Theres only one person who can explain what just happened with those cat puppets.
Trent is a loose cannon, a fellow Harvard alum who has blackmailed Rebecca repeatedly.
Hes very obsessed and so in some ways, hes like Rebecca.
Credit: Greg Gayne/The CW; Inset: Lean Machine
Hes basically her id come to life.
When he shows up, the stories tend to get extreme.
In this episode, for starters, Trent dresses up like Rebecca and re-creates one of our credit sequences.
Aline Brosh McKenna
We made a few adjustments and were ready to go.
But the night before we started shooting, I bolted out of bed.
Something was wrong with the end of the episodes story.
Aline Brosh McKenna
Trents incursions into Rebeccas life were affecting mainly her love life and not enough of her broader character journey.
I realized we had to make some big changes.
Im normally NOT an unravel-y writer.
We dont do that on our show.
Rachel and I, and then the room, agree on a direction and we generally stick to it.
I rushed to Rachel to tell her the changes I thought we needed to make.
Rachel quickly agreed and she and I riffed on story ideas.
It was Halloween and my costume was Sarah.
I told them I was going to rip up some stuff and they should be prepared.
Then I shouted to my assistant, who was dressed as Anne Hathaway.
(That day all of our assistants were dressed as different Anne Hathaways.)
I asked her to assemble the writers right away.
Everyone was all hands on deck for an emergency rewrite.
We dug in, did a first pass.
Then Dan and Doug and I stayed late refining the changes.
I was worried we would have to cut a song, something we are loathe to do.
Story and script are everything in a TV show; they are the engine of the whole machine.
If they dont work, nothing else does.
Once we knew it was right, we could all relax.
And as for those cat puppets?
They are the co-stars in the episodes first song, A Buttload of Cats.
Shooting that song was one of the best days ever on our set.
We just bopped along with the puppets.
