From the start, we had a vague shape in mind for the story, which was Mike meets someone who seems like a good guy, but then he becomes a huge problem and Mike has to escape. The placeholder for this, when we were putting index cards up on a board, was the guy tries to eat Mike. I may have been the only person who actually considered that seriously. But as far as Pat’s personality, the only thing we had from the start was that he would become dangerous. It seemed that paranoia about the government was a fine motivation for that, and so the character grew from that. And Mark Boone was so perfect.

This is probably the most virus-heavy episode, but it still keeps things subtle and restrained. What were your thoughts on this? Did you think you spent too much time on it? Not enough?

Will had wanted to do the sea of body bags for a while. I think he brought it up in season one, and we definitely considered it for 201. Just to have a silent scene where Tandy and Carol are driving and they go right through a CDC tent village full of body bags. Since the pilot, we kept seeing people online saying, “where are the bodies????” We knew some people just had to see them. This was our way of saying, “Here. A buncha bodies, happy? Can we get back to the show now?”

I’m embarrassed to admit, I kind of took it personally when people would say, “Where are the signs of chaos? There would be bodies everywhere and crashed cars and stuff.” As if we had missed the first rule of apocalypse stories. I felt a mission to show people that there are other versions of that story. Pat lays it out quite simply: Most people died in their homes and others were taken to makeshift triage centers. So I think we spent the right amount of time on it. We just wanted to give a plausible explanation, frame the story our way, and move on.

I really like that this episode can still just take some time to soak in the beauty of normalcy. The scene of Mike and Pat playing tennis in hazmats suits is such a simple, surreal image.