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We'll Meet Again - episode 1x21
This episode was written by Denis McGrath, and here is his story about the creation of the episode. From what Denis writes, you can totally understand why showrunner Peter Mohan won the 2008 WGC award of Best Showrunner.Friday, January 25, 2008
Blood Ties: "We'll Meet Again"
BEST IDEA WINS.
It's the greatest part of working in a writing room on a TV series, when you've got a showrunner with the stones and the smarts to run it that way. Best Idea Wins comes from the top down; it wipes away all agendas and ego, it builds camaraderie and it results in the bestest product you could ever hope for.
And when you're the episode writer, the nice dividend is, you get your name as the "Written by" and behind it, a whole bunch of great ideas from the minds who worked with you.
Best Idea Wins. I just don't understand working any other way.
To maintain and to nurture a true "Best Idea Wins" kind of room, you need a Showrunner who approaches his or her job with brio and confidence. Not the confidence that comes from thinking you're right -- because no one's right all the time. Not even the confidence that comes from "having a vision." Because Best Idea Wins means you have to know your material and its creative heart and still be flexible enough to take things in a direction that you didn't expect, should that idea present itself.
As an added bonus, when you're that kind of Showrunner and you do give credit to the great people who work with you -- everybody just thinks you're being modest.
Epstein and I were laughing about that just the other day. The more a Showrunner takes credit, the more writers think they're grabbing; the more they share the wealth around, the more people want to credit them. (There's a reason Joss Whedon always talks up his writers, kids.)
Anyway, this little disquisition on Best Idea Wins is brought to you by Blood Ties' penultimate episode, "We'll Meet Again".
Tanya Huff, the venerable author of the books BT was based on, has her own take on the episode up at her LiveJournal here. I'm going to take a crack at trying to walk you through how the creative came to be.
First of all, I joined the staff of Blood Ties about halfway through their season, once I was finished writing my previous show. They were over budget, and people were tired, and changes needed to be made to economize. We also had the looming knowledge that we were trying to build to a place at the end of the season that left the characters further apart than ever. The first volley of this was the return of Christina to Henry's life. That formed the nexus of my first episode, "The Devil You Know." After that we saw a bit more of Henry's pull toward the earthly. We knew that in episode 19 (that's right, 19 -- not the silly 2-season marketing thing Lifetime did that just confused everybody) Vicki was going to stab Henry. That violation and betrayal was going to be deep and have bad implications for their trust, and Henry's feelings toward Vicki. When we broke Ep. 20, "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly," that's the moment where we wanted the characters to be furthest apart. And in Episode 22, the season finale, we knew we had to set up a terrible choice for Vicki. Everybody who's following the series, of course, knows that the ongoing choice Vicki has to make is between Henry and Mike -- so we wanted to give her another choice to make. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Episode 21 was a great dark spot of nothing. We didn't want to steal the thunder of 22. And we didn't want just a rebeat of 20, where the three mains really, really, really weren't getting along.
So what do you put in that slot to get the juices really going?
I relish this kind of opportunity, by the way. It's when series writing is its most exciting.
(Spoilers for Episode 121 "We'll Meet Again" follow)
By the time we got to the end of the season, we were all looking to tell stories that weren't so much about the monster of the week, but that were about the monsters that lurked in all of us. It was time to push our world a little bit. So in 20 we showed a bit of Mike and Vicki's backstory, when they were both cops.
What to do for 21, though? What to do?
In the room we threw out a bunch of pitches. One of the ones that really stuck, for the two Den(n)ises, was some kind of reincarnation story. We started from what sounds like a bad Japanese horror movie place:
Vicki encounters a man who claims that his reincarnated lover is trying to kill him. What they gradually uncover is a weird sport -- two people who have taken a lover's grudge through the centuries. Every lifetime, one finds the other and kills them. Last one living each lifetime, wins. But this time, one person's tired of the game.
And here's the first case of "Best Idea Wins." Peter Mohan, our Showrunner, thought there was something there. But that wasn't quite it. It was very fanboy -- not really our audience.
I look back on it now and think, "what were we, high?" A bad showrunner or a panicky one or a non-writing producer would probably have tossed it with a glare -- but Peter...he ruminated. He nodded, and smiled... and rocked in his chair.. something... something there... If we could just nudge it somehow...
It was Peter that came up with the idea, as far as I remember, that we tell a story of a couple that somehow refracts all the themes of Henry and Vicki and Mike -- we can't advance their antipathy anymore, and we can't nose into any of the juicy emotional reveals that are coming in 22 -- so somehow we needed to reflect what we'd come to know about these three. We needed to comment upon them, by riffing on their situation.
So we needed a pair of lovers who can't be apart, but can't be together. Something mythic. And not Romeo & Juliet, because, come on man, that shit's played out.
Naturally, I went to the Greeks.
I'd had vague memories swishing around the brainpan of the story of Hero and Leander -- Leander, swimming each night to be with his love, until one time the light goes out and he loses his way. (Hence, "Lee," and also, I think, "Helen.")
What happens if the light goes out, and you lose your way? What then? And what would that look like in a reincarnation story?
So somewhere in the room, the mashup happened -- a pair of star crossed lovers with a routine for meeting up in each life. A routine that gets disturbed because of something about our modern world. A man who comes to Vicki for help.
I don't know who came up with the idea of a teenager. Might have been me. (See, this is the nice thing about surrendering to "Best Idea Wins." Because you know that's how you're working, nobody jealously counts their contributions, or even remembers, man.) I have a vague sense of just pitching funny teaser ideas, and one of them was a young teenage boy coming in to Vicki and saying, "you have to help me find my wife!" Which, of course, is one of the greatest of Detective story cliches. It's cool when you can use things that are cliches and totally invert their meaning. It's tres post-modern.
Anyway, from there the usual story process took over -- pitches here and there. What's kept them apart? What's the obstacle? We know the obstacles that keep Vicki and Mike and Henry apart -- some are external, some internal. We needed our star crossed lovers to have that duality, too.
Somebody came up with the idea of them being out of sync -- so somehow this time, it's a Harold and Maude thing. She's too old for him. That's good. But what about that original idea from the top of the pitch -- where one wants to stop the game? There had to be something there...what would make her want to stop looking?
...A baby. She'd never gotten pregnant before.
Well, why? And what kept them apart in those lifetimes? What was the mechanics of it? We don't have to posit why they keep getting reincarnated, but there has to be some kind of reason in the universe...maybe the sense that they were unfinished, somehow... Maybe they were never together very long...so they never really got to finish their journey...and she couldn't have a baby...and what would make her easy to track...something Vicki could discover...
I remember being in my office and whooping with joy when I realized that, yup, women could be hemophiliacs, but it was really, really, really rare. (Thank You, Internet!) Super. Just the thing we needed.
From there, we hit the "wouldn't it be cool ifs?" I wanted a scene between Lee and his Older-younger brother. The idea of Coreen being sappy and unable to control her crying made us all laugh. A good comic bit of business for her.
What happened in the end? Did she die? Too cruel. Did he? Again, too bleak. What were we trying to really say about love, here, anyway?
There's a point where you've reached almost the end of your basic plotting where, intentionally or not you take that step back and you think, "what really do I believe about this?" And more importantly, what do the characters believe about this?
Henry is a renaissance man. He'd believe in Love conquering all. Vicki would be a skeptic -- maybe a skeptic because she's really too chicken to commit, but that's for the audience to decide...and what would Mike believe?
Well, Mike's a cop. Mike's not a superhero like Henry, and he's not larger than life like Vicki. Everybody wants the damsel to wind up with the hunky vampire because that's the fantasy. How can a poor old regular guy compete?
By working harder.
This is something I believe profoundly, by the way. I've always been suspicious of the idea of "the soul mate" and the kind of gooey, adolescent fantasy portrayals of love our culture shoves at us. It's not that I don't believe in the power of seeing someone from across a crowded room, it's just that...so what? When the dashing couple finally kiss, and the image fades to black, then what? Life is a marathon, not a sprint. Then comes the part we never see -- the rest of your lives together.
And that shit's hard.
Every long-standing relationship I've ever seen that lasted, lasted not because of a deep and abiding storybook love -- the fantasy -- but because of sheer bloody minded, stubborn, hard and endless work. Love that works makes us all grinders, just trying to get by, day after day, not get into trouble, build that trust, that respect, that familiarity...
It sounds a lot like police work. Investigating, dotting the i's, crossing the t's... being there. Okay then. Mike's the guy who thinks that love is hard work. Mike's the guy who's seen case after case of love gone bad.
Now I knew the emotional through line. The story of Lee and Helen was going to be our device to get our three characters to reveal how they felt about love. And it was going to force them all to take a pause, and think over the stuff they'd been together recently, and maybe come to a decision or two -- the result of which will be how they start out at the beginning of the final episode of the season.
It was clear that Lee and Henry would have to bond, and that maybe Vicki would at least try to express to Helen that which she could never broach with the men in her life - but the centrepiece in terms of plot here is that we wanted to show a turn in Henry where he definitely makes the choice that he's leaving Toronto.
I'd included a little telephone conversation off the top of my last episode, "The Devil You Know," where Henry is on the phone with someone, trying to suss out the last known whereabouts of Christina. It was a nice litte drop. And I was eager to explore this idea a little more. In our world -- in the Vampire lore that Tanya created, Vampires are very much animalistic in the sense that they can't share territory. Well, who keeps that straight? I had this idea that it was this one family -- a human family -- that had kept the peace and brokered the lines for generations. From there, those scenes got written lickety split. They just flowed out -- the stuff about the wine, Henry and Vicki, the back and forth and my grandfather warned me about you -- sometimes you know a character so well it doesn't even feel like writing. That's what it was like writing Augustus and Henry.
Researching flapper speak was a fun hour or so. "Dude, flappers were sick." I still laugh at that line.
From there, what else can I tell you? Doing the math of who died when and when they were in a coma was hard. Really hard. I math dumb. I wanted Lee to forgive his brother Jeff for something they did at Expo 67 -- but the math didn't work.
I also had, in an early draft, an exchange directly to tweak the fans. In the course of discovering his travel brochures, Vicki and maybe Lee discovered that before Henry was a graphic novelist, he'd written a few cheesy romance novels. But it didn't move the plot along, or really say anything essential about the characters so, you kill your darlings...
Back to the "Best Idea Wins." It's not just that a sure, guiding hand like Peter Mohan gets you to the heart of what the show's really about. It's that really smart people come up with really funny things to say that you just slip in there. After my first draft, Dennis Heaton came into the room with an alt for a line that is just so completely Vicki that it makes me swoon:
"Real coffee would take this out behind the shed and beat it until it turned to tea."
I think Heaton also gave us the "what, did Mr. Wilson steal your ball?" Damnit, Heaton -- you scooped me on the Dennis the Menace reference this time...but one day... ONE DAY...
Sadly, most of the really mushy stuff that got written was probably me. But so was all the tough love stuff about it being hard work. So, what? I'm a hardass with a fondness for tissues? That's right ladies, tough and sensitive.
This script didn't get rewritten a lot -- mostly because everybody firing on all cylinders meant the "Best Idea Wins" engine was cranked way up. There was one major pass I did from the Pink to the Blue -- proof positive that no matter how much experience you have, you can still make rookie mistakes.
The Cast read off the PINK draft, and everybody loved it. But we could tell that Christina Cox was a little restless about it. And -- this is why you absolutely need your cast to read the script aloud -- it suddenly became clear:
I was too in love with my guest roles. Henry had a cool scene or two. Mike had his end soliloquy with Lee. But Vicki? Vicki was reacting a lot.
So the last pass, start to finish, was making it more Vicki. Beefing up her lines. Taking some stuff away from Coreen so that Vicki investigates alone. Having her drive scenes, not take the back seat. Tweaking the ending so she convinces Lee to give up, not Henry. As a result, there's a really interestng tonal difference between the Pink and the Blue shooting script. The Pink is a good story, a pretty good hour of Television. But the Blue is Blood Ties.
I didn't spend a lot of time on set watching this episode go to camera. The scene I saw the most of was Mike's final thoughts to Lee. And here, again, is why I love TV and how everyone can make it better. At the end of Mike's little speech, we're on Lee. And the expression on his face is... what? Does he buy it? Is this guy gonna get it and move on? Is he still dangerous? Is all of this just going to start all over again in another lifetime?
The way Tyler Johnson plays the scene, and David Winning directs it, you just don't know. It's a chilling note of ambiguity, something for the audience to fill in. You just don't know. I love it! And I love that while that's going on, Dylan still hits his note as Mike. We saw Henry make a choice earlier in the ep. Now, in this speech, Mike makes one, too.
And that's gonna cause some fireworks in Ep. 22.
So brings to an end my season of Blood Ties. It was such a fun show to work on. Such great people to work with. I know the fans may be disappointed, and certainly the cliffhanger of the Season Finale seems excruciating if it never gets resolved. But at the same time, if we don't get to continue the journey (which seems increasingly likely at this point...that's just my read -- I am NOT an official source) it's not as bad as some of those shows that just...stop.
Because, of course, if you want, you can see where the story was going. All of Tanya's Blood books are still in print. And though it's a shame to not be able to work Augustus and Coreen and all the great ideas Peter had for season two into that narrative, the books are still a cracking good read -- if you're one of those people who can't stand not to know how it's supposed to end...well, Tanya answered all your questions years before you thought to ask them!
If we managed to accomplish anything of value on Blood Ties, it's only because we had the smarts of Tanya Huff and Peter Mohan to build on.
Best. Idea. Wins.
(H/T to the Bloodlines fansite for the screencaps.)
If you want to read the user comments to Denis' blog, go HeyWriterBoy
09 April 2010