When Season 1 of “Bad Sisters” ended in 2022, the story of the Garvey sisters seemed to have reached a tidy conclusion. The evil John Paul was dead, killed not by one of his four sisters-in-law — each of whom had a compelling motive to commit murder — but by his seemingly meek wife, Grace, fed up by years of abusive behavior. With help from her friend Roger (Michael Smiley), she made it look like J.P. had died in an accident, with the rest of the sisters — Eva (Sharon Horgan), Becka (Eve Hewson), Bibi (Sarah Greene) and Ursula (Eva Birthistle) — facilitating the cover-up.

But Season 2 has slowly unraveled that neat — perhaps too neat — Hollywood ending. Two years after J.P.’s death, Grace has fallen in love with a seemingly kind new man named Ian (Owen McDonnell), but she starts behaving strangely and then dies in a car crash while fleeing home in a state of distress. The grieving sisters try to uncover the truth about what happened to Grace, and increasingly suspect Roger’s pious, overbearing sister Angelica (Fiona Shaw) of wrongdoing — but turn out to be (mostly) wrong about her intentions. Adding to the Garveys’ panic is an idealistic detective named Una Houlihan (Thaddea Graham), who started to ask questions about J.P.’s death.

It all comes to a head in the Season 2 finale, appropriately titled “Cliff Hanger.” It turns out that Ian is not the nice guy he appears to be, but a disgraced former cop named Cormac who has a wife and family in the North. In the end, Houlihan helps silence Ian and protect the sisters. In the final scene, the Garveys set Grace’s ashes adrift in the sea and finally seem to put their sister’s trauma behind them.

This interview with series creator Sharon Horgan has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: Season 1 seemed to wrap things up rather neatly. What made you want to go back for more?

A: I didn’t think I was going to go back for more, but everyone responded to those characters. That’s not always the case and Apple wanted to do more. I thought, if I can think of a story that feels important to tell, then I’ll do it.

People found the ending perfect — it was, kind of, but I was much more interested in the real life of it all. Even though it was heightened, it was always supposed to feel that these were ordinary women who experienced something extraordinary but terrible. In the real world, it isn’t neat and triumphant like that. I wanted to explore the aftermath of something like that and what would really happen to a woman like Grace who had been isolated and full of shame for so many years.

In researching those relationships, and what happens when someone comes out the other side — if they manage to — they don’t necessarily fall into a healthy relationship. They’re so vulnerable, they can be targeted easily.

My original idea was what if it happened again? Would she be believed? What would her sisters’ reaction be? Could she go to them? Then the story started coming into the light. I knew it would be more brutal, but I also felt like I wanted to dig into that. I wanted to really feel the aftermath of what it’s like to have an abuser in your life. I wanted to dig into the institutions that are there to protect us and what happens when they don’t. There was still a lot of stuff I was angry about, and I wanted to tell it through these sisters, who people like watching,

Q: Did you do research into domestic abuse and con artists?

A: I did a lot of work around the “Dirty John”-type relationships, the kind of women who end up in those situations and the psychopaths behind them.

Q: Ian is a different kind of villain from J.P. He presents as a nice, sensitive guy, but then it turns out he’s this serial abuser and con man. Were you trying to explore another kind of toxic male?

A: I was more interested in exploring how difficult it is to move on when you’ve been in Grace’s situation and how open and vulnerable women like that are, and (people) who can find their way in through the cracks. I was interested in all of the sisters and where they are two years on, how what happened in Season 1 impacted all of them. For Eva, she finally got to offload to her sisters that terrible thing that had happened to her (getting raped by J.P.) and had arrested her life. She’s now starting over. There was a lot of me in there — like, let’s try and fix my life. Let’s go out and run, let’s stop drinking, let’s sort my hormones, all that. When she suffers bereavement, she’s vulnerable and just wants something to fill that grief hole.

Q: It’s interesting because not only does Grace fall for Ian, the sisters do too — Eva literally.

A: That’s what happens — whole families are taken in and they feel so much shame around having been duped. These guys are incredibly good at what they do. The idea that he met Grace at her bereavement group — I listened to so many podcasts and read so many articles with stories like that.

Q: Angelica is interesting because the sisters really misjudge her. Why is that?

A: Sometimes we’re so angry about what’s going on in the world, we misplace our anger. Angelica was such an amazing character for me because she was really just a decoy baddie. She’s a very flawed person, and she’s a bigot in her own way. But she is a product of her environment and that generation, especially in Northern Ireland at that time. A certain life was expected for you, and woe betide you if you went outside of that. Suddenly she sees this new generation of modern Irish women, and she’s like, “What is that?”

There’s so much that we forgive people for that is generational, all sorts of bigotry. I think she rattled the sisters. She represents everything that they stand against. They’re a very liberal, free group of women. It’s also their grief, their paranoia and the panic that leads them to get it so wrong. But at the same time, Angelica is a wagon. (Irish slang for an ornery woman.)

Q: So are you done telling the story of the Garvey sisters?

A: I know that when I wrote the ending for this season it felt like the end. I guess an idea could come to mind that feels viable for the world we’ve created, but for now I think we have a finale that gives fans what they wanted and allowed me to say what I needed to say.