ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You get at least one big laugh.
Scientist-turned-saboteur Jim Meeks (Christopher Denham) telling Frank Winter he doesnt want to hurt anybody.
And Frank responds: You picked the wrong line of work.
Credit: WGN
SAM SHAW:Its important to be able to laugh in the face of nuclear annihilation.
And I often think of our show while were writing scenes almost as a comedy.
Season 1 was about the quest to build the bomb.
Season 2 seemed to be the quest to stop it.
It felt important that Trinity did work at the end.
It was really important for these characters to actually see what they wrought at the end of this season.
We certainly talked about what the sort of laws of physics of the world of this show would be.
It played around in this bizarre fashion about the death of Robert Oppenheimers mistress.
Tell me aboutManhattanexploring women and people of color, whose stories and contributions have often been overlooked by history.
Theres something thats really alive about her as an actor.
I cant say enough great things about her.
Katya for president, shes incredible.
You show her struggles in this social climate.
Frank has this great dawning of conscience about this thing that hes helping to midwife into the world.
He becomes stricken by the idea of this thing hes bringing into the world.
Helen doesnt really share those pangs of conscience by the end of the story.
Im not totally sure that she has the luxury that Frank has of indulging all of those moral doubts.
Everything is uncomfortable about that moment.
How about Theodore Sinclair?
He seems to have been embraced by the project leadership partly because he is so isolated.
They know they can trust him, because nobody else does.
So that is actually a huge regret for me.
I hope well get to keep doing that in future episodes.
I love Theodore and Corey Allen is fantastic.
We need to talk about Charlie Isaacs.
Just watching John Benjamin Hickey and Ash Zuckerman, theyre both incredible.
John, theres this sense of conflictedness about him that I find profound.
So thats what suggested where Charlie would go.
Its a very dark turn … Its his own way of reconciling to himself everything that hes done and everything that hes lost.
Lets talk about the final moments of the episode.
How did you get to that point?
We agonized over the ending.
We debated it until we were sick of debating it and then debated it some more.
So it was really painful to think about that moment.
Obviously, its not the feel-good ending of the year.
Why did it have to happen, in your mind?
We knew that this season was going to end with a nuclear explosion.
It was a tragic moment for that reason.
But why choose Fritz as the sacrifice?
He hasnt been tainted by it at all.
I will say to you that it wasnt a choice that was made lightly.
Whats the state of season 3?
Thats still very much an open question.
I wish it were not an open question.
Any hint of where it might go?
What awaits is a story about the America that was born on the other side of World War II.
The beginning of the atomic age and the way in which we remade ourselves.
