Calling his “Helix” character a “bad ass with heart,” Mark Ghanime teased that Major Sergio Balleseros would do some shocking things in the show’s first season. [Spoilers ahead if you aren’t caught up!]
Still, I’m not sure I can forgive him—or the “Helix” writers—for killing off smart-ass veterinarian Dr. Doreen Boyle (Catherine Lemieux) in last week’s episode.
“He’s multifaceted, let’s just say,” Ghanime said in a recent conference call with reporters. “So we’re going to see some surprises.”
Ya think?
In last week’s “Single Strand” episode, Balleseros murdered Boyle when he discovered she was dangerously close to figuring out the origin of the deadly virus killing scientists, monkeys and rats in the Arctic Biosystems research facility. Sure, he told her he liked her and that he was sorry, but I wouldn’t say the guy has “heart.” Would you?
“He’s got his own agenda. He’s got his own side story and his own motivation for a lot of the things,” Ghanime said, adding that Balleseros had grown to respect Boyle. “Not to say that [he] didn’t think she was a brat and maybe a bit of a pain in the ass, but [he] kind of liked her.”
Balleseros continues to cover up any evidence about the virus’s origins for his unknown bosses in this week’s episode, “The White Room,” debuting at 9 p.m. Jan. 31 on Syfy. As you can see in the sneak peek above, he’s still got something against those frozen monkeys outside the building. He also still can communicate with the world outside the facility, even though he’s made sure no one within can do the same.
But Dr. Alan Farragut (Billy Campbell) and other members of the CDC team quickly figure out that they’re not being given all the information about what’s been going on at Arctic Biosystems. And once Boyle’s body is discovered, they know there’s a murderer in their midst–and he or she isn’t a vector.
Possibly hinting at Boyle’s murder, Ghanime said that during filming he constantly was checking new scripts to make sure his character lived through the next episode.
“It is one of those things. As we’ve seen with shows like ‘Game of Thrones’ where they’ve done some pretty drastic things to their cast in that series,” he said. “It’s the WTF era of television where it’s just a lot of shock and awe sometimes.”
Check out Lemieux’s reaction to her character’s death, and some WTF moments from the season so far, in the videos below.
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