“Woe’s Hollow” was also Ortbo to separate production – a vulture

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Followed by spoilers for Indemnity Season two episode four, “Woe’s HollowS “

The well -known ding of the elevator to the cut -off of Lumo ring when John Turturo B’s Irving opens his eye in the middle of a snowy, icy lake, surrounded by plain mountains. The wind you around the head and body wearing a coat.

Here’s how Indemnity The fourth episode of the second season opens, a visual, which stems from the idea Dan Erickson, the creator of the Apple TV+series while writing the first season. “I have always wanted this image of one of the hanis to wake up in a huge, frozen area and not know how the hell have come there,” he says.

This episode, entitled “Woe’s Hollow,” has enabled Erickson to take this image and get out of it and strangely with it. The surreal Odyssey puts Mark, Heli, Irving and Dylan on Ortbo – this is an event of retreat and building a team, Apparently – Designed to strengthen their loyalty to Lumo. Making the episode was like its own retreat for the series “The Acting and the Crew” Indemnity spent in the production in an episode. (It takes an average of 18 days to capture the series of the series, says Stiller.)

The production took place in March 2023, which coincides with a large northeast snowstorm that dumped tons of winter rainfall in New York. It was a grace for production that wanted natural snow in many scenes, but also a challenge that made even more difficult access to remote places. In some cases, obtaining a setting requires the use of a snow cat, something that MDR Innies would surely be glad to borrow for its march to the Woe cavity, the Holy Land in the National Forest of Dieter Egan, called Kier’s Twin Brother.

“This was a whole ordeal,” Stiller says of logistics related to downloading the 51-minute chapter in Indemnity History. The end result is an episode that looks frosty and is often freezing.

Shortly after Erving Aleens, he connected with his three colleagues, who all ended up in the freezing desert in the middle of nowhere. It is not clear exactly how they got there, though it seems likely that instead of getting out of the office elevator, as usual, Lumon’s technology somehow transports them to this massive forest.

“One of the funny things about this show is that you are often in the subjective reality of Innies,” says Erickson. “It occurred to me that they could wake up somewhere and have no idea how they came there and that if we put the audience in the same confused space, we can solve this mystery with them.”

As they question their surroundings, the four notice a television set and a DVD player placed on the edge of a rock. He plays an orientation video in which Milchik tells them that they need to dare the cave of scissors to extract the fourth application, an important text that explains the connection between Kieer Igan, the mythologized founder of Lumon Industries and his twin, Dieter , who was employees did not even know they existed. Immediately, things look excluded not only because of the strange instructions of Milchick, but also because the setting of the TV and the DVD player seemed to have been thrown out of a classroom in high school and on this rock, without any of the necessary electrical equipment.

The Hindle team actually built a fake plug into the rock adjacent to the TV, but the scene “was just better without it.” Adds Stiller: “Sometimes you want to pay attention to the logic. Then another time you guess that viewers can understand it yourself because you just want to live in the images. “

Photo: Apple TV+

As Mark, Heli, Dylan and Irving were touring the scissors cave and ultimately the Woe cave itself, they are guided by their respective Doppelgängers, Lookalikes, which appear one at a time, standing at a great distance and target in the direction, in the direction, which the group has to travel afterwards.

Stiller explains that the production dresses actors to look like Scott, Brit Lower, Zack Cherry and Turturro and equip them with masks. “We played a lot about how we wanted to see them and even how much you would see them,” Stiller says. The scene later in the episode in which Irving encounters his Doppelgänger in the forest, eventually cut.

“The story in this episode is much more about the fact that Irving is making up what happens to Heli,” he says. “It was more for him to face his own shadow. It was really good, but it was out of the subject of what the episode was about. “

Photo: Apple TV+

“It makes sense that penetrates the whole episode that Lumo is trying to inspire fear of nature and of unbridled human nature in The Innies,” says Erickson. “The fact that they take them to this horrifying place and has death around them, all this is deliberately created by Lumo to paint a specific picture of the outside world and human nature.”

Erickson and his writers were initially not sure what kind of corpse would come across the group in the forest. They discussed the creation of a “hybrid creature”, which would be practically unrecognizable for both Innies and the audience, but eventually settled in print because its presence in this climate seemed so unlikely. “Like Innie, do you know that print does not live in the snow? It was an opportunity to re -enter this question about what information he is doing and does not penetrate the barrier for compensation, “he says.

The animal itself was created by Penko Platikonav, a sculptor that works on the series. By studying photos of dead seals, he sculpts several versions of foam and other artificial materials – “probably very fake skins and lacquer and latex,” Hindell says – before presenting Hindle, Stiller and Props Master Cat Miller variants. “We would say,” Oh, maybe there are bones here. ” It is almost as if we have turned the design to break it up. “

Photo: Apple TV+

The Ortbo-Somping accommodation that boasts a small tent for any MDR crew member,

“This episode was probably my favorite to shoot, just because we actually have to travel there and it was really raining and cold,” says Sarah Bock, who plays Miss Huang. “I couldn’t go back to the base camp and do a school on the set, as I usually did between participation, so I had to hang out and hear people tell stories around the fire. John Turburo was telling stories about when he was a young actor. “

Hindell, whose department is responsible, among other things, loads all the pieces and props in this secluded area “in the middle of nowhere”, has a different look: “It was really difficult.”

The manufacturing designer has spent a lot of time thinking about the structures that will become temporary homes of MDR employees. “I wanted tents that were foldable, but I wanted the inside to feel a little like a cell,” he says. The fabric and the framing of the tents were handmade by the production team, which also built what Hindell describes as “an incredible, strange, trained thing that was a toilet” for a scene that was cut from the script. “It was quite fantastic, but we didn’t shoot it,” he says.

They filmed and included part of Miss Huang’s recital, filled as part of the entertainment of fire. “I learned how to play,” says Bock. “I play piano and guitar, so I decided I could take it quickly, but it was definitely more complicated than I expected.”

Why Theremin? The simplest, most literal answer: Erickson likes the tool. “Honestly, I just like how it sounds and I was like, If I can get a free concert of Theremin from this thing, then so much better, the betterHe says.

After all, the most important points in this sequence appear when Milchik reads parts of the fourth chapter of the application for Cyrus and Dieter Egan, which reveals that Dieter’s decision to masturbate in the wild makes him become part of the forest forever. As Heli explodes that she is laughing at absurdity, the other MDR loyalists initially consider this story read by G -H -Milchik, as if this is the actual Bible, with reverence.

“The fact that Dieter recovers back into the forest for the sin of being lustful – there is morality there in terms of Lumo,” says Erickson. “In the end, their goal is to seek the comfort of Lumo again.”

The fourth application – as in the actual, tangible support – existed in many shapes and sizes to hold different angles of the camera. “The shooting is a large part and a half feet. It’s huge, “says Hindell,” Then you can get nice, close pictures of the pages, watercolors and drawings and all handmade work and letters. The amount of work that comes into all different versions for a book you see on the screen is incredible. “

Photo: Apple TV+

When Irving accuses Helly of lying to her time in the outside world, she throws herself, replying that Irving is just lonely because she will never see Burt again. Sick, he wanders in the forest at night, eventually falling asleep and dreams that his desk in Lumo is in the middle of the hollow of the poor. Burt is there, as it is woe, “the insightful bride, half of the height of a natural woman” that appears before Kier in the fourth application to accuse him of dissolving Dieter in the soil. Her presence ensures the scare of the episode jump, adding to the threat of Irving’s dream.

To shoot this scene, Indemnity The team actually put a desk in the forest-specialist at Sam’s Point, over a dwarf-black-black forest, recently burned in a controlled fire. He coincided with the ghostly, abandoned look Hindell hoped to achieve. Once again, the crew had to take motor sleds and trucks with songs to get to the place. “We built a quarter mile skeleton raised above all the dead, small trees, so no one went to the ground,” Hindell says. “That’s how the desk came in. That’s how the whole gear came on.”

The whole sequence was shot in the forest with John Turturo on a day, which just turned out to be extremely misty. “All this fog, all this is real,” Stiller says. “We really got to the ominousness of him.”

Christopher Wakecker’s coverage like Burt and Vera Vaughn as the poor (her appearance was twisted later by visual effects) was shot later at a small, internal stage in Catskills. “She was in full hair, makeup, this wedding dress, but we change it a lot in post,” Hindell says. His team also built the desk and the keyboard so that the woman who plays bitterly looks much younger.

Indemnity Fans will undoubtedly wonder at the images that appear on Irving’s computer. It begins to look like the list of numbers that refineries usually sort, then collide and at one point seem to take the shape of an eyeball. All this was created by the VFX team in post -production. Stiller will not explain the importance of any of it, except to say that there are things on this screen that are worth looking at. He knows that many viewers will do just that.

Photo: Apple TV+

Convinced that Helley is actually her appearance, Irving is trying to drown her to blackmail Milchik to call on the true Helle. Irving knows that this can lead to his termination from the cut floor – and his own death.

“At Burt Irving’s retirement party specifically said,” You will let him die, “no,” you will let him retire, “says Erickson, pointing to the decisive scene in the season. “It is part of his development that he has come to see as a person with life and that if he is fired, it is not retirement, this is death. I think he takes it as an end at that moment. “

The comments of G -H -Milchik to Irving in these last moments – “As if you, Irving B., you have never existed, nor have you elapsed any breath on this earth” – support this idea. As well as the final image in the episode, in which Irving seems to have been pulled to the waterfall and rocks of The Woe’s Hollow, becoming the earth as Dieter Egan before him.