Daniel Radcliffe and Geraldine Viswanathan tease the bumpy road ahead on Miracle Workers: Oregon Trail

We’re now two episodes into Miracle Workers: Oregon Trail, and things have already started to get pretty wild. The premiere episode, “Hittin’ The Trail,” sent the people of a dusty little town out on the eponymous trail, with a preacher man (Daniel Radcliffe as Ezekiel Brown) and an outlaw (Steve Buscemi as Benny The Teen) shepherding them to a land of, if not great promise, than greater resources. And, as she has every season, Geraldine Viswanathan has stepped up to help lead the unruly group—this time as Prudence Aberdeen, the repressed wife of the town’s richest man, Todd Aberdeen (Jon Bass).

In the second episode, the townspeople try to “Ford The River,” and things go about as well as you’d expect. Everyone is under Benny’s sway, so they listen to him about everything from dining on bald eagles to abandoning one of their neighbors in order to make it across the river. When Zeke challenges the group’s ruling about leaving someone behind, he almost drowns, but he’s saved by Prudence, who would have done anything to get away from a pair of stoned proto-influencers played by Jordan Firstman and Shay Mitchell. These extreme developments are foreshadowed at the top of the episode, when Benny tells Zeke,“There is no morality on the trail. It’s kill or be killed.” They were previously hinted at in “Hittin’ The Trail,” as Prudence suggested to Zeke that he might be allowed to “do a little bad to do a lot of good.”

Naturally, co-stars Daniel Radcliffe and Geraldine Viswanathan also have a sense of the moral compromises in store for Zeke, Prudence, and the rest of the group (and maybe even Benny, who seems to be growing a conscience). The A.V. Club spoke to Radcliffe and Viswanathan about the dark times ahead, as the group grows increasingly desperate. Miracle Workers has always explored the notions of goodness and worthiness, whether in the season-one context of a weary God (played by Buscemi) who was prepared to completely undo His creation because it wasn’t perfect, or season two’s questioning of the values of a bygone era. Viswanathan says Zeke will grapple with how to stay good while trying to keep everyone alive: “He has this very black and white sense of morality. The stakes are high on the trail, and you gotta pick your battles.”

For Radcliffe, the darkest hour comes in episode nine: “I don’t want to say what it is, but we wouldn’t be doing an Oregon Trail series if there wasn’t a Donner party episode. So people make some real compromises.” He was impressed by the writers’ ability to balance an overly grim reality with the series’ trenchant humor, so he texted them to say, “‘Well-done. I think you did something impossible, which is to write a comedy around something truly, truly horrendous.’”