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#Pausing closes top bar access spotify series

“Evan doesn’t just know where the bodies are buried, he’s the one who buried most of them for the U.S. “He suffers from, and deals with, these missions that he’s conducted,” Hurwitz says. That’s something that Evan has carried with him throughout the series, as he continues to in “Prodigal Son.”

“It’s like this really weird thing that if you don’t suffer from the guilt of knowing that you’re responsible directly for bloodshed or death, then you’re unhooked from the moral responsibility of inflicting it.” “What’s so interesting is that what we ask soldiers in war to bear is their suffering,” Hurwitz says. The drone technology he incorporates in “Prodigal Son” fascinated not just because of its terrifying potential, but also for its ability to remove the moral consequences of war from the men and women who have always borne it. “The next thing that’s going to start to break into the public awareness two or three years hence.” “And I’m always looking at what’s the cutting-edge technology,” he says. I have former spies, Navy Seals, professors, porn stars, demolition experts, scientists, people who deal with stuff out of DARPA labs,” the latter a reference to the defense department’s research and development arm. “I have a hell of a Rolodex,” Hurwitz says. It might sound like science fiction, but a quick online search reveals plenty of proof of concept. In “Prodigal Son,” Evan is drawn into the investigation of an off-the-books military technology that involves mini-drones modeled on dragonflies that can swarm and attack autonomously, using their AI hive mind to make life-and-death decisions without human oversight. “Part of what was interesting for me to see, as she appeared, was how much had to alter and change in his worldview.” Killer tech “It hasn’t ever occurred to him that he could disappoint somebody in who he is and his identity,” Hurwitz says. When Evan tells Veronica he’s a government agent who kills people for a living she’s disappointed, and that changes him, too. He never contemplated, because he had shut the feelings away so tightly, what it was to be wanted.” “Like, there’s all these feelings that are elicited in him that he never knew. “A lot of it I poached from his point of view,” he says.

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Part of that’s reflected in the care he increasingly feels for people in his orbit, whether it’s single mother Mia and her young son Peter who live downstairs, or Joey, the 16-year-old girl, who previously had been part of the Orphan program and now serves as his tech wizard and personal hacker.īut it’s the arrival of Veronica, the mother he never knew, that pushes Evan the most in “Prodigal Son.” Creating the mother character six books into the series was a challenge, Hurwitz says, one on which he let his protagonist take the lead. Hurwitz says that “Prodigal Son” represents the biggest step forward in Evan’s discovery of his own humanity to date. “I thought, what a fun thing if I have this character who is perfectly at home calculating the wind drift of a sniper round but gets completely undone if he has to make small talk by the mailslots.” Mother and son

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“We don’t ever see James Bond go home, right? We never see Jason Bourne trying to figure how to make small talk. “All of these things, that was the fun of it for me,” he says.

“He toggles between these larger-than-life missions and him coming back and getting stuck in a HOA meeting, or being dressed down by the highly irritable, elderly Jewish woman who lives downstairs who may or may not be based on my late grandmother,” Hurwitz says. The second key that unlocked the character was the decision to show Evan in the world beyond the secret missions he undertakes, which he does first for the government and later as a do-gooder known as the Nowhere Man. “I realized that it’s what I wanted a do - a series about somebody evolving past the strictures and rules, the assassin’s 10 commandments, and sort of thawing into the imperfections and awareness of being human.” “It’s when Jack says to him, ‘The hardest part isn’t making you a killer, the hardest part is keeping you human.’ “There’s a line that I use in each of the books around which for me the whole series coalesces,” says Hurwitz, who has a pair of Southern California virtual book events over the next two weeks. His handler, Jack Johns, becomes his father figure over the course of what is now six books, the latest, “Prodigal Son,” out on Tuesday, Jan. Evan Smoak, as he’s known in the real world, is every bit as talented and deadly an agent as Jack, James and Jason, but the humanity with which Hurwitz imbues him sets him apart. Orphan X eventually took clearer shape in his imagination, and five years ago, the eponymous first book in the series was published.