Now that it’s been revealed that there is at least one more living beast, aside from Vincent (Jay Ryan), things are about to get explosive for both him and his love Catherine (Kristin Kreuk) on The CW drama series Beauty and the Beast, already been picked up for Season 2.

The show’s executive producer/writer Jennifer Levin spoke to Collider about this revelation, how long then been planning to have another beast, whether this beast could help or hurt the show’s heroes, determining the look and just how different it would be from Vincent, the cool revelations that are still to come, and just how epic the finale and the cliffhanger in it will be.  Check out what she had to say after the jump, and be aware that there are some spoilers.

Collider:  How will the reveal of Gabe (Sendhil Ramamurthy) being another beast play into the finale?

JENNIFER LEVIN:  He’s a beast and the question is, “Is he going to work with Vincent, or is he out to get them?”  That’s what plays into that final episode.  It leads to some stuff that you wouldn’t expect, and some really cool revelations.

When I spoke with Jay Ryan before the show’s debut, he talked about his hope that there would eventually be more beasts, at some point.  When did you decide to introduce that storyline, and how early on did you start to develop that?

LEVIN:  We talked about it early on, that there might be another beast out there and that that would be really cool.  I guess we thought about it with the scene in the pilot where he is getting injected with the stuff and there were other people there, so we were like, “Well, what happened to those other people?  What if they weren’t all killed?”  It was on the set that we were talking about it, very early on.  The interesting thing is that Gabe wasn’t a soldier, so he has a whole different background.  He’s a little bit of a different kind of beast than Vincent, which is very intriguing. 

Did you have to really think about how Gabe would look as a beast, compared to how Vincent looks, and whether you’d want them to look similar or not?

LEVIN:  Yes, totally!  We did.  And we learned a lot from Jay [Ryan], and working with Vincent and his make-up.  We tried a bunch of stuff.

beauty-and-the-beast-jay-ryan-kristin-kreuk

How does it feel to know that you’ve wrapped this season up now, with the story?  Are you excited for fans to see where this season will end?

LEVIN:  It’s super exciting!  I think that we’ve taken things and twisted them.  We have some reveals that I don’t think people will see coming.  I’m excited to get feedback and to hear what people think.  We are very excited about it. 

What words would you use to describe the season finale, and how you think fans will feel when they see those final moments?

LEVIN:  I guess the word would be epic.  We use it a lot, but it is the most epic episode that we’ve done, for sure.  It’s big and grand.  As far as what they’ll feel, they’ll feel frustrated that they have to wait four months to find out what happened.  We did really go for the cliffhanger.  We have really pushed ourselves and are trying not to be too safe. 

beauty-and-the-beast-jay-ryan-kristin-kreuk

Did you worry about setting up a cliffhanger without knowing for sure about whether you would have a Season 2, or were you just hopeful that things would work out?

LEVIN:  I think that it will work itself out.  It felt like this was the way to go.  I can’t imagine the network won’t bring us back.  We have such great fans.  The show is so good.  Kristin [Kreuk] and Jay [Ryan] are so good.  And we have this big cliffhanger.  Everybody will want to see what happens.  Maybe it was this underhanded way of letting the network know, “You can’t cancel us!”  We didn’t want to give them an easy out.

Beauty and the Beast airs on Thursday nights on The CW.