Spoilers: Quarantine Spoilers Below

Welcome back!

Carl said Quarantine was a group effort that sprang out of the necessity to make a less expensive episode. Why less expensive, you ask? Well, you see, we had just blown our budget making the amazing VFX sequences for Be All My Sins, and we had to pare back or we would have gone way over budget for the season. So they had to come up with what we call a “bottle episode” – existing sets only, no guest stars. But, as is usually the case, these types of episodes end up relying on wonderful character moments, and Quarantine is no exception.

So the writers sat around, and someone (some say it was Joe Mallozzi, others say it was Martin Gero) came up with the idea that the city locks down and everybody is quarantined in various rooms. Perfect bottle episode. Once that was decided, all that was left was to figure out which characters are trapped with which characters, and what the story line for each “pairing” would be.

I won’t let the cat out of the bag too much, but I will tell you that Carl’s favorite pairing was McKay and Katie Brown, because McKay could be vocal about his nihilistic view of life, which mirrors Carl’s own world view. That reminds me of a study I learned about in college: psychologists have actually proven that pessimists have a more realistic view of the world than optimists… Turns out it’s the positive, happy people that are deluded.

Our thanks to Elyse for this info.

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