Clary Will Be 'Forever Changed' When Shadowhunters Returns

It's been a long, long hiatus for Shadowhunters fans, made longer by the knowledge that the upcoming episodes of Shadowhunters will be the show's last. At least there's hope that when the show picks back up, Clary (Katherine McNamara) might not be quite as dead as we'd thought.

When we last left off, Clary, Lillith (Anna Hopkins) and a newly resurrected Jonathan Morgenstern (Luke Baines) were all blown to kingdom come after Lillith's attack on Simon (Alberto Rosende) activated his Mark of Cain, which obliterated everything in his immediate vicinity. Whoops? We all know Shadowhunters would never kill off Clary in the middle of a season, so it's no surprise that she's not exactly dead and gone when the show returns, even if everyone in the Shadow World thinks she is. To find out exactly how much of Clary survived the blast, TV Guide caught up with the Shadowhunters cast to ask where the story will pick up when the show returns for Season 3B.

"Clary is still in the show," McNamara reassured TV Guide when we visited the set of the series finale last year, "but she will never be the same. The Clary that we all have grown to love is kind of gone in a sense, and Clary will never be able to fully get back to that person. She's forever changed."

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While Clary's fate is still a mystery, we do know that her brother, Jonathan (Luke Baines) was resurrected in the midseason finale, and he'll be playing a large part in her storyline in this final stretch of episodes. And if the trailer for Season 3B is any indication, they'll both have to come to terms with the darkness they've inherited that's still very much inside both of them.

"Clary has been trying to push away the Morgenstern part of her for a long time and trying to bury those feelings and the lost familial connection," McNamara told TV Guide at the Television Critics Association winter press tour. "She's found a family. She's made a family with Jace and Izzy and Alec and Luke and all these people. Now, in this season she's forced to confront her biological family, which is Jonathan, and of course to confront what it means to be a sister and a Morgenstern and to have to deal with that and the mess that their parents left them. As good as Jocelyn's intentions were, they are really messed up because of the mess that their parents created. It's interesting to find the ways in which they can help each other and the ways in which they can hurt each other because they really are in the same boat."

While Clary deals with familial drama, everyone back home will still be reeling from her apparent death, and they'll all be going through the grieving process in their own ways. Some are apparently handling it better than others.

"As far as the rest of the gang knows, Clary's dead, and Simon thinks he killed her," McNamara said. "So the fact that Simon thinks he killed his best friend is kind of going to weigh heavily on him. Jace, the last interaction he and Clary had was him throwing her off the roof... You see it affect everyone in the Institute and outside the Institute, but I think it becomes a catalyst for what happens next."

Poor Simon! It sounds like he'll really be having a rough go of it when it Shadowhunters returns, and not just because of the guilt over Clary's "death." If you remember, Simon recently had to cut ties with his family after his vampiric stalker nearly killed them. Now, with the loss of Clary compounding that loneliness, Simon's headed in a decidedly dark direction.

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"Simon went through the Shadow World but he always went through it with Clary," Rosende told TV Guide, "and after having lost the two other pillars of his life, he knew that if he had Clary, he still had something to anchor on to, something to wrap around. But now with Clary gone, we're definitely going to see Simon in like the lowest place that we've ever seen him. In a place that I was scared for him. It's really rock bottom. He has to either learn to stand up and build himself back up again or fall in the process. It's very dark and very hard for him."

Another wild card in this scenario is Jace (Dominic Sherwood). After spending much of the first half of the season committing horrible acts under Lillith's control, Jace is not only dealing with the loss of Clary but with the aftermath of his own dark turn.

"He's turned a lot of that guilt in on himself, not just from these things that have happened but also going back through Imogen, trying to kill Alec, then going even farther back like the sword and dying. Everything that's happened to him, he's now turning in on himself," Sherwood said.

Luckily, we won't have to see him down in the dumps for too long before he starts digging into the truth about Clary's demise. "Fortunately," Sherwood revealed, "fairly soon in 3B, we get help from a fairly unexpected source about [Clary's] supposed circumstances."

Shadowhunters returns Feb. 25 at 8/7c on Freeform.

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