It's about talent and this ensemble has it in spades

Mandy Patinkin is great and everybody knows that. This is the first time I'd seen Ellen Muth. I'm getting older and don't pay as much attention to popular culture as I used to. I've heard it said that you gage an actors skill by watching them when they aren't speaking their lines. By that measure Ellen is Laurence Olivier, Marlon Brando and Robert Downey Jr. all rolled up into one small woman. I think it was the first or second episode of DLM- I never get to seen them in sequence - The scene after the train wreck. Watching Ellen's face as Mandy tells her she has to do her job and take that little girl's soul. The movement from resolute refusal to heartbroken acceptance was astonishing. She informed the moral makeup of that character with a range that covered a human lifetime. And not a word.