Episode Twenty-One.... and behind-the-scenes writer's commentary

"Ragged Isle" episode twenty-one, "Are You Gonna Wait Forever?", is up at The Entertainment Experiment web site. If you haven't already, go watch it now. After you've seen it, read on for a behind-the-scenes writer's commentary, which will (of course) include spoilers for this episode and previous episodes.

To me, the scariest villains are the ones who don't know they're villains, the ones who think they're the heroes of their own stories — because that's what we all think, right? That we're the heroes of our own stories. Nobody thinks he's the "bad guy," even bad guys. I think of Robert De Niro in Scorsese's Cape Fear. Here's a guy with a legitimate grievance against his former lawyer (Nick Nolte), a lawyer who's own unethical behavior plays a part in triggering the terror that befalls his family. (Not that it excuses De Niro's violence, but the horror comes from the realization that the violence has its roots in the victim's own bad behavior.)

In "Ragged Isle," we've just learned that the main villain of the series, the one who's been killing people left and right, had a back story that helps explain (if not justify) his horrific behavior. That back story also reveals the other villains on the island, those of his kind who put him in that underwater cage with his human lover. In our writing sessions, we informally referred to these people as "the elders."  In this episode, we learn, quite explicitly, how the elders also do not consider themselves to be villains.

We've seen Rose's powers of persuasion before. In the first season, she convinced the town meeting attendees to carry on with the lobster festival (a decision that turned out to be disastrous). In the second season, she convinced a weary Gertie Kendrick to jump into the body of her poor doomed protégé, Trevor Stebbins (which didn't work out very well for Trevor or Gertie). In this episode, she tries to convince the sheriff that what the elders have been doing for centuries is somehow justified. This effort is doomed to failure, of course, as neither the sheriff nor the audience is likely to be convinced that taking over someone else's body (killing them in the process) is okay. But you can see why the creature calling herself Rose Fuller believes she's in the clear, morally. If you can't, consider the lobster (or whatever other animal you're recently consumed).

“I am not the potter, nor the potter’s wheel, but the potter’s clay; is not the value of the shape attained as dependent upon the intrinsic worth of the clay as upon the wheel and the Master’s skill?” 

-Stephen King, The Stand

Julie Katsarakis, always sunny and positive, has an unsavory history that was revealed in her Homeland Security interrogation in season two. In Rose's discussion with the sheriff in this episode, we learn the significance of that history. It turns out, Julie was chosen as a vessel precisely because she was a lost soul, someone who, without intervention, would not have thrived. The elder currently known as Rose reasons that if she cultivates a lost soul, she has the right to take over that soul when the time comes. No different than an organ transplant recipient using the organ of someone who no longer has use for it.

The sheriff's counter-argument is that Julie may have been a lost soul, but now that her soul has been restored, she has the right to it. That's where Stephen King's quote above comes in. I have always loved this quote. (In an early draft, I even had the sheriff paraphrase it pretty directly, but this was roundly rejected as out of character.) The intrinsic worth of the clay.  To the potter, the clay is just a tool, a means of achieving the finished product. But the clay itself has value all its own. The sheriff (and we) can see things from the clay's point of view. The elders cannot.

All of this thinking informed the discussion between Rose and the sheriff that anchors this episode.  This is a long scene, probably the longest single scene since the town meeting in episode four (unless you count the talent show as a single scene), and certainly the longest scene we've ever done between just two  characters.  I'm delighted and riveted by how it's played by Beth Saufler and Rick Dalton. It's a debate between philosophies, between cultures— hell, between species. And both actors perfectly embody the opposing viewpoints.  Both of them quiet, both of them understated, both of them brimming with unuttered rage. My two favorite line readings in this exchange is when the sheriff says "and neither of them... drowned" and when Rose says "Not to me." (I also love Rose's "By all means" that closes out the scene.)

I love this scene.

Other thoughts:

1) The opening scene is about as deliberately comic as we've ever gotten (with the possible exception of "Louszini"'s magic show). I love the pace of this scene, the rapid-fire exchanges, my own character's extremely condensed summary of everything that's been discovered, and the one last Aquaman joke courtesy of Deputy Dan (who delivered our first Aquaman reference way back in season one).

2) I wrote last week about how the parallel investigations are starting to intersect. I'm enjoying watching previously unpaired characters teaming up. Agent Thorne and Sheriff Dalton? You bet! Deputy Dan and Dr. Hoffman? Sure, why not?

3) An early draft of this episode had the sheriff enter Rose's house with his gun drawn, which makes a certain amount of sense, given the threat level. But a decision was made soon after that draft was written not to have any guns on this show. Now, the sheriff plays this scene like an unarmed hostage negotiator, and the scene is all the more riveting for it.

4) Rose's one outburst in her debate with the sheriff reminds me of Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men.  Here's a powerful person who has indulged some impudent questions from an underling for a brief period, but whose patience has definitively run out. "You can't handle the truth!" (This goes back to the villains who don't know they're villains.)

5) The final line of the line of the episode is decidedly meta, isn't it? Rose is (hopefully) voicing the opinion of everyone in the audience, everyone who has to wait for the last episode to see how everything turns out. (This is my favorite closing line of any episode since Madame Clelia's in episode seven.) The line is shamelessly cribbed from Kenneth Branagh's largely forgotten 1991 neo-noir Dead Again.  The movie is pure hokum, but (mostly) pretty clever and entertaining and (at times) wildly over the top. It occasionally streams on Netflix, and the next time it does, you should check it out.

6) I cannot believe there is only one more episode of "Ragged Isle" left. It has been an amazing journey, from that December day in 2009 (when Barry Dodd asked me what strange things could happen on an island) to today, almost five years later, as we prepare to wrap up the series. The show has quite literally changed my life, and I'm grateful to have been a part of it.

7) I'm also grateful to you, the audience, without whom this whole endeavor would have been rather pointless. Thank you for following along on our story. I sincerely hope we've stuck the landing and you dig our ending.

8)"Rose, why is there a man chained up in your basement?"

Episode Fifteen.... and behind-the-scenes writer's commentary

"Ragged Isle" episode fifteen, "Moment of Surrender," is up. Check it out, and when you've seen it, read on for a behind-the-scenes writer's commentary.



Have you seen it? This is where I start spoiling the episode, so if you haven't watched it, you should probably watch it, or come back later (after you've watched it).

Some of my favorite TV series are serialized, telling a long story via individual installments. But even the most heavily serialized shows occasionally present a stand-alone episode, one that advances the larger narrative but also tells a self-contained story. That's cool too. Last year, we had a nifty stand-alone episode in the form of the Ragged Isle talent show, which was really Barry and Karen's brainchild. Next year, we've got a doozy of a stand-alone (just you wait!) with a core concept that sprang from the mind of co-writer/prop maker/poster designer Jake Lear. This year's stand-alone (well, mostly) tells the story of Gertie Kendrick, and came out of an idea I had long before we had cracked the story for the rest of the season.  I wrote the Gertie scenes very early on in the scripting process, before we even knew where they would fit.

The Gertie scenes tell a macabre short story by themselves, but they also open up our understanding of the mysterious drowning deaths that have plagued the island.  As the newspaper articles on Vicki's conspiracy wall broadly hinted last week, certain entities (whatever they are) are passing their consciousnesses from one Ragged Isle citizen to another, usually from mentor to protege, leaving behind "drowned" corpses in their wake.  This is the first time we've gotten a good look at this process, though we've certainly seen glimpses (and the aftermath, obviously).  I wanted to convey just how seriously these creatures (whatever they are) take it.  Jumping from one body to another is not something they do lightly, or often, and like Native Americans with their kills, they observe certain somber rituals of gratitude when they do make the jump.

Except one of them is not like the others, and is plowing through Ragged Isle residents as if they were items in an all-you-can-eat buffet.  I expect we'll find out what's behind that at some point, just maybe not soon.  We'll see.

The were some character gender changes in the revision process of this episode (and the last).  Dr. Monroe was originally a man, but then I decided there was no reason that character had to be male, and I wanted every episode to at the very least pass the Bechdel Test, if possible.  There's a shortage of strong female characters in movies and TV, especially strong female characters who don't serve exclusively as love interests to the central male characters.  I think it was important to all of the writers plotting out the story (Barry, Karen, Rick, Jake, and myself) that we have a wide variety of interesting women on the show.  Also, the great Cathy Counts really delivers in this role, both as the kindly doctor and as the vengeful whatever-it-is.

On the other hand, Gertie's assistant was originally a woman. But then, pretty late in the scripting process, I got the idea that the dynamic between Gertie and her protege was too similar to the dynamic between Rose and Julie, so we made a swap, and were lucky enough to land Justin C. St. Louis for the role of the doomed Trevor Stebbins.

As I mentioned last week,we shot the Gertie scenes on the very last day of principal photography for "Ragged Isle," as our "summer" shoot lingered into the end of November, 2011.  These were some of the scenes I was most excited about (and also some of the scenes I had written earliest), so it was a long, long wait to see them play out.  But boy was it worth it.  As I've mentioned on this blog once or twice (or three times), it was such a joy watching actress Suzanne Rankin perform as Gertie, and everyone she shares a scene with in this episode really shines as well:  Beth Saufler as Rose, Denis Fontaine as Vance, and the aforementioned Justin C. St. Louis as Trevor.  I love everything about this storyline, including the grisly surprise ending.  (At least, I hope it was a surprise.  Last week, the doctor rang the doorbell.  This week, she knocked.  That was your clue that she was a "changed" woman.)

But the Gertie scenes are not the only scenes in this episode, so there's more to talk about.  After the success of last year's scuba diver monologue, I felt a little bolder this year placing longer speeches in the mouths of our characters.  Hence, Agent Thorne's monologue about lies and poker, Rose's monologue about Gertie's many life experiences, and even my mini-monologue about the grieving process.  As always, I'd rather not spend a lot of time lingering on my acting, but I'm quite pleased with how Kathryn Perry and Beth Saufler delivered Agent Thorne's and Rose's monologues, respectively.

Way back when, Rick wrote an early draft (the first draft, in fact) of episode eleven, the first episode of the second season (back when we thought there were only going to be two seasons).  Rick's draft dealt almost exclusively with the meeting between the sheriff and Dr. Hoffman (my character).  It was pretty great, but it had to be pared down extensively when we revamped our plans for the season and introduced new plot threads and characters (like Agent Thorne).  The exchange in episode fifteen (this one) between Rick and myself emerged out of Rick's old episode eleven draft, and I like that we can still see the lingering effects of the sheriff's grief.  We saw how devastated he was in the first episode of the season, but he has been pretty much all business since, even cracking a few jokes (good ones too: "Control the lobsters, control the world!").  In this episode, we can see that the sheriff's grief is still there, just pushed beneath the surface so he can do his job.

The ending of this episode is just about the grisliest thing we've seen since Harrison Shaw's death way back in episode five. And so, another one of these creatures (whatever they are) appears to have met its end. Who (or what) are they, and why is someone or something (whatever it is) going around carving them up?

The answers to those questions will have to wait for another day.