CHRIS RADTKE: I just watched the Season Three Finale and I have to say: nice glasses, Otto.
KURT SUTTER: Oh, thanks man.
RADTKE: Did you always see Agent Stahl going out like that?
KURT: When we introduced her character in Season One, she was obviously a different animal than the current character, but Ally Walker brought this great sort of quirky madness to Stahl. You know Ally just has this crazy gleam in her eye.
RADTKE: She has that wild eye.
KURT: It really was. She really helped me shape that character and making her a little more of a predator. She was probably more of a sexual predator than any of our guys were. You know she had that crazy energy. We pushed the envelope, I've always sort of pushed toward getting to the most absurd choices organically as we can, and I think the choices she made with that character really gave me the freedom to go down that road. I think once the scene happened with Otto in the prison, I think that was really the turning point for Stahl in terms of crossing the line, in that it's no longer a necessarily objective opinion, it became personal for her.
You know obviously this season Jax plays her like a fiddle in terms of knowing where her weaknesses are and you know that Alpha Cop Paradox which is you become so obsessed with getting the bad guy that you ultimately have to become more evil than the evil you are pursuing. They played with that all the time on The Shield. I really think that was the case for Stahl this year. Seeing her need to use the Sons to get to the bigger goal of the IRA and this whole international gun running thing that would make her a superstar and that she's ultimately a woman that is driven and probably not unlike Tig, I think she's sociopathic and has no intimacy. I think all her relationships including the one with Agent Tyler weren't about intimacy, they were all as a means to an end.
I wasn't quite sure how the whole scapegoat thing would play out but ultimately as we started creating this character of Tyler and she became a greater threat to what Stahl wanted to do, it served Stahl's character best if she killed two birds with one stone, literally. We were able to push boundaries with that and to me I always knew there would be that reaction that happens in the finale when Jax figures out exactly what she's done. Jax has that moment where he literally takes a step back from her because he realizes that she's nuts. That ultimately she's far more evil or Machiavellian than he or Clay or the Club is. We knew we were going to cater down that road, and there's not a lot of places you can go after that.
RADTKE: She's one of the best TV villains I've seen in years. What do you do without her?
KURT: I hear that, and ultimately the truth is that after this season, after what she's done to Tyler karmically, she has to go away, you can't get away with that. The same way Jimmy couldn't get away with what he was doing. Honestly I always think of the way I can tell a fresh story without it feeling derivative, and after this whole thing I don't know how to plug Stahl in there without it becoming a variation of what was done before. So yeah, it sucks to lose her but ultimately I think that for the narrative to move forward and Jax to be a rat, obviously all that had to go down. You know, I think we earned that death.
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