‘Ponies’ Co-Creator Breaks Down the Real-Life Moscow Fire That Sparks the Big Season 1 Twist

[Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for the season finale of “Ponies.”]

Co-creators Susanna Fogel and David Iserson always knew the end shot for Season 1 of “Ponies,” which is all the more impressive considering what it is — its two protagonists trapped in the middle of a very real fire that happened at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in 1977. The project lived in their heads for years and through development at multiple networks before the series found a home at Peacock, as well as a voice through its cast led by Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson.

The pair play Bea Grant and Twila Hasbeck, respectively; both are recent widows (or are they?!?) of CIA operatives in Moscow who, in late 1976, talk their way into becoming spies themselves in order to find out what really happened to their husbands (Louis Boyer and John Macmillan). Both, naturally, have different temperaments and strengths that make them useful to Moscow desk chief Dane Walter (Adrian Lester) — and find opportunities to uncover more information through his potentially too-earnest right hand Ray Symanski (Nicholas Podany), and Ray’s imperious wife and head of the US Embassy secretary pool, Cheryl Symanski (Vic Michaelis). Bea (Clarke) is an intellectual perfectionist Rhode Islander with very good Russian and an untapped range as an undercover agent; Twila (Richardson) is a quick-thinking, effortlessly hip military brat with the most lit collection of blazers in recent television history and a talent for lighting things on fire.

One of the fringe benefits to having lived with the story for so long is that by the time it came for Fogel to shoot Episode 8, “The Stranger,” is that the “Ponies” team could improve upon the idea. The last shot of Twila and Bea linking hands, overwhelmed but about to face an impossible situation together, was always clear, but Iserson and Fogel added some of the most stunning twists in Season 1 at the last minute. Bea and Twila find they have bigger problems than smoke inhalation. We learn that the KGB is actually running their own female double agent — and so while most people in the US Embassy can say, ‘We didn’t start the fire,’ Cheryl Symanski absolutely did start this one; the conflagration also sets free the dangerous KGB agent Andrei Vasiliev (Artom Gilz) within the embassy walls.

“It was a plot twist that we knew we wanted in the show at some point because it was based on a real fire that happened at the embassy that was set by the KGB. But we didn’t know it was going to be like the last card turn at the end of the season until we were down the road,” Fogel told IndieWire on an episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast.

“And there was something about the ending we had in mind, which was like, ‘The girls in peril can’t escape the fire. What are they gonna do?’ But it wasn’t the one last [plot twist] of the fire being a conspiracy and [Vasiliev] is going to get out. When we had that idea, we were all instantly, like, ‘Oh my God, that’s so much better.'”

‘Ponies’Katalin Vermes/PEACOCK

The extra turns of the screw in “Ponies” — and that is merely the last one, there are many on a wild ride through a delightfully colorful and alive Moscow of 1977 — are handled by Fogel and her fellow directors Viet Nguyen and Ally Pankiw with real visual playfulness to support a story that is as much about friendship as it is about spycraft.

“You have to make elevated, specific choices,” Fogel said. “You don’t have the time to do really specialized, stylized things and also get a ton of options. You just don’t have the time to do both on a normal TV schedule. So it’s a high wire act where — [in the right situations] you have enough confidence to be like, ‘No, this is a oner. I’m not gonna give them eight angles.’ Not because they’ll use them in that sort of cynical way, but because it’s just not going to feel specific if it’s not the shot that I planned.”

The specific shots that Fogel planned are wonderfully psychologically revealing and playful, utilizing some of the zoom-heavy and split-screen techniques from the ’70s but mostly grounding the camera and lights in the paranoia, curiosity, yearning, absurd coincidence, and (pun intended) camaraderie of the characters.

‘Ponies’Katalin Vermes/PEACOCK

“It’s a missed opportunity to use the stakes of the spy missions to reflect on what else is going on in these people’s lives, right? For us, it was like, ‘OK, yes, it’s these women doing these missions. But that’s the vehicle through which they’re figuring out their identities and their relationships to men, to each other, to their sexuality, their self-worth. Like, it’s putting them in situations that are changing them. So the showing of changing them was as important as whether they do the dead-drop.”

Fogel uses the momentum of a tracking shot to add to Twila’s triumph as she picks up a camera from a dead-drop inside a men’s locker room. But the show also makes great use of the warm, harsh lines of “the bubble” — a secure room where the two can complain to their bosses about that camera not actually working. Fogel is always looking for the visual angle that provokes an emotional response.

“We wanted to shift where the lens was on them — you need to see them in their missions in high-stakes situations, but in a spy movie, you cut before they go home and, like, have a fight with their mom or talk to their friend or have a glass of wine,” Fogel said. “But they’d still do that, you know? There’s still people living a life when they’re not at the most high stakes moments of their life. So for us, it was like, ‘let’s explore those other layers of a person.'”

To hear Susanna Fogel’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.