When the creative team set out to turn Nevada Barr’s bestselling book heroine into a small-screen hero for USA’s Anna Pigeon, they chose two of Barr’s books to focus on in Season 1. Her first novel in the series, Track of the Cat, served as the outline for the series’ pilot episode. And now, midway through its first season, viewers got to see Barr’s 17th novel, The Rope. When we sat down with showrunner Morwyn Brebner on set last November, she admitted The Rope is “one of the most exciting of the Anna Pigeon books.” She wasn’t kidding. Warning: The following post contains spoilers for Anna Pigeon Episode 5, “The Rope.”
Tracy Spiridakos (who plays Anna Pigeon) and executive producer Lea Thompson visited TV Insider’s offices last month to discuss the harrowing, tone-changing episode. The installment opens with Anna waking up in a cave — a giant hole is in the sky above her, but otherwise there’s no visible clues of how she got inside, or how she’ll get out. As Anna tries to put the pieces back together, she’s starving, dehydrated, and beginning to see visions of her late husband Zach (Jordan Sledz, last seen in Episode 1). The visions are sweet at first, but quickly sour, as Anna’s situation gets more and more desperate and her subconscious leads her down a darker path. “The turn that that takes — initially he’s encouraging her, and he’s helping her, and then we see all of her guilt,” says Spiridakos. “Everything just compounds and attacks her; it’s almost like she’s attacking herself because he’s in her mind.”
“There were a few things I always wanted for Anna Pigeon,” says Thompson. “One of them was that I wanted the husband to come visit her in times of need, and I’m so glad that we could figure out how to do that, in a really cool way.”
The episode’s cave scenes were also interesting because, unlike most of the show, which is shot in the Canadian wilderness, “there’s no cave!” says Thompson with a laugh. “They had to build it. And we didn’t really have a stage, so it was like half built in a quonset hut, but it was a huge part of our budget.”
Thankfully, it paid off. The episode, says Spiridakos, is a “big growing moment for [Anna].” Learning that her friends (like Cooper Levy‘s Jesse) and her colleagues at Glacier National Park banded together to search for her will really give the ranger confidence to open up just a little bit more. “I think it allows her the ability to lean on more people around her, and let more people into her [life],” Spiridakos continues. “She’s so capable of love, but is so heartbroken that she just closes that door. I think this experience is like, she learns that she can open that door again.”
Though she quickly adds, Anna’s not in for a total personality transplant: “Anyone [who’s] ever dealt with grief before [knows] it’s a rollercoaster.”
Bonnie Osborne / USA Network
At the end of the episode, Anna has heroically escaped and trapped her kidnapper in the cave. Next week, we’ll see what happens when she returns to the scene of the crime. “She wants to know who it is. She wants answers,” Spiridakos teases. “She’s a very curious person, and that is what drives her. So to have this person caught….she’s driven. No matter how she’s feeling. No matter how messed up she is. She needs to find out why.”
Adds Thompson: “What you love about Anna is, she always pushes through things. She pushes past the trauma and the exhaustion — we all could learn something from Anna Pigeon.”
Indeed. Check out the full interview above for more on how they built the cave, details on Anna’s fight sequence as she escapes the cave and more from Spiridakos and Thompson.
Anna Pigeon Fridays, 10/9c, USA