This PONIES Character Was Supposed to Die in the Finale (EXCLUSIVE)
Find out what series regular in Peacock's PONIES was originally going to be killed off in the finale.
SPOILER WARNING: This article contains major plot spoilers for PONIES and its finale.
The finale of Peacock's espionage thriller series PONIES left off on a dramatic cliffhanger — and as shocking as the last scenes were for viewers, even the actors themselves were in for some surprises about what would happen to their characters.
At least one of the series regulars told Peacock Blog that the outcome of the person he portrayed changed after he took on the role.
The show stars Emilia Clarke as Bea and Haley Lu Richardson as Twila, the wives of two CIA agents stationed in Cold War-era 1970s Moscow. When they're told that their husbands died in a plane crash, the two women convince the CIA to let them work as operatives themselves, in order to try to find out what happened to their spouses.
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Playing a high-stakes game with their safety and the secrets of their country, the pair are forced to mingle with all kinds of characters, like ruthless KGB officer Andrei Vasiliev (Artjom Gilz) and sweet CIA informer Sasha Shevchenko (Petro Ninovskyi).
Andrei and Sasha become intertwined in Bea and Twila's lives, especially Bea's, and both of their characters meet interesting fates in the finale. But the end result changed dramatically from what was originally planned for at least one of those characters. Find out who was supposed to die in the finale by reading on, below.
In the PONIES finale, titled "The Stranger," Bea, Twila, and Sasha end up at Andrei's secret safehouse, where they find boxes of shampoo bottles stuffed with tapes that the KGB agent was using to blackmail Soviet officials and Americans. The tapes also contained proof of some of Andrei's crimes and murders.
Andrei's affiliates show up at his safehouse and attack, with Sasha ending up critically stabbed in the chest. Twila and Bea get Sasha into a car and flee, but then Andrei finds them and engages in a car chase. Thanks to Twila's skilled driving, she leads Andrei into making a sharp turn she knows his vehicle can't pull off, and his car flips multiple times, injuring Andrei.
As Twila steps out of the car to see what's going on with Andrei, another car pulls up and a sergeant from the U.S. Marines gets out and tells Bea they're answering the call she and Twila placed for an extraction while they were at Andrei's safehouse. While it's unknown what happens to Sasha after his rescue, he's alive when viewers last see him.
Who was supposed to die in the PONIES finale?
Ninovskyi's Sasha was supposed to die in the last episode of PONIES, titled "The Stranger," the actor revealed to Peacock Blog.
"The initial version of Sasha's character was ending at the end of the first season," Ninovsky said. "We were supposed to actually die at the end of the first season. And then it was changed into him being extracted and just carried into some kind of mysterious direction."
As for Sasha's ultimate outcome, the actor who plays him says he's just as much in the dark as the other characters and the show's viewers. "We don't really know what's going to happen to him," Ninovskyi told Peacock Blog. "But it gives us an incredible amount of possibilities and options to play with and explore if the character survives for the second season."
As for Gilz's murderous KGB officer Andrei, the character survives his car repeatedly flipping during that chase scene, but he's stuffed into the trunk of Bea and Twila's vehicle. They take him to the CIA's station at the U.S. Embassy — along with the boxes of shampoo bottles containing evidence — and start interrogating him, trying to use what they have against him as leverage to get info on what happened to their husbands.
But a bomb planted at the embassy goes off, leading to the destruction of evidence and giving the KGB an excuse to pose as firefighters and come in and take the rest of the CIA's evidence — and allowing Andrei to walk free.
As for how much of Andrei's fate Gilz was looped in on, the actor said he also had some surprises while filming.
"The [story] arc up to the interrogation, I knew," Gilz told Peacock Blog. "But after that, it was unclear what would happen. I was a little wobbly. So no, I didn't know."
Andrei not only lives and escapes Bea and Twila's captivity, but smirks and rubs it in their faces as he triumphantly walks by them, just before KGB agents raise guns to their heads.
RELATED: Why Emilia Clarke Thinks She'd Make a "Terrible Spy"
But can Andrei, whom viewers saw murder a woman in cold blood and brutally threaten an elderly woman, possibly get any worse if there's a PONIES Season 2?
"Oh my god, I keep on thinking about that," Gilz told Peacock Blog of Andrei's already-horrific list of crimes. "I played quite a range already, so I was like, ‘Where am I going to go now?’ We have seen him being so horrible. What is he going to do next? So yeah, that's going to be really interesting to explore and see what [PONIES creators David Iserson and Susanna Fogel] come up with next."
Catch Gilz and Ninovskyi in action by streaming PONIES on Peacock, where all eight episodes are available to watch right now.
