MRH: The most interesting character in Season 2 was Pen Verrity.

Her marriage is a disaster, she’s had difficulty with her son, she’s dating Mike Sweeney, the detective whom she treated the year before and she’s now counseling his daughter Sadie. Pen’s a mess, but at the same time, if she’s called in on a case, in spite of all the conflicts she can sit there and actually function as a certified psychiatrist, and be non-judgmental.

I found that really fascinating because she’s able to manage this disconnect and switch to professional mode, but there are trigger mechanisms that will switch her back to the paranoia of losing Mike, and her son.

Janis Lundman: I love that character. Laurie had a lot of fun writing her, and I absolutely adore Michelle Forbes.

Adrienne Mitchell: We all strived very hard to involve Michelle. I think that’s what really hooked her into the character because what Michelle thought was fascinating was that process where inside of [Pen] there are so many things that are deconstructing.

The scary thing is all of a sudden she’s watching herself sort of implode, and [Michelle] found that to play that duality was really a challenge as an actor, and extremely rewarding because it is a duality: there is that objective therapist watching her own self start to unravel and start to exhibit self-destructive behaviour and dangerous behaviour to others; yet in the same time, the only place she can sort of reel it in is when she’s interacting with others, and when she can grasp onto that part of her that’s the therapist.

With the other people she’s helping, she can maintain that sane objective side of herself, but when it comes to herself, she’s helpless to just watch, so it’s very fascinating.

Janis Lundman: You can see this character of Pen Verity go from vulnerable to angry to manipulative back to vulnerability; it’s incredible, and that’s really a combination of Laurie’s writing, Michelle’s acting, and then the directing, whether that was from Adrienne, Rachel Talalay, or Alain Desrochers.

MRH: As a director, was it hard to keep track of the plotlines, or did you have a solid bible where everything’s mapped out, because I think in the second season there’s so much baggage from the first season plus all the new permutations that have to happen, that I was amazed how everything managed to flow, and you were able to pick up and continue at various points without any confusion for the viewer.

Adrienne Mitchell: It’s really very challenging. As a director, it’s extremely complex. You’re always concerned about how do you bring in those threads from last season in such a way that you’re not being expositional [and] you’re not sort of banging people over the head and weeding them into the current storyline.

I work with Laurie as a writer, too. I'll say ‘This looks really good on the page, but in terms of realizing it, it’s going to be very difficult because we have to find a way that I can dramatize this more to bring the internal to the external, [and] into an event to something that’s happening.'

We want to make sure we do things with visuals, and scenes of things aren’t just about people talking about stuff, so it is a very challenging experience... [With] Laurie, I kind of feel on the inside of her brain half the time, and she in mine, which is a bit scary. It’s a very intense connection, and I think that really helps to give us a bit of a shorthand.

Even though I’m there at the beginning as a director, as well as her co-creating, co-producer, you can never underestimate the complexity of her scripts. You get there on set, you think you’ve read it a thousand times, you’ve talked to the actor, and you get there and you start to see them rehearse, and you go ‘Holy shit, this is even more complex than I thought! How am I going to get this in a day and in the time that I have?'

MRH: I recognized Rachel Talalay from the films she’s done early in her career, and it’s so nice to see her working on such a good show because I always thought she was a good director for whom nobody could find the ideal material.

Janis Lundman: It’s hard, I think, for a woman director. I was thrilled to see that 3 out of the 4 Gemini Award nominees for Directing for TV were women.... We’re slowly getting there, and I think it’s also a bit of a challenge with Rachel because she’s on the west coast.

When you’re looking for directors… you have a tendency to look around Toronto, and you look at a few people in Montreal, and then of course… Vancouver, but that’s not necessarily the first place that we go.