It’s a profoundly upsetting scene for a myriad of reasons: Prepon wisely makes viewers wait for the shocking reveal — but at its core, the reason Piscatella’s actions carry such sickening weight is because he’s not inflicting physical harm on Red, he’s cutting straight to her core as a powerful woman. “It was something we talked about for a very long time because it felt, obviously, very important to get right,” Lauren Morelli, a writer and co-executive producer on the show, told BuzzFeed News. “Coming back to something that's really character based but all about her pride and her ego and stripping her of that. He would be smart enough to know that's the way to go with her; he doesn't have to cut off her finger, he doesn't have to physically harm her more than he already has — he has to degrade her.”

As difficult as the scene is to watch, it was equally challenging to film. Mulgrew and Henke spent a long time working out the physicality of the scalping, but opted not to discuss the minutiae of their individual emotional journeys in hopes everything would feel more organic in the moment. “It was hard. It was hard,” Mulgrew said of the “disturbing” scenario. “I had to reflect on a lot of things, vanity being foremost among them. All of that had to be quickly thrown away, and I'm not one to dismiss my vanity out of hand. So I had to really take it off the table and allow this other thing to enter in, which is called evil.” Through that process, Mulgrew got a valuable, albeit painful, insight into Red’s world. “It led me to a more cogent understanding of … this horror,” she said. “[More] than any other single moment in the five years I've been on the show, because she was so perfectly helpless. Heretofore I've always had a card up my sleeve. He took my entire deck and stripped it bare.”