'Manhattan' Marathon: A guide to this Sunday's atomic bomb binge-watch

They’re making a “gadget,” one that they hope will save the world … but fear will actually destroy it someday.

In Manhattan, WGN’s new World War II drama about scientists racing to develop an atomic bomb while grappling with the threat of espionage and the equally undermining power of egos, has just finished its first season, and the network is re-running all 13 episodes this Sunday, Oct. 26, in one marathon showing starting at 11 a.m. ET (8 a.m. PT.)

For those who are already fans, it’s a chance to revisit those earlier episodes and catch little hints and Easter eggs that become much more important as this fictional story of the Manhattan Project progresses. For those who haven’t yet tuned in but are intrigued by the idea of a Mad Men-style story fueled by the nuclear age, it’s the perfect time to devote 13 hours to a Manhattan binge-watch.

Here’s an EW guide to each episode, including commentary from series creator Sam Shaw (Masters of Sex) who has declassified some of the behind-the-scenes trivia.

EPISODE 1 — “You Always Hurt the One You Love.”

The pilot episode introduces us with the Manhattan Project already in full swing, so to speak. Our central character, grizzled scientist Frank Winter (John Benjamin Hickey), is unleashing some frustration, by teeing off golf balls into the New Mexico desert. That’s when inspiration strikes: the key to unlocking the destructive power of the atom could be compression, not simply a traditional explosion.

From there, we see just how dysfunctional this nuclear family is: two scientific brothers — Winters, and his clean-cut, politically savvy rival Reed Akley (David Harbour) — are competing for their aloof and demanding father-figure, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Daniel London), one of the few true-life figures in the show.

We also meet a character who serves as a sort of kid brother in this family dynamic, a young scientist named Charlie Isaacs (Ashley Zukerman) who arrives at Los Alamos, an entire town that is top secret, and is told by one of the guards: “Welcome to nowhere.”

MUSICAL INSPIRATION: “In the script for this first hour of our season, the Mills Brothers’ 1944 recording You Always Hurt the One You Love played over the final sequence; but our fantastic composers Jonsi & Alex (you may know Jonsi better as the front man of the Icelandic rock band Sigur Ros) scored the ending so beautifully we dropped the track that gives the episode its title.”

CREATOR CAMEO: “The Isaacs’s pajama’d neighbor, who appears briefly about halfway through 101, is played by yours truly,” Shaw says. “I tried to leave my Hitchcockian cameo on the cutting room floor; unfortunately, director Tommy Schlamme wouldn’t let me drop that one.”

EPISODE 2 — “The Prisoner’s Dilemma”

This is the tragedy of Sid Liao, a scientist in Winter’s group, and a young Asian-American fighting against the prejudice of a culture burning with hatred for “Japs.” In Los Alamos, he’s fighting for his homeland — the United States — but also hopes that some of the technologies he was developing could make him some money after the war ends and secrecy is lift. So he has taken some documents home with him, and ends up paying a steep price when military brass, fearing espionage, wants to make an example of someone.

RAZOR UNSHEATHED: “Our second hour ends with a bang that upends the tenuous sense of security on the Hill. [It] also introduces a figure who will cast a shadow over the rest of the season: Richard Schiff’s for-now-unnamed inquisitor,” Shaw says. “On the page, he’s called ‘Occam,’ after Occam’s Razor, [a scientific principle] which proposes that, in the absence of conclusive proof, simple solutions should take precedence over complex ones—a lethal proposition in the world of Manhattan.”

EPISODE 3 — “The Hive”

There is a death on The Hill, violent and mysterious, which causes a panic in this tight-knit community of scientists and their families like a rock thrown into a beehive. Kept utterly in the dark by their husbands, who have now seen the cost of breaking their vow of secrecy, the wives of Los Alamos are searching for their own answers, any type they can get. In the case of Winter’s botanist wife Liza (Olivia Williams), she turns to her own research on the environment in their unusual new town, while Isaacs’ wife Abby (Rachel Brosnahan) takes work in the compound’s telephone hub — where she develops an unexpectedly close relationship with an enticing French operator named Elodie (Carole Weyers.)

THINKING INSIDE THE BOX: “We nearly titled this hour ‘Box 1663,’ the Hill’s famously mysterious postal address. The episode is full of boxes, literal and metaphoric, from the cardboard crate full of Sid Liao’s personal effects to Liza’s bee box to the black box of Los Alamos itself. Thematically, its stories revolve around questions of compartmentalization — of information, of grief, of guilt.”

UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE: “The photo of Werner Heisenberg that Charlie tapes to his blackboard was taped to a whiteboard in the Manhattan writers’ office, along with a Heisenberg quote: ‘You just have to be able to drill in very hard wood… and keep on thinking beyond the point at which thinking begins to hurt,'” Shaw says. “He was talking about physics. It’s also a decent description of TV writing.”

NEXT PAGE: EPISODES 4-8

EPISODE 4 — “Last Reasoning of Kings”

There aren’t a lot of celebrity cameos on Manhattan. Most of the actors are of the character variety, men and women you’ve seen before, even if you don’t realize it. But this episode brought in a cameo of a different variety — the famous physicist Niels Bohr (played by Christian Clemenson), renowned for breakthroughs in mapping the structure of atoms. He delivers a critical vote of support for Winter’s implosion model.

Meanwhile, we catch glimpses of Winter’s previous wartime past, with flashbacks to him as a young soldier (Kyle T. Cowan) in the trenches of World War I. It’s a devastating look at frontline battles that explains Winter’s zeal for finding a weapon that could end such bloodshed once and for all — though hopefully not by destroying life as we know it.

TRUE-LIFE PARALLEL: The great Niels Bohr really did visit Los Alamos in 1943, as he does in this episode (though in reality he was accompanied by his son, Aage, who also went on to win a Nobel Prize in physics). To the young scientists who revered him, it was a little like the Beatles’s debut on Ed Sullivan. In Manhattan, Bohr brings tidings of war-torn Europe and a sobering perspective on the physicists’ work that conjures not only the Manhattan Project’s immediate predecessor — the race to invent lethal chemical weapons during World War I –but Frank Winter’s own wartime experience. The deceptively simple question he poses to Charlie, “Is it big enough?” is ripped from the history books. After the war, the famous physicist became a passionate advocate against nuclear weapons, and for the free exchange of ideas between scientists around the world.

SOLDIER’S SWEETHEART: “A little production trivia: the Fraulein in the photo young Frank recovers from a dead German soldier is Tommy Schlamme’s mother,” Shaw says.

EPISODE 5 — “A New Approach to Quantum Cosmology.”

One of the most intriguing characters on Manhattan gets to take center stage in this episode, with Daniel Stern’s kindly, goat-bearded old scientist, Glen Babbit, comes under fire from the young upstart Isaacs — merely for being a friend and mentor to Frank Winter. Babbit’s crime? Isaacs knew him to also be friendly with a traitorous scientist who has since fled the country. The true nature of Babbit’s relationship with this unseen figure turns out to be one of the most heartbreaking and human moments on the show.

DAYS OF FUTURE PAST: “On our first day of broadcast, we take you to a distant land that can’t be found in any atlas — the country of the past.” A disembodied voice on the Hill’s secret radio station speaks the first words of Episode 105, which shines a light on the pasts of Glen Babbit and Charlie Isaacs,” Shaw says. “The Los Alamos station (KRS in reality, KPS on our show) was broadcast over power lines to avoid transmitting a radio signal that might be picked up by enemy aircraft, and announcers and performers weren’t allowed to reveal their last names.”

SPEAKING OF SECRET IDENTITIES: “Our brilliant cinematographer Richard Rutkowski (whose work you may have enjoyed on The Americans) makes a guest appearance this hour, photographically and in an oil painting, as physicist-defector Richard Lavro.

EPISODE 6 — “Acceptable Limits”

Another lovable figure from Winter’s ragtag group of scientist suffers a lab accident that leads to the disappearance of the tiny amount of radioactive material he was studying. Louis “Fritz” Fedowitz (Michael Chernus), the loveable, lonely-hearted lunk of the group, finds he has inhaled the material. Concerned for his safety, while trying to minimize the worry, Winter discovers the unsettling news that the chain of command in the project’s medical division is a loop. Calls placed to higher ups end up rerouted to the local medical administrator — there is no hierarchy for maintaining safety at Los Alamos.

ANOTHER TRUE-LIFE TALE: “Fritz’s story in this episode bears a more-than-passing resemblance to the experience of a young chemist named Don Mastick, who accidentally inhaled a few micrograms of plutonium at Los Alamos in 1944,” Shaw says. “Like Fritz, Mastick could set off radiation monitors six feet away with his breath.”

WEEKEND AT OPPY’S: “Late in the episode, Babbit jokes that Frank is about to give the Hill “the best piece of theater since Oppenheimer was in Arsenic and Old Lace.” The father of the atomic bomb did, in fact, appear in a production of the 1939 comedy on the Hill,” Shaw says. “He played a dead body.”

EPISODE 7 — “The New World”

Isaacs and Helen Prins (Katja Herbers), the only female scientist working on the Manhattan Project, are dispatched to Tennessee to monitor the launch of the reactor that will generate radioactive material for the bomb project. They discover that the facility’s chief, Ellis (played by John Carrol Lynch), is a blowhard who considers himself a factory manager more than a scientist. Ellis would rather cover-up flaws in the system, despite the ominous power of the lethal substance they’re creating, but a young black scientist, Theodore Sinclair (Corey Allen), who is relegated to second-tier status because of his race, is the key to fixing the mistakes before it’s too late.

Back in Los Alamos, things get a little more intimate between Isaacs’ wife Abby and her increasingly exotic friend Elodie.

FERMI’S FERMENTATION: The speechifying by Ellis at the top of this halfway point in the season nods to a telegram sent to Washington when Enrico Fermi successfully initiated the world’s first nuclear reactor in a rackets court under the University of Chicago football stadium: “The Italian navigator has entered the new world,'” Shaw says. “The response came back: ‘How were the natives?'”

OUT OF BOUNDS: “This is an episode packed with border-crossings of one kind or another, in which questions of who ‘belongs’ where and who’s allowed access –to information, to Native Americans’ sacred land, to a woman’s bedroom — loom large,” Shaw says.

EPISODE 8– “The Second Coming”

Abby Isaacs breaks protocol to meet with her parents, who are traveling through New Mexico by train and have dire news of their relatives in Eastern Europe, where Hitler is engaging in genocide, although the American public knows little more than rumors about that at this point in history. Suddenly, the need to defeat the Axis powers and end this war gets a grim new urgency.

Meanwhile, her husband is given the opportunity to serve as Akley’s right-hand man on the “Thin Man” project, the rival scientific group to Winter’s implosion-focused team. But Isaacs knows from his visit to the Tennessee plant manufacturing the plutonium that the substance won’t be pure enough for Akley’s design. It will pre-detonate, and the only workable model is Winter’s plan for implosion. Isaacs faces a difficult question: Does he really want the devastating power of an atomic bomb to come to fruition?

NEVER AGAIN: “Finally, in the eighth hour of the season, we hit the fulcrum of our story. At the heart of this pivotal episode is Abby’s evolving relationship to the horror overseas — a story about the earliest form of Holocaust denial,” Shaw says.

O TANNENBAUM: “Hawk-eyed viewers may notice a Christmas tree lurking in the background in some of the scenes at their apartment,” Shaw says. “It was explained in a scene we cut for length — a totem of Abby’s disconnection from her Jewish roots.”

NEXT PAGE: EPISODES 9-13

EPISODE 9 — “Spooky Action at a Distance”

A dalliance with psychotropic desert drugs leads to a long, strange trip for the three musketeers of the implosion team — Fritz, the combative, arrogant British scientist Paul Crosley (Harry Lloyd) and Jim Meeks (Christopher Denham), the mild-mannered researcher who has lashed out at security for the death of his friend Sid Liao, whom Meeks refuses to believe was actually a traitor. While tripping on peyote, the trio take to their chalk board and hit what they think is a eureka moment in the quest to solve implosion.

Winter and Isaacs are devising another risky scheme: since implosion is the only method that can succeed given the compromised state of the plutonium they will receive, Isaacs should take Akley’s No. 2 position and use it to secretly funnel implosion calculations through the much more strongly staffed team — even though that violates restrictions on secrecy and compartmentalization that could land both of them in traitorous territory.

Among the civilians, Elodie’s husband makes an unwelcome advance on Abby, then sexually assaults her. Abby’s husband’s response is disconcerting: he feels he has bigger issues to overcome on the project … although he may find a single solution for both his problems.

SEPARATE PARTICLES: ‘Spooky action at a distance’ was Einstein’s folksy name for the paradoxical behavior of particles whose quantum states become entangled. It’s also the title of the ninth episode of Manhattan, which explores uncanny new entanglements between Thin Man, implosion, Frank, Charlie and Helen. This many be the most genre-bending hour of our first season — part caper movie, part western (complete with our own Russian cowboy), part druggie comedy. It also reveals a crucial fact we’ve withheld thus far: the identity of Elodie’s husband.”

EPISODE 10 — “The Understudy”

As the science behind Akley’s “Thin Man” project falls apart, the last hope for a workable atomic bomb falls on the implosion group – otherwise known as the backup plan. Winter, Isaacs, and the “Russian cowboy” armory chief Lazar (Peter Stormare) experiment by clustering explosives in a sphere, trying to determine how they can shape the shockwaves into something that will crush and unleash the energy in their nuclear bomb.

Babbit is horrified to discover the secret collaboration between Winter and Isaacs, fearing that while those two may go to jail if their collusion is discovered, he could face the firing squad due to his questionable history with a defector.

Into all this, Sid Liao’s widow (Lucia Micarelli) arrives at Los Alamos, and draws the attention of a sympathetic Jim Meeks — who is a literal understudy in the community’s local theater production, and will soon ascend to a starring role in the real-life drama unfolding on the project. Elsewhere, Winter’s wife, Liza, discovers something unsettling — first about the radioactivity of the place they’re inhabiting, and then about herself.

REVERSAL OF FORTUNE: This episode revolves around the central technical problem of the implosion bomb: how can Frank and Charlie reverse the direction of shockwaves? It’s also an episode that reverses the direction of most of the character stories we’ve been telling, from Liza’s obsession with the effects of radiation on the Hill to Frank and Charlie’s rivalry-turned-friendship, to Meeks’s understanding of Sid Liao’s death.

PLAY’S THE THING: Viewers may note that Meeks, who played the Tin Man in Episode 2, has been cast in a production of Our Town; later in the season, we’ll see him reciting from Skin of Our Teeth. (Like the writers on our show, he’s a Thornton Wilder fan.) He also delivers the line that gives this hour its title: ‘Everyone in the theater knows, the whole show rests on the understudy.'”

EPISODE 11 — “Tangier”

The title refers to an escape: Elodie and Abby consider abandoning their husbands and running off together to a place where their affair could blossom into open romance. Meanwhile, their husbands are at each other’s throats: Charlie’s secret effort to have “Thin Man” scientists work on equations for the rival implosion group is discovered by Elodie’s husband, and is blackmailing him with the information. Winter makes a cut-throat suggestion: set up the Lancefields as spies, and let the security of Los Alamos destroy them.

IN-HOUSE CONNECTION: “Readers of Entertainment Weekly may recognize the name of the author of this episode: for many years, Scott Brown was a staff writer and editor at EW,” Shaw says.

CALLING A BLUFF: The poker scene in this episode is one of my favorite set pieces of the season. The final sequence of reprises, for the first time, Jonsi & Alex’s sweeping music cue from the end of the first episode of the season—underscoring (or just plain scoring) the extent to which Charlie is becoming the Frank Winter we met in Episode 1.

EPISODE 12 — “The Gun Model”

When your boss shows up at your door in the middle of the night with a rifle … it’s never a good thing. Akley knows Charlie Isaacs has betrayed him, but when he discovers that the reason for this is that his model for the bomb can never work, Akley himself is crushed. Winter’s implosion group is poised for success, but only because he left so many careers and lives destroyed over the preceding episodes of the season. ‘”Great men are not always good men,’ Akley tells Helen in this, penultimate hour of the season — framing what may be the ultimate question of season one: Who is Frank Winter? How should we feel about him?” Shaw says.

LOOSE CANNON: “The episode kicks off with a quote from Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” a paean to the six hundred British cavalrymen who rode to their deaths at the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War,” Shaw says. “We know that Akley presides over a staff of six hundred; also that the Thin Man design is a modified cannon, a fact eerily echoed by the poem’s third and fifth stanzas (“Cannon to right of them / Cannon to left of them / Cannon in front of them / Volley’d and thundered”). “Someone had blunder’d” the poem tells us — one of the great testaments to failed intelligence and military haste in all of literature. Someone has blundered on the Hill as well. We’ll have to wait till the end of the episode to find out who, and what havoc it will wreak.

EPISODE 13 — “Perestroika”

Richard Schiff’s ominous Occam discovers that the Isaacs have relatives from Eastern Europe who were rescued and brought to the United States, which raises the question — how? Suspicion immediately falls on Charlie Isaacs as the potential mole, suspected of bargaining for his wife’s family in exchange for information given to the Third Reich about American spies in Hitler’s bomb program. Winter, now ascending to lead the entire Manhattan project, is content to let Isaacs take the fall — even if it means prison, or worse, for the younger scientist.

As the ghost of Sid Liao tells Winter: “What’s one more?” But the next one to fall may be from an act of self-sacrifice instead.

OFFER THEY COULDN’T REFUSE: “The reflection of Lady Liberty at the start of Episode 13 is proudly stolen from The Godfather,” Shaw says. “We nearly titled this one ‘The New Colossus,’ for the sonnet on the plaque at Ellis Island (also a nod to the new colossus rising in ‘Thin Man’ and Reed Akley’s wake). Instead we opted for the name of the Russian political movement that signaled the end of the Cold War — literally, “restructuring” — in a finale that upends the power structures on the Hill and raises the specter of Soviet spies in the Manhattan Project.

PAST IS PROLOGUE: “The last hour of the first season of Manhattan is full of Easter eggs and narrative and visual rhymes that bookend the season, down to the final frame of the episode, which echoes the first frame of the series,” Shaw says.

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