and he connects with her on a lot of levels that are unexpected: this pressure to be perfect, their type A personalities, and not having a relationship with one of their parents. They do have a lot of things that they genuinely connect with — anxiety, all that stuff,” Park said of Toye’s character, whose mother Denise is portrayed by Missi Pyle.
Rory’s dad is mentioned, but he doesn’t appear in the show. Denise seems aloof one moment, but then totally sharp the next. Ellis, pilot, boat repairman and Joe’s son, feels Annie’s pull right away, and then he gets sucked into her sisterhood puzzle with Ramona when they think his father Joe is also Ramona’s dad.
“What’s interesting about Ellis is he really is the one person who slows Annie down for the first time in her life in a way that her soul just so desperately needs,” Park said. “I think it really also reminds her of why her mom wanted to be [on the island], and so she also feels very connected in that sense. There’s that scene where they’re canoeing and he [points out] a bald eagle and they’re just canoeing in silence. Ellis is what she needs right now, and it’s interesting to think about when she gets further into the experiment than her mom ever got the chance to. She’s like, ‘I’m going to stay on this island and see what happens.’ Her mom never never really got to go that far in it. It’s like, ‘How is that going to play out both romantically with Ellis and just in terms of her plans for the future? How sustainable is it long-term?’”
The contrast created between Annie’s encounters with the boys was intentional, according to Park.
“We made a real point of, in her romantic scenes with Rory there’s crazy special effects and music, and there’s so much happening,” she said. “Then with Ellis in Episode 8, their romantic scene is totally quiet. There’s no music. I feel like there were a lot of intentional choices, in how we shot them, to also show the difference and how that dynamic is hopefully going to play out.”
On Casting Katie Douglas
One of the more rowdy scenes Annie and Rory share is a celebration of her birthday at a nightclub, where they happen to run into Clem (Katie Douglas), a friend from Annie’s New York life. Clem represents the competitiveness Annie started the show with when she was desperate to get into a summer intensive program at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Katie was somebody who I knew through some other Canadian actors, knew of her, but I’d never worked with her before, and she actually auditioned for the show, even though she’s done a lot of stuff. I immediately saw her tape. I was like, ‘This woman’s amazing,’” Park said. “And then they were like, ‘Oh, she’s like quite known. She’s done you know A, B, and C.’ I was like, ‘Wow, that’s so nice that she auditioned and wants to do this part.’ Then she came out to me and she was like, ‘I just have really been wanting to work with you, and I was just down to do whatever,’ and she was so funny and so good.”
Douglas stars as Abby Littman in Netflix’s Ginny and Georgia, created by Sarah Lampert. (She is also high on the fancasting list for the role of Violet Sorrengail in Prime Video’s Fourth Wing television series adaptation.)
“The whole day I was like, if we do a Season 2, we have to bring this character back. She’s so good, and their dynamic was hilarious, and [Katie] could really improv spar so well with Ella,” Park said. “So much of that stuff in the bathroom was just them doing their own thing. It was so funny, but she was incredible. I was just blown away by her, and I’m dying to work with her on, if not a Season 2, something else. She’s so talented.”
Connor’s Search For Their Biological Parents
Keen Ruffalo’s Connor, fraternal twin brother of Annie and fellow adoptee, lives in her shadow for the first few episodes, but after he gets over his “debilitating wolf-phobia” and travels out to the titular island, he charts his own path just as Annie is finding herself too.
“Connor, his defense, as Annie’s in denial and type A and really driven and has become really parentified with her dad, Connor’s defense is that he acts like he doesn’t care. He’s whatever,” Park said. “I think he’s tired of trying to live up to Annie’s expectations. Also I think he knows, just like Steven knows, that if Annie is thrown, like if her role in the family is thrown out of place, like at the end, it really disrupts the family system.”
Connor has his own moments with Rory right off the bat, as well as with Rory’s mother Denise. He also has his own bond with Ramona. By the end of the show, Connor has decided to embark on a search for his and Annie’s biological parents, but he doesn’t tell Annie this.
“Connor’s like, ‘If [Annie] thinks I’m as smart as her, it’s gonna make my life really hard.’ And Steven knows bringing a woman into the house is going to be really difficult, not on Connor but on Annie, whereas she would say ‘That wouldn’t bother me. I don’t mind that,’ but they are almost one step ahead of her in that way,” Park said. “Connor has genuinely been living a little bit under the thumb of Annie and how she wants things to go, and the decision for him to go after his biological parents, their biological parents, without her permission, is like a huge betrayal because they are twins, but he’s an adult, and it’s sort of his first foray into ‘I know Annie has her feelings about this, but this is something that I want to do. This is what I feel connected to, and what I need to know,’ which I think is very real about people who are adopted.”
It would be interesting to see this explored from Connor’s perspective, especially now that Ramona has gone back to New York and wakes up in Annie’s bed. She would be an interesting soundboard for him through this process. The show ends with Connor and Annie’s birth mother wanting to get in touch with him.
“I’ve seen both sides of it, and they’re both completely valid and fair. It’s people who really don’t want to know, and sometimes people give them a hard time for that. Like, ‘How can you not know? Like, doesn’t that drive you crazy?’ A lot of people do not feel that. They don’t need to know, and then other people do need to know, and they need to get those answers,” Park said. “So, it’s an opportunity to show two paths and potentially the fallout or the payoff of what happens.”
Ramona and Oona’s Breakup
Ramona’s decision to go to New York results in heartbreak for both her and Oona (Bo Bragason). After the pair had finally acted on latent feelings for each other and decided to be together, Oona first broached the topic of Ramona leaving for New York and leaving her behind when Ramona pitched it as a not-yet final decision.
“What was special to me specifically about Ramona is that Ramona’s not a very active character. You need characters to be active, especially for TV, to keep, again, the propulsion going, but what was really important to me is that [Ramona] wasn’t able to be active in her own life,” Park said. “She didn’t have the autonomy, and she was fresh off the grief of her grandfather. She’s 16. She’s still very much in a place where she has no f*cking idea what’s going on and who she is and what’s real and what’s not, to a degree. So she is very reactive to what’s happening around her. I think that’s a natural response, especially for somebody that age.”
Ramona’s retaliation in her argument with Oona was that the latter was channeling her mother’s abandonment issues into their relationship.
“With Oona, it was the same thing where she is pretty reactive in that dynamic, and then I think is just totally derailed when, in their final scene in episode 108, I think [Ramona’s] anger is justified, and she also is correct in the fact that this is not about her; it’s about Oona’s mom, and that is Oona’s biggest trigger,” Park said. “It obviously is not handled well, but what breakups are handled well? Or what fights are always handled perfectly?”
There is much, here, to go off of, should Sterling Point get a Season 2, according to Park.
“I wanted you to root for them, to be like ‘Can they push past this friendship thing and make this real because they’re so perfect for each other?’ And then obviously we knew we wanted to tear them apart by the end,” she said. “Bo Bragason is so incredible, and Oona is such a fun character. It would be really cool to go more into her backstory and maybe meet her mom, and also see if they can find their way back to each other or not.”
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