We had such a great chat with Doc showrunner, Hank Steinberg, that we had to break things down into two parts.
If you want to read what he had to say about Jake’s evolution, the Amy & Jake reunion, and the reckoning in store for Michael, then check out the first part of our Post-Mortem interview!
Of course, there’s more to dive into after that explosive finale, including what’s coming up next with the controversial revenge plot, and how Scott Wolf may return! Check it out!
Okay, you guys have probably one of the most widely discussed villainous plots right now. Everyone’s fuming. Our comment sections, online, live-tweeting, everywhere, people are going.
Was there ever a hard line you didn’t want to cross with Hannah’s pursuit of vengeance, or were you going all in?
Well, that was the fun thing about Hannah. We talked in the writer’s room, and it’s so tricky.
You want to have an antagonist, because it’s great, it’s fun, and in this case, it’s also organic to Amy’s predicament, which is that, for eight years, she was a very difficult woman.
In those eight years, she doesn’t remember creating a lot of enemies through her behavior.
It is organic that she has people coming after her, but she’s kind of reaping what she sows, and it’s getting to an extreme that she doesn’t deserve.
She has some potential responsibility, and we’ve already explored that in the season premiere with Alex, the cop who had the wrong understanding of her, but took it out on her.
This year, we wanted to do someone very different than Scott Wolf’s character, who became her boss, and this is someone who’s at the bottom of the totem pole, a young woman instead of a man in a senior position.
What we loved about bringing in Charlie was, it gives Hannah someone to talk to, to conspire with, that we can get under her hood and know what she’s thinking and whatnot.
We have these two damaged kids, and you see in this episode, Charlie is much more damaged and willing to go farther, and that helps us keep Hannah’s credibility because she’s a doctor, she’s worked hard for that, she has her own dreams.
She’s gonna find herself getting carried away. At first, it seemed fun to mess with Amy, but then she’s gonna watch Charlie go farther and farther, and she can’t control it.
Yeah, yeah, I noticed that.
She invited him into the hen house, and now, she’s got a problem, and that’s always fun.
Whether it’s Fargo or, you know, any other crime or villain story, it’s fun when there are two people who are arguing with each other about what to do, how far to go, and one of them is a bit more reluctant or has more inherent decency, but is getting carried away and dragged into it by the other.
That’s always a fun dynamic. It also makes it feel more personal, more emotional, and whatnot, so.
With Hannah, we did see at the beginning that she and Amy had a nice dynamic. There was some respect there, and then everything shifted so much.
Will Hannah keep experiencing that conflict moving forward, because she’s clearly having moments of “Wait, maybe shouldn’t be doing this.”
She’s definitely gonna be feeling, like, is what we’re doing commensurate with the crime, right?
I think she wanted to punish Amy a bit, maybe hurt her, maybe have her lose her job. We don’t know if she wanted to destroy her life. Charlie wants to destroy her life, and Hannah’s getting more and more uncomfortable with that.
But it’s a train she may not be able to stop, which puts her in a really conflicted place, because if she’s just going around twirling her mustache in the hospital ready to do everything with Amy, then there’s no tension for her.
Emma [Pfitzer Price]’s such a great actress, and you feel her three-dimensionality, so I think you actually kind of feel for her, too.
You know how close she was to her father, and how much that meant to her, and she’s just quite damaged.
We’re going to have some flashbacks coming up where you see what happened to Hannah and Charlie, and how they got this messed up by what happened, and that’s coming up in a few episodes, so it’s all really dynamic.
Charlie, of course, has gone full nuclear at a funeral, and there’s so much collateral damage of epic proportions.
What can you tease about what that fallout is going to be like, and how it plays out when the show returns? There are so many directions that can go in.
Yeah. You’ve got Jake and Amy together, Michael’s marriage has fallen apart … The hospital is now aware there’s been a cyberattack, so Hannah’s going to be freaking out because there will be investigations at the hospital.
She’s going to be worried about getting caught, and Charlie doesn’t seem to be stopping.
As a matter of fact, Charlie is escalating now, I mean, the AI voice replication, he can do anything he wants, and make it seem like Amy said whatever he wants to say.
He can get her in a lot of trouble with that, so it’ll be very fun to watch when we come back for the midseason premiere. There will be unexpected consequences for Charlie and Hannah as they push things too far.
You brought up Richard Miller. Is there anything you can tease about his return to the series? I’m excited to see Scott Wolf come back, and I know he’s directing, which is awesome too.
He did an amazing job on the episode that he directed. We all loved Scott personally; we loved the character of Richard Miller. And we beat him up so badly at the end of last season, we were not sure how we could bring him back, and it took a while — months.
We were breaking the stories for this episode and constantly returning to how we could get Richard back.
All I can say is, it emerges very organically from the Hannah story in a way that when we discovered that, we were like, oh, that’s great, that’s great. We feel it comes out of that story in a way that is very organic, and you understand it.
It doesn’t feel like, “oh, it’s just that the writers wanted him back, you know, we found a pretty clever way of bringing him back, and weaving it into the existing story in a way that, oh, I see that.”
So yeah, that was like a party that day when we realized that’s how we’re going to do it.
I know you touched on it about more personal character arcs that we’ll see with the other characters. We had really great Gina and Jake episodes, covering topics like domestic violence (which was really powerful) and COVID here, too.
Will be digging into other characters more or tackling big topics in the second half of the season?
The great thing about having 22 episodes is you really get to go into each character, and everyone has their own arc and story for the season. Sonya has her own thing going on, TJ. We’ve got the secret of Joan’s illness, which will start to emerge.
We’ve got a couple of big tentpole kind of medical stuff going on in the back half. Difficult moral choices for our characters when it comes to what’s going on internally in the hospital, and we’re always looking for provocative medical cases that we’ll have.
Of course, we’re going to have a bunch of those. It’s a lot to do with 22, so I’m tired, but I’m feeling very satisfied and pretty proud.
I know, it was a tall order, but you guys are killing it so far.
I’d say I’m still standing, but I’m sitting.
Lots of coffee, right?
Yeah, lots of coffee, lots of coffee.
Doc returns with its midseason premiere on January 6th at 9/8c following the series premiere of Best Medicine!
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