Was the plan to always periodically catch up with Poodle and Christopher throughout the show as Mickey and this family continue to evolve? Have you thought at all about them even getting out of prison and how the show could change in that sense, too?

DAVE CHERNIN: Yeah, we always had some sort of plan for them. We knew we had these characters that were very much in the background during season one, but the more we worked with those actors—we just love Laird and Trisha—we definitely wanted to return to them in some capacity. I don’t know if we’ll ever want them to be fully in the mix, but it seems fun to keep having them pop up. Also to keep changing their location–in the first season they were on the lam, this year we make a point to see them in prison, and maybe at a certain point we’ll move them somewhere else. We like having them around though.

JOHN CHERNIN: Originally in the pilot we actually killed off the parents, but by the time we got around to pitching the show, we thought that would ultimately be too dark and depressing. So we definitely don’t want Christopher and Poodle to overtake the show or anything, but we love using them when we can.

Poodle’s change is pretty substantial here. Do you think her growth is genuine, or is she just wearing prison-tinted glasses and this is just temporary?

DAVE CHERNIN: We talked about that a lot, actually. It’s certainly the most sympathetic side of her that we’ve seen. It felt true to us though. When we were originally breaking this episode and we had her in prison and still being an asshole, it rang a little false to us. So we took a step back to sort of analyze what the real reaction would be here. Regardless of how terrible she may be, it still seems like she’d have some regret about how everything went down.