David has gone in to get the body after Nate said he couldn't. Left to his own devices there in the truck after having said, "I can't deal with this," Nate's left with a sense of impotence that he has to somehow disconnect from-by getting in the driver's seat. That's how I imagine I would be in that situation.

The minute he does that, the reality of what he tried to avoid sails up at him through his nose. You can ask your brother to go in there all day, but that doesn't mean this filthy rotten corpse of the girl you emotionally betrayed every single episode of last season isn't going to wreak havoc and invade your awareness.

Death ends up being bigger. And it comes and gets him. I think that's what this beat is about. The reality of death sort of vanquishing Nate's self-aggrandizing.

Part of the whole sequence of events here is David volunteering to go with him. The whole situation is an opportunity for these brothers to bond. At 'Six Feet Under,' the writer is trusted, but a lot of the work here is in the actors' hands. What I like about the show is that it's a system with enough freedom for all the players' concepts to sort of zoom around beside each other and knot together. The end product is more complex than what any writer or actor or director would come up with on their own.