Sepinwall: One of the characters who doesn't survive the massacre is Charlotte. She's one of the very first characters we meet in the series, but she flitted in and out of season 1, and for a lot of season 2, we would see Ray and/or Cesar instead of her when we looked at that corner of the show. Was this an issue with Annabeth Gish's availability, or did you think that character had played out the string?
Elwood Reid: We think the character played out the string. It was a matter of focusing what the crimes were on the border. For us, to show a rich ranch widow actively involved in the cartel stuff somehow lessened what Fausto was doing. There was some comic relief there with Ray and with Cesar, but as the writing went on, I really found the heart of that story to be in Cesar. He's this guy who's massively conflicted because of the situation he finds himself in. He trades one boss for another boss, and then he ends up working for Eleanor, who's probably the worst boss he could possibly have. That became where our storytelling interest went, and finding an exit for Charlotte's character that somehow made some sense, because I didn't want to punish her for what she was doing, because what she was doing seemed pretty naive and reckless. In the reality of the real world out there would've yielded some disastrous results. We struggled for a while to tie it all together. We really wanted her death, if it was going to happen, to center on all of our characters. And it does with the Red Ridge stuff, but it took me a few episodes to build that story in there. I didn't want it to just be, "This is what happens when you're a white rancher who gets into narcotics trafficking." I wanted to really knit it into all of our characters.
