Hello and welcome to Inside the Episode 1865. I am one of the producers Rob McCollum and

Joining me is over Eric Archila and Steven Walters. Guys good to talk to you again.

Hi everybody. Hey Rob. So you have made it through Episode 3 and I will tell you this

is the final of our kind of three episode look back where we set up this season, kind of

the flashback episodes that have been framed by the conversations with Dickens. And so

now that we are through this we will be looking all in real time at this point forward and

the story will kind of pick up where we left off.

Yeah we've caught up to the timeline. So this what we reveal in this moment is that

the dinner between Stanton and Dickens occurred right on the heels of Grant giving the office

back to Stanton and that's sort of why I picked this conversation as the framing device

for these these three episodes. It felt appropriate to the timeline. And also you know

appropriate to this this thing that we've talked about about Stanton kind of realizing

that he might not be the hero of the story, right? We learn this right about Edwin Stanton

throughout season one that he's a deeply flawed figure, a complicated figure in so many

ways on the right side of history, but in so many ways not. And I think that you know

he doesn't live up to the promises that he's made to John Mercer Langston and to the Friedman

and to the cause of equality in so many ways he falls short, racked with guilt about you

know his his decisions that he's made and his I don't know call it complicity that he

feels that he has in Lincoln's death. And so we sort of are tying all that up and team

up what's to come, which is which is not the story of Edwin Stanton, but the story of

General Ulysses as Grant and his presidency and his fight for reconstruction.

One thing that I always hope that with the series is that people never view at least

...