Craig Mazin
speaker
405 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard May 2025
Craig Mazin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Very small, but very fierce. So a little bit like Ben Oller's character from last week, the rookie who's went from a federal soldier to this WLF soldier character. we see that Hanrahan, that's the character's name, went from a citizen who was a revolutionary to a high-ranking officer in a militarized organization. And there is a mystery here.
She clearly outranks all these guys, but it's not like they're backing away from her here when she shows up. They're sort of looking at her defiantly as if to say, yeah, we did the thing that you are upset about. There is a stairwell door that has been welded shut, not just by a little, by a lot. And they don't back away from her. They don't back down.
She turns around and she heads into a room to have a one-on-one conversation with someone else.
It's coming.
The challenge for us was to figure out where the spores would make sense. And then also, what could we do to make them even more dangerous, actually? Not just a little, but a lot, or at least more menacing and threatening. And what we struck on was the idea of the basement. And we have a hospital with three basement levels, B1, B2, and B3. And we have learned that there was nothing on B1.
And we now learn from this conversation that that there are spores on B2. This woman sent her son down. And she had a choice to make because her son says, it's in the air, seal us in. Now that choice is not dissimilar from the choice Joel has. Do I sacrifice my child to save everybody else Or do I put my child first on the off chance that maybe he'll be okay and put everybody else at risk?
And here we see a mother making a very different decision. She doesn't hesitate. She sacrifices her child for everyone else.
Thanks. Well, I mean, there are so many ways to do these things. And it's not that we're trying to be intentionally cruel to people. But emotionally, maybe a little bit. I mean, maybe a little. Because we're being cruel to the characters too. Sure. In the end, what we're trying to do is invite the audience to feel, at least in small part, what this woman must have felt.
And part of the way is to shock them. Because in my mind, when I watch that sequence, I think, oh, she might be talking about her husband. That's what I feel. That's my instinct. She's talking about her husband, but I would never presume to think she was talking about her son. And that circles back to this notion of motherhood and how a mother made this choice. It's very mythological.
Every culture's mythology somewhere in there has a story of sacrifice and usually the sacrifice of a child, which is the most brutal kind. And to see that there are people who would make that other choice. And we don't condemn her. Quite far from it. If you understand what spores are. No, she made the most selfless of sacrifices. There's also an introduction here of a concept.
And the concept is that there is depth under this building. And we now know that there are horrors on B2 if we have not yet seen them. We understand that they're there. But note, nobody knows what's on B3. Just leaving that out there. I think some people who play the game might know.
Ooh, this is exciting.
Hmm. Two people in a room smoking.
I wasn't conscious of it. I think probably it's one of those cases where it's just that I'm the same guy. But the concept of the basement levels is taken, of course, directly from you, from the game. What I do love to talk about, I guess, are the practical. So maybe the most Chernobyl-y part of that is... The blueprints.
So one of the things that I like to think about is, okay, if someone's going to say, we can't afford to lose this hospital, you're telling me there's airborne infection. We have to really believe that it's down there and it's okay and it's safe. And so they go through it in a sort of scientific way. No one else has gotten hurt.
We know it wasn't in the vents or else we would have been sick weeks ago. It is contained because I sacrificed my son, because we sealed it in. And then a very human thing, and I guess a very Chernobyl-ish thing, Hanrahan says, we'll tell only those who need to know. This is how humans go about these things. And it is incredibly arrogant. But what can you do?
I mean, the bottom line is, once you know it's there, what can you do? It's not like leaving the building is going to help you. If it gets out, it gets out. It's in the air.
Yeah.
Are you kidding me? It's funny you ask about these like asking questions. That's all I do in the, I ask. So as we go into our exploration of what's going to come next in season three. Neil, brace yourself. The questioning is about to begin again. I ask so many questions. Not only, okay, well, what does that mean? But why did you do this? Why did you do that? What was the thinking there?
What else did you consider? Was there stuff that went in between that you weren't able to fit in? And it's part of the way you get to something exciting, I think, is just, as a fan, is getting as much under the hood as you can get. And I'm lucky because... I've got the guy.
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