The walking dead invaded Horseshoe Bay on Wednesday in the final season premiere of Nancy Drew, giving everyone something to fear.
But first, let’s start with the #Nace of it all: Though Nancy spent most of the hour dodging questions about why the couple can’t be together, she eventually caved and wrote down Ace’s name during the Lovers’ Vigil — and what do you know, he found it! No longer able to deny her feelings for him, Nancy finally told Ace about Temperance’s curse.
“There’s a subconscious part of Nancy that’s crumbling under the weight of this secret,” star Kennedy McMann tells TVLine. “She made what she thought was the only decision, which was to keep this secret. There was a little bit of her that hoped he would somehow find out without her being directly responsible for telling him,” hence her writing down his name.
Then again, Ace may not be the only man in Nancy’s life this season. The premiere introduced us to Tristan (played by Henrique Zaga), a handsome lobsterman who also happens to be the son of the Glasses, with whom Ryan and Bess had a near-fatal interaction earlier in the episode.
McMann promises “exciting, surprising reveals” to come in the Nancy-Tristan relationship, explaining that Nancy has “spent so much time harboring feelings for Ace that she can’t act on. She feels isolated and alone, and we’ve seen that she has a habit of running from those uncomfortable feelings, finding solace in physical intimacy or validation in other relationships. She has this longing to be loved, to be able to touch someone who cares about her. The feeling that she’s deprived of in her relationship with Ace drives her to leave a door with Tristan open in a way that she probably otherwise wouldn’t.”
The premiere also introduced us to Horseshoe Bay’s new police chief. (“The real mystery of this show is the case of Horseshoe Bay’s rotating police chiefs,” McMann jokes.) Though Nancy and the chief initially find themselves at odds, we’ll soon learn that “this particular police chief is different than any of the others she’s interacted with before. This police chief’s biggest adversary is actually somebody else, which is a cool subplot.”
The new chief was by the Drew Crew’s side when they discovered that the town’s “missing” corpses actually became zombified and moved themselves. And just when you thought it couldn’t get any weirder, the black substance puked out by those zombies appeared to take on a life of its own as it slinked its way into the town’s water supply.
So, what can we expect from the rest of Nancy Drew‘s final outing?
“This season is pretty jam-packed with all spooky, creepy creatures from many different origins,” McMann teases. “We have some great standalone episodes that bring forth all of these crazy-big spiders and things like that. And our main mystery throughout the season introduces a number of different beings that the Drew Crew has never crossed paths with before.”
Did you enjoy your long-awaited return to Horseshoe Bay? Grade Nancy Drew‘s final-season premiere below, then drop a comment with your hopes for the Drew Crew moving forward.
This story originally appeared on TVLine
