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Warning: The following contains spoilers for The young Season 3 Episode 6. Proceed at your own risk!
Aside from being “one of the more graphic hours of mainstream television,” eh The young Showrunner Eric Kripke called it, the “Herogasm” episode of the Prime Video drama also earned another special honor: It gave Amazon execs a break for the first time over a specific moment involving two unlikely lechers in the super orgy. (Out of context, but: Did you also see the episode’s stealth cameo?)
“We’ve had a lot of discussions about the Deep and the Octopus scene this season,” Kripke tells TVLine.
“For some crazy reason, Standards has a policy against bestiality. They’re so uptight, really,” says Kripke, laughing. “The discussion of this scene and how we pulled this scene off has actually set off a lot of alarm bells on Amazon on many different levels because you’re not supposed to teach people how to fuck animals and I get it. But my pitch to them was always so absurd [that] it wouldn’t look out of place in a Farrelly brothers film. So it’s hard to call it lustful sodomy. It is ridiculous. To my knowledge, I don’t even think octopuses have vents down there. So there was a lot of discussion about what the shots are and what can we do and what can we get away with? (According to Prime Video’s X-Ray Trivia feature, the scene was actually filmed using a puppet and then replaced with CGI by the VFX team.)
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“But that was really the first time that there were talks where they had to walk up the ladder,” Kripke continues. In fact, according to the showrunner, The young is partly responsible for the streaming giant even having a standards and practices department that’s more typical of a broadcast network.
“I still remember the call that [was] like, ‘Can you guys come in? Because we need to set up a standards and practices department, partly because of us,” says Kripke. “It was [our] Season 1 and then I think there was another show that gave them a problem. I will wear it as a badge of honor for helping establish their standards department.”
While The Deep is sexy with him mollusk Freund raised his eyebrows, nothing was excluded from the episode because it was deemed too daring, Kripke insists. Instead, certain ideas had to be scrapped purely for reasons of time and cost.
“We just couldn’t pull off all the gags that we wanted to pull off,” regrets Kripke. “I remember at some point there was discussion about a type of water Creature from the Black Lagoon-Guy super in the pool, sex under water. That was discussed once and I don’t think we could go through with it. We wanted to make a running gag out of these massive fire hoses being sprayed. There would be a female that would be sprayed over Hughie and that would be a running gag. Then we just ran out of time and that’s how it all added up to this one about poor mother’s milk.”
Given the episode’s sexually graphic nature, Kripke also notes that “several” intimacy coordinators were on set during filming and every precaution was taken to ensure everyone felt protected.
“Honestly, I was terrified throughout the whole shoot because there are so many actors who are naked and simulating sex,” admits Kripke. “The likelihood of something really going wrong was so scary to me that everyone from top to bottom in production said, ‘We have to be so correct about that and so professional about that and be like cops in every aspect to make sure that it’s a safe space for everyone.” So we did it.”
Kripke credits the intimacy coordinators and the show’s “brilliant assistant director.” [who was] on top” with “we just really made sure that everyone felt comfortable and we did it right.”
The young Fans, what do you think of The Deep’s sexual exploits? Rate the episode below, then post your thoughts in the comments!
