HBO: The episode opens with a monologue from the Man in Black and ends with the same confession. What was the thinking behind bookending the hour with this speech?

Roberto Patino: In this episode the Man in Black is reliving the events of that fateful night and his role in it – events and details that have crystallized in his mind. Here is a guy who is a globally-praised leader, who is widely recognized as a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy. And yet he harbors some very profound, serious darkness that he has very carefully controlled and kept out of the narrative of his public persona, and even out of the way of those closest to him. He’s pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes. Except for his wife, Juliet.

Juliet sees beyond the surface conclusion that he doesn’t love her any more. She knows that what she feels from her husband is something much deeper. Perhaps he was always blindly driven by business opportunity and gain, and she was just a stepping-stone in his professional ascendance. Perhaps he never loved her. Perhaps he is incapable of love. But up to this point, she only feels his darkness. She really has nothing concrete to bolster her suspicions. There is no quantifiable malice that the Man has ever really let surface. And he’s never said anything to that effect. On the contrary, the Man in Black is and has been a doting, patient, caring husband to her. His every move, his every gesture has been carefully calibrated. Therefore, the only possible explanation for the way his and Juliet’s marriage has evolved is that Juliet is unhinged and paranoid with substance abuse issues.

But then there’s this one night. The one time where the Man in Black lets his grip on his nature loosen just ever so, and he tells Juliet the truth about his darkness, how he feels, about which world he really belongs to. It’s the one shred of his true nature that he bears to the world for just that one fleeting instance. Of course, Juliet isn’t completely asleep as he presumes, and her hearing his confession wholly validates the decades of suspicions about her husband. And the fallout is tragic.

Considering all that, the book ending of his speech really served to underscore how thoroughly haunted the Man in Black is by this one moment. There is an indelible sense of humanity in this, which is highlighted by the very gentle discrepancies in the sequence of words between the Man in Black’s voice over at the beginning and his actual speech at the end. It highlights the subjectivity of memory and how the nature of the events of our pasts, as opposed to the actual sequence of events, is what stays with us.

But in this way, the bookends also present a perhaps contradictory idea. Which is that the events of this night might constitute the foundation on which the Man in Black’s character entirely rests. They might be what gave rise to the character we have come to know as the Man in Black. In other words, a cornerstone of sorts.