Prepare For Takeoff: Here’s What We Know About The Flight Attendant Season 2

The Flight Attendant was supposed to be a limited series, but just a day after the show’s finale, HBO Max pulled a Big Little Lies and announced that there would be more turbulence ahead. Even though season 1 ended with some answers about Alex’s (Michiel Huisman) death and Cassie (Kaley Cuoco) on her way to recovery, both Cuoco and creator Steve Yockey have said that there are many directions a second season could go.

“It is a limited series, and we have plans baked in… We have a great producing team, we are a wonderful group of storytellers. I think we have everything in place should the show move forward after this initial mystery,” Yockey said at a virtual press tour before the renewal.

Based on Chris Bohjalian’s 2018 novel of the same name, the series follows an impulsive flight attendant who wakes up one morning in a hotel room next to a dead man — with no memory of the night before. As Cassie attempts to figure out what happened, she’s also forced to face her own buried trauma. And although she’s in a much better place by the end of the season, there’s still a lot to explore in her next story. Cuoco's performance left fans eager to hear more of her story, and her portrayal of the complex Cassie character even earned her a Golden Globe nomination.

Here’s everything we can expect. Fasten your seatbelts.

Unfortunately, we’ll probably have to wait awhile longer. Cuoco told the Hollywood Reporter in December that “in a perfect world,” the second season would film around the end of 2021. “I’d like to keep it COVID-free,” she said. For now, we can hope for new episodes in early 2022.

Cuoco will definitely return, and we can assume that Rosie Perez, Zosia Mamet, and Griffin Matthews might be back, too. Michelle Gomez, who plays Miranda, is more of a question mark — she was nowhere to be found by the season 1 finale, and seemingly ran off with Alex’s money. But Yockey teased that he’d love to see her in season 2. “There’s always a world in which Miranda shows up, which is the kind of world I like to live in,” he told the New York Times.

Cuoco and Yockey have both said that season 2 will tell a new kind of story, because Cassie is on her way to becoming a new version of herself. “All of Cassie’s antics before, it was always like, ‘Well, that’s just Cassie!’” Cuoco told the New York Times. “What if we go down this route of her living this new lifestyle, trying to be sober and clean up her act, and there is no excuse anymore? And what does work now look like? What does love now look like?” 

Yockey likened the second season to “a whole new adventure, like a new Hitchcock movie for Cassie to stumble into.” 

The show’s most important moments take place in Cassie’s head — in what Yockey calls her “mind palace.” Now that she’s finally moved on from Alex (and likely on her way to a healthier mental state), these scenes won’t look exactly the same, but Yockey says they’ll still play a part in season 2. “It would be present because it's a part of our storytelling, but I think it would take a different form,” he told Collider.

Fans of Bohjalian’s novel were surprised by the show’s season 1 finale, which had a pretty different ending — and according to Cuoco, season 2 won’t exactly follow the source material, either. At the end of the book, we learn that Cassie goes on to become a CIA informant and also a mother, but Cuoco told the New York Times that her character will not get pregnant. “That was a bit too far,” she said.

She added that Cassie also won’t “wake up and suddenly be a spy,” but she could see the CIA playing a role in Cassie’s future. “She’s not a professional [spy], but I do wonder if she could be used in that CIA Human Asset Program,” Cuoco said. “That could be interesting for her.”