John Rogers's Blog, page 2

LIBRARIANS #104 "Santa's Midnight Run" Answer post

Bruce Campbell. How frikkin' cool was that?

This ep was born when we got, in the middle of our first few weeks, the news that we'd be premiering in December, to match the 10th anniversary of the original Librarian movie. Hey, we make a magic show. One of our episodes is on the week of Christmas.  The math does not seem hard. 

Christmas episodes are useful in a meta-sense because, regardless of our heritage, the holiday brings a lot of emotional baggage. Even the acceptance or rejection of mainstream culture's traditions around the date say something about you, never mind the complications of interacting with your family.  It's my personal favorite kind of plot hook -- a story object you toss into the middle of the show, and each character will naturally have a different, and revelatory relationship with it.

I'll admit I'm always a little impatient at the supernatural shows (and some procedurals) which gets up its own plot, which is more a series of complications than conflicts.  As Chris Downey used to insist when we worked together: "What's the argument?" If there's no disagreement, no character argument, it's just dogs jumping through a series of increasingly ornate hoops. They can be entertaining as hell and, hey, there are a couple I avidly watch.  But I can't imagine making one over the long term.

We landed on Santa as the plot hook for the show early.  We'd been discussing moves for the Serpent Brotherhood to make in other contexts, and were dug in on not making each episode with those antagonists an artifact hunt.  We were working hard to make sure we weren't doing artifact hunts too much to begin with (again, Warehouse 13 kind of owned that space),  and to tell the truth I'm just not that personally invested in objects as MacGuffins.  "I just don't care about another magical hoo-ha", I may have said, "they're purely transactional. I care about people." "Like Santa?" someone in the room said, at which point the idea that "This is the episode where the Serpent Brotherhood tries to kill Santa" landed like a delicious fully cooked meal on the conference room table. 

It went through several iterations -- originally, the show began with the Serpent Brotherhood having a meeting, ending with Dulaque revealing Santa's photo and announcing "This is our target," very Cobra Commander/Bond villain.  But the pulp rule is always START LATER, END EARLIER. Each episode, each scene. The audience is smart, they'll catch up, and if the goal is to get the characters into a tree and throw rocks at them (as the saying goes) then why not start with them in the tree?

Splitting the team up seemed the only way to keep the bear manageable. I've shot a five-hander, and it ain't pretty. We needed to split the characters up, and a rescue/distraction broke out nicely.  It solved one of the problems of a pursuit show -- not enough days in your home set. (Yeah, welcome to the dream factory, kids). Splitting the team meant coming up with different obstacles for everyone, which is how we landed on Baird dealing with an unstable Santa and the team tackling the retrieval part of the job.

We also had availability issues with Matt and Lesley-Ann -- they're busy humans and we could only steal them for a few days. This is why you only see their shoes in the opening sequence. It's a little cheat for doubles. 

Also originally: the Santa reaches the spot in the Northern Lights and releases his energy in mid-flight, after a fight on the chartered passenger plane. We had a perfectly good passenger plane fuselage laying about (hello, "The D.B. Cooper Job"), but the nice camera folks on The Librarians who'd also worked on Leverage told us that moving that many people around in that contained a space would be impossible to shoot on our seven day schedule. Also, how would we shoot the Serpent Brotherhood getting on and off the plane?  The idea began to collapse under the weight of physical production. 

One of my brothers had been a crew chief on a C-130, and I always enjoyed his stories of the various things they threw/hung out the back of the open cargo door in flight.  The inside of a cargo plane is big and boxy, just the sort of thing one likes to build on a soundstage.  One odd thing -- I got a couple Twitter folk and emails asking how the plane stayed up with the back open. Has everybody really not seen one of these?



We then faced the problem of spending not just one but two whole acts in that set though, which is not something you want to do in a pulp show (or any show).  Much like the first thing any director learns is the moving master, a TV writer learns not to park their characters in one set unless they're making a point of being stuck in that set.  So we landed on the crash, er, landing. Nicely enough we had an ice-station set laying about -- thank you, "The Long Way Down Job".
So wait -- the whole POINT of the show, Eve Baird spreading hope, was the last thing added to the script?  Pretty much.  I mean, it was in there early, well before the first shooting draft, but it wasn't in the beginning. Scripts are iterative processes, from pitch to outline to screenplay, and in TV in particular, in a show where you start with 70% less prep time than usual in particular.  There are various schools of thought on showrunning, but I'm a big believer in fast, ugly documents and drafts. Writing is rewriting.  This is the biggest trap I see young writers falling into, endlessly agonizing and polishing that first draft.  Anyone who's had the misfortune of working with me has heard me say "It's not even a show until the Blue pages".  
That said, I'm also a stickler for that process. If you try to toss an episode that's made it through pitch, two-pager, outline, and white pages, I will tell you to go ... I will be unpleasant.  Nothing makes me crazier than short-circuiting that process, or wasting time by ignoring the process.  Occasionally I'll tell an exec, when discussing a script actually in production queue, "I'll get that note in the Blue pages." This is annoying, I know, but so far it hasn't damaged my career beyond repair.
The whole Eve Baird/hope thing came out of our desire to always have on more twist. An episode where your protagonist's goal is to do a thing, and they succeed just by doing that thing ... well, eh.  We also couldn't find a way to close out Baird's arc. She actually had a great reason not to like Christmas, and "good cheer" was still a little light. I mean, it sounds light.  You want primal energies and themes in a pulp show. Hope, that's a sonuvabitch to get behind. 
As often happens in TV, her name being "Eve" was a coincidence which led to a solve in an episode which then became one of the primary building blocks of the season arc.  At this point (Santa was written/shot a bit later in the order than it aired) we were beginning to see how we'd pull off the final episode that we'd been kicking around since the first few weeks of the Writers Room.  Anything more would be spoilers, but we'll discuss when we get there.
Bruce Campbell, well, he was on the wish list.  He has a place in the Northwest, as I understand, and with Burn Notice wrapped, was available.  We had the good fortune that our producing director Marc Roskin and the director of the episode Jonathan Frakes (the "Frakes on a Plane" jokes flew fast and furious on set) had both worked with him.  We gave a call, he dug the script, and he showed up to be awesome.  There is nothing more inspiring to writers than knowing that you have an actor who can deliver absolutely any line you give him.  We were particularly gratified by how well he landed the big emo lines of the show. We all know Bruce Campbell can land a joke. But damn, he made me tear up every time on both the "human heart" speech on the road and "gift of hope" speech in the ice station.
All right, let's see what you're throwing at us this week:
@ChelseaNH: Did you tell the wardrobe department that Lamia needed evil shoes? 'Cause those were evil shoes.
The wardrobe department, led by the awesomely monickered Critter Pierce, has delivered non-stop funkiness all on their own initiative.  What is Rule One of succeeding in television? Hire smart people and stay the fuck out of their way.
@Geekette: In the episode, Santa says he knows both versions of Stone. Is this a nod to Leverage or something that will pop up later?
Santa was saying that he knows Stone leads a double life, just a quick way to establish his Santa bona fides.  We wound up not ging into this plot-wise as much as we thought in Season One, due to the 10 episode order, so we wanted to make sure we landed it in dialogue a few more times before it becomes an issue in episode 8.
@Tina2Tired: If they can open the magic door and go in and out of it at will to wherever they need to go, why didn't they just bring Santa back to the library, then open the closest door to the North Pole/Northern Lights? I might've thought that the Library can't have non-Librarian staff in it, but if that were the case, it wouldn't have been able to be attacked in the first episode. 
In an earlier draft, that's exactly what happened.  Santa went walk-about from the Library itself, leading to a chase across Portland. That felt a little ... small.  So we wrote around that using two reasons: First, Santa was determined to get to his sleigh, and then after his sleigh tried to get them there on his own.  It's not until they're stuck in Canada do they slow down to get a plane.  There was actually a line in the script about "there's no doors that far north", so they would've needed to get a plane anyway.
Second: yeah, it's almost as if things needed to go exactly as they did. As if there's some other plot going on in the background.  I mean, really, Santa is very powerful ...
@Michele Dee: So the guy that tries to start a fight with Santa in the bar, he was in The Reunion Job, right? Do you guys have a lot of crossover with local actors from Leverage?
That's Paul Bernard, our line producer.  He's the guy who manages the overall production and scheduling of the shoot.  We tossed him and a bunch of the crew into this episode.  You can see our B camera operator Norbert, and the dude pulling his teeth is Pete Dowd, one of our 2nd AD's.
@Greg S. : Was there a scripted reason why Santa didn't get his hat back as soon as they got on the plane, that maybe got cut? My inner "story sense" felt that it was important as soon as I saw that it didn't happen and later Santa says (roughly)"I've been separated from my talisman for too long".
Tick tick tick.
@Dave MB: Very unusual December weather for both England and northern B.C., I think.
Global warming is accelerated in the Library-verse. Honestly, we set a bunch of those shots inside to cover the summer shooting, but then everything got claustrophobic.  That said, average December temperature in London is 44 F, and in BC, well, you do get that warm Pacific air and less snow than you think. This is the price you pay for shooting in the summer ...
@Trillby: So whose idea was it that Santa is collecting the world's goodwill and the "presents" that he brings everyone is that he gives the goodwill back to us? Yours? Paul's? A Joint Efforts Production? Totally brilliant. Also glad to see Frakes back, there is something the combination of his direction, the writing team's work, and the actors that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
It was a group effort to land on the re-distribution of good will.  We worked backwards -- why does the Serpent Brotherhood want to kill Santa? To get his magic power.  Well, what is that power? Combine that with the effort to find something non-secular about Santa, and it all laid out quite easily.
I explained above how we landed on the Hope transformation, and I'll take a bit of credit for that.  To me, seeing others do good deeds is what gives me hope about humanity. Just extrapolate out.
@marti jackson: 1.)  "morgana would be proud"? du lac / of the lake? arthur's crown? something going on there? 2.) also, is lamia the original snake in the brotherhood of the snakes? mythologically speaking, y'know. 3.) when jenkins seemed bemused at the thought of du lac dying from a fall from a plane, i was reminded of "silverado" -- "jake? fell off his horse?" ha. 

1.) Well that's an interesting theory.2.) No, it's Lamia's work name she took when joining the Brotherhood. She is also actively campaigning to change the name from "Serpent Brotherhood" to "Serpent Collective".3.) That's pretty much right.
@Sarah Roo: What did Jake tell his family about why he's not with them for the holiday? (And, for that matter, why he moved? Cassandra, Baird, and Ezekiel all seem pretty solitary, but Stone obviously has a lot of ties back in Oklahoma, and people who would want some kind of explanation for his absence.)
He actually explains in the finale what his cover story is, but it's not a big deal, He's told them he got a gig working on a refinery repair down in New Orleans.
@Stefan Jones: I like how the "Eye" (that's the nickname of the big ferris wheel, right?) was superimposed over the (NW Industrial area?) skyline. Do little touches like that gobble a lot of budget?
Not really. Anything interactive -- interacting with or changing because of the actors -- anything moving, any brand-new 3-D objects, those are the bears. 
@ryan_w_enslow: Please, please, please have Stone be gay. This isn't a question, just a hope. But Kane is so good at playing against-type while playing to-type, and it would totally work with what we've seen of his characters arc so far (and while I loved Leverage all of the major on-screen romances were hetero)
Stone's not canonically gay, primarily because I didn't want to complicate his self-image issues, particularly since we wouldn't be dealing with his family on-screen (S2, if we get one). Secretly gay and artistic seemed like both a stereotype and a hat-on-a-hat.
That said, when we discussed the character with Kane, we landed on the idea that coming out as gay was the actual, operative metaphor for the character arc.  And, as always, whatever the hell you people do in your fic is your business.
@Margrave: I asked this on the other post but I'll mention it here. OST2K? what is that?
answered by --
@Timothy R: O2STK stands for "Organization to Secret to Know". The secretive group was created by fellow TV producer/writer/creator Javier Grillo-Marxuach for his amazingly fun and wild comic and TV series "The Middleman" (sadly gone far too quickly). If you like the fun of The Librarians and Leverage, you'll find a kindred cousin (and Mark Shepard!) in The Middleman. 

Now for my question: On Leverage, I remember you (and Dean and Chris) always had a one-word theme for each season of the show (e.g. "Consequences"). Assuming there's one for this first season of The Librarians, what's the word, and why?
Consider the Middle Man crossover canonical. I got permission from Javi to use the name, and I'm going to ride it as far as I can go.  
For the question: "Choices" or ... "Fate".
@Calla: Caught the line Jenkins let slip about him (and DuLac) being something other than human. Interesting. Does that mean Jedson and Charlene are something other than human, too?
"Other than human" is probably not quite right.  Just -- you are changed, pick up some tricks along the way when living in the magical world.
@lisa king: 1. I like how everyone got their  Christmas wish. All 3 LITs were explained but you let us be smart enough to know that Eve got her wish of saving the people with the hope she had lost. 
2. on a side note I could not help but wonder what would happen if Eliot Spencer ever met Col. Baird around Christmas time. Who would glare and growl the most. 
3. Did we see a foreshadowing of Lamia changing sides? What was the reason she does it as NOT Santa was hinting at.
4. How special of a cowboy does Lamia think Stone is. That was a very sexually tense way of saying it.
1.) Nicely done.2.) They'd be to busy kicking ass.3.) Lamia is not a straight-up bad guy. She's on a crusade. 4.) She digs him. She'll still kill him, but she digs him.
@Shannon14: You said in your previous post that Ezekiel and Jake will never be friends. Is that because Jake values trust a heck of a lot and Ezekiel's a thief? It would be great if you could delve a little deeper into that, if it doesn't involve spoilers. (It may be because I'd really like Jake to call him Zeke at one point, like he called Cassandra 'Cassie'). Also, how many takes occurred while Ezekiel was Santa!Ezekiel? John Kim was amazing, and that Australian accent has definitely added to the character. Hoping we get some back story on him soon. Thanks for making a great show!
Jake and Ezekiel (we toyed with Zeke but it never worked) are just too different. To a great degree, the personal force field of arrogance Ezekiel radiates is just too much for Stone to handle, and it's not going to change any time soon.  Ezekiel, as you will see very soon, was chosen by the Library for qualities other than his ability to steal stuff.
@Nusaiba C:  I mentioned this on twitter but again, I'm really glad the hope montage had the bit about the Muslim protesters. (Whose idea was it?) As a Muslim who doesn't do Christmas I loved getting to learn more about Santa and the goodwill twist was great!  For my actual question: We've seen that Lamia may not be out for power the same way Dulaque is. Will we get to see more of her reasons for doing the whole Bad Guy thing?
Well I'm glad you dug that. The montage was a group effort, not sure who landed that one. I was very dug in on it once we put it into the sequence, though.  It was important for us to say that "the Santa" was bigger and older than our culture, and it helped cement the world-wide nature of magic. Also, Muslims get kicked in the teeth plenty on American TV. I don't much care for that, and would like to swing things back a bit when I can.
You may see more of Lamia's motives, but she was pretty clear in the pilot.She wants to make the world a better place. She thinks bringing magic back os the way to do it. She's a zealot, that's all.
@Stacey: 1.) Rather than wonder how the sleigh flies without Santa, I found myself fretting that he won't get it back. Can you say, or would that be a plot spoiler? 2.) If we get a season 2, I hope we get to see Bruce Campbell as Santa again. And that we get to see Gretchen. Any casting fantasies yet? 3.) I've been wondering which of the LITs would cover languages. We know Stone speaks Latin. Is he proficient in other ancient languages?  4.) With all the hats you wear, I assume you know what you'll be seeing when an episode airs--the special effects, the scenes cut for broadcast, etc. Do the actors?
1.) He basically revokes magic privileges on the one stolen, and gets a new one from Mrs. Claus for Christmas.2.) We have a list. We'll see.3.) Assume Stone can handle most ancient languages, while Ezekiel;s got a good working knowledge of the world-wide travel/thief languages.4.) great question! The actors often don't see the final cuts before air, as they;re off doing other jobs,etc.
@Tom Galloway: 1.) Just wanted to mention I'm really enjoying Matt Frewer's just this side of going off a paleo diet on that delicious carb filled scenery performance. Would've loved a Frewer/Campbell/LaRoquette scene, just to see which one would manage to steal it from the others.  2) Is Frewer getting to ab lib, as I've read he has a tendency to do? 3) Any reason the Serpents seem to be against using ranged weapons? When both Lamia and Dulac pulled out a knife and sword, I was half expecting Stone or Baird to do an Indiana Jones pistol pull at 'em.
1.) Well, you get 2/3rds of that wish tonight.2.) He's sticking to script but doing some lovely physical ad-libs. The bit with the hand sanitizer in the pilot was his alone.3.) They prefer quiet and old-school. It's a way of making sure the killing is personal and ritualistic.
@StaceyBanks: How long, on average, does it take to bring an episode together? Excluding Santa's episode....that one must have left everyone in stitches! (and taken 3x as long ;) ) 
A week or two to break the script, roughly one-to-two weeks for a first draft, 7 days prep 7 days shoot. Like a horrible, horrible clock. Or as we say in TV, the train is running while you're laying tracks.
@Anonymous: Nice job having the time zones show up correctly during Eve's trip around the world. Was that specifically in the script?
No, we handled that in something called the "tone meeting", where we talk about how we want to handle the artistic demands of the script, before pre-production starts. Tracking that was a plot-point, though.
@Julia: I'm a little conflicted about Cassandra. I'm hoping to see her own the enormity of what she tried to do and what she actually did do. After all, she didn't break with the evil minions of evil after they evilled outrageously in front of her. She broke with them when they put her in a cell and made it clear that they weren't going to reward her for helping break the world. 
Even so, she still apparently thinks that not only was she justified, she's not at any kind of moral disadvantage because anyone else would have done the same, to the point of being self righteous about it.  (etc)

Well that's the danger (and it happens quite a bit) of taking a what a character says at face value.  Cassandra was absolutely lashing out at Stone because he was lashing out at her. She's consumed with guilt, and self-doubt. She has an arc where she comes to terms with this and wins back the group's trust, but unfortunately it's split up by having the episodes air slightly out of order. 
This is the thing that happens where people assume I haver a beef with the MidWest because I have characters make fun of the MidWest. When the characters do that, that's because they're being assholes.
@LynRasa: 1. )Alright. You dropped a 'magical worlds' hint in a 103 answer.  That got me thinking about Jim Butcher's Nevernever as did, oh lots from the Santa episodes. I know your run at the Dresden Files TV show predates Dresden v. Santa, but did you pull your Dresden Files Notebook from Cold Storage when you started looking researching for The Librarians? Is there 7 year old frozen buffalo in The Librarians' chili? And if so can we get Paul Blackthorne as a guest star for S2?
2.) What is Jake's pseudonym? Do we get to know that or is it like Sophie's name?
3.) I'm thinking the mistletoe dart came from the Baldr myth, what about holly and poinsettia?
4.) What did Ezekiel steal for Baird's Birthmas gift?
5.) Technopagan Janna Kalderash/Jenny Calendar(BtVS) totally got an envelope, didn't she? 
6.) Did you have to give the CGI guys a crash course in math and physics? Admittedly, I'm not qualified to judge, but either your preemptive dare about checking Cassandra's math shut them up or or the visual aids have been spot on
1.)  I was never on The Dresden Files TV show, but I'd say we're definitely hanging out in the same genre space.2.) He has multiple pseudonyms.  None of them are story relevant  ... yet.3.) One of the sources.4.) A famous 1st edition.5.) Yep.6.) Nope, they do all that work on their own, and send us roughs to approve. We do try to check the math as much as possible. We actually made a mistake in the script on this one they caught -- we had the wrong side of the car be warm in Cassandra's flashback in the 1st draft.
@George Michael Anderson: I cannot speak for all of them, but this Heathen was very happy when one of Santa's incarnations was Odin. Who's idea was it to have Santa refer to himself in the third person?
The Odin link was Paul Guyot's excellent research. Any annoying verbal tic joke is almost always mine, much to the Writers Room's constant pain.
@Cara B: 1) Is Christian one of those 'tends-to-point-with-his-middle-finger' dudes or does he really enjoy flipping off the camera to see if he can get away with it?2) Methinks that Du Lac worked for the Library at some point in time.....and knew Jenkins fairly well....
3) I'm pretty sure that's Flynn's desk has some sort of connection to the now disconnected Library (and not just in an annex sense), although I'm not really sure as to how...
4) I *adored* Jones' ability to flip back and forth between being super high on Christmas and his normal, thiefy self. Highly entertaining and well, well done.
5) Bruce Campbell as Odin (and Santa...but mainly Odin) made my entire week. 
6) Is Eve more of a Mother Hen or Annoyed Older Sister Who Secretly Loves Them All? 
7) Is Cassandra's personality going to get a little more..unhinged as the season wears on thanks to the brain grape? 
8) Wardrobe was on point this episode--do you have Nadine back?
9) Jenkins is my favorite cantankerous old man. I adore him. Will we see him get to save the day/one of the LITs as the season goes on? 
10) (Last one, I promise!) Baird seems to have a super strong sense of justice//right/wrong...but still seems to adore Jones. Is it because he's part of the team that she has to protect? Or because she genuinely sees good in him?

1.) One of those dudes.2.) Wrong, then right.3.) More like a connection to Flynn. Its an interface, and as explained, it resets to his preferences.  And that said, that fact is incredibly important.4.) John Kim is a treasure.5.) Made ours too.6.) Annoyed Older Sister Who Does Not Love Them Very Much At All.7.) We address that a bit in a future episode.8.) Critter Pierce, who worked with Nadine on Leverage.9.) He certainly gets more involved as the show goes on. Once we had John, we started writing to him.10.) She does not adore Jones. She finds him amusing.  She does not, however, like or trust him.
@awa64: 1) Was there any hesitance toward having "cast member wears a literal act-out-of-character hat" as a subplot so early in the series' run?
2) In the 101/102 post-game post, you mentioned "characters are lenses, and so you should build them in diametrically opposed pairs in order to best showcase your themes." I'm always excited to hear you talk storytelling theory (and will be picking up your hypothetical book day one), but I think that particular one just clicked with me. To check my understanding: make sure characters who are likely to be paired up together have at least one major difference in worldview from one another, and if that difference in worldview is centered around one of the major themes you're trying to explore in your work, any scene with those two characters has instant conflict, a handhold to kick off banter, and an injection of thematic resonance, regardless of the scene's function in the plot?
3) How does Librariansverse Santa feel about Coca-Cola?
4) How do writer's-room-you and showrunner-you argue out how much magic to show on-screen to make the show suitably magical without straining the effects budget? Does an episode like this get away with fewer major effects sequences by virtue of having a mythological being like Santa front-and-center, or is there less pressure to seem overtly magical (or more pressure to stay under budget) as the show establishes itself and the season progresses? (Or did I totally misread this episode and it actually had more effects work than past episodes, just applied in places I wasn't looking as closely at?)
5) In a world where magic is explicitly symbolic (as opposed to one where it's portrayed as science-fiction-technology but with "arcane energy" replacing "dilithium crystals"), does the ease with which subtext becomes literal text pose more of an advantage or a disadvantage?
6) Cassandra in a story where her warnings of imminent danger go ignored/disbelieved—future episode, grounds for temporary expulsion from the writer's room for taking name-based symbolism too far, or myth already checked off the to-do list with the Serpent Society metaphorically whispering in her ear in 102?
1.) It seemed an interesting challenge. And the bigger "out of chracter" ep was originally slated to be aired before this one, so it wasn't a concern.2.)  In a nutshell, yes. It makes your work easier.3.) He prefers Coke Zero.  Staying trim.4.) We very coldly try to amort out the cost per episode. When we have heavy ones coming, where we know we'll need the effects (like the upcoming science fair episode) we try to pullback on others.5.) Advantage. It gives the writers, characters and audience something to anchor onto, so you can explore the emotional issues caused by the themes rather than explaining the mechanics.6)  Sadly, I just like K sounds.
@David: 1) Do the prop people enjoy finding strange phones for Jenkins to talk into? I am getting a kick out of the mish-mash of tech he employees.
2) I am enjoying the fact that Lamia thinks she has a think with Stone (and who wouldn't?), I hope she pulls the katana on someone else later and Stone gets calls her on it.
3)Loved Stone doing the British accent. Is there anything Kane can't do?
4) Back to Lamia, are we supposed to read anything in her name? Or is it just a code name?
5) I am honestly surprised at how much I am enjoying the show! I normally don't go for shows that are so silly out of the gate, but the actors plus knowing you are behind the wheel are making it work for me. Can't wait to see where it goes
1.) They delight in it. They surprised us with that, to tell the truth. It wasn't scripted, and then when we saw what they were doing, it became a thing.2.) There's a little bit of that tonight.3.) I will leave that question alone.4.) Code name.5.)  I know, right?  We decied to go for big goofy fun, and the audience came with. That's cool.
@Neil W: This show seems a little more family oriented than Leverage, which was family-friendly but involved convoluted plans, complicated crimes and deep villains. In The Librarians the baroque details sort of decorate the plot rather than form part of the structure. So my question is: Is the show delibrately aimed (as in originally pitched) to be as entertaining to bright ten year-olds as it is to those of us who have an inner 10 year-old or has it emerged that way due to the films, stories and everything else lined up?
The shows' based on the movies, which very much had a family-friendly feel. It was then expanded upon with both mine and Dean's love of Doctor Who, or at least the role Doctor Who is supposed to play in the tv menu.  We wanted to make a show you could watch with your kids, burt with enough deep geekspace behind it to keep the mythology-minded interested.
@mysterycat75: 1.) If Jake and the others are Librarians in training, per se, is that the reason Jake Stone can't make the map appear when he throws the sphere up in the air, or does it have more to do with coordination/know how?  2.) Also, how do you choose which bits of history/artifacts to use in an episode? What kinds of research do you do when preparing to write these episodes? 
1.) He'll get it eventually.2.) First season, a lot of it came from our native data base as odd humans, then we did research to expand the ideas.
@Keith DeCandido: If Santa is a timeless avatar of goodwill, why is his redistribution of that good will on 24 December, an arbitrary date on the Gregorian calendar, instead of the winter solstice? The reason why Christmas and the new year and bunches of other celebrations occur at this particular time of year is because it's when the sun "renews itself" after the solstice and the days get longer. So wouldn't it make more sense for not-calling-him-Santa to do his thing on the solstice?
Already setting up for the tie-ins I see. Right, the Santa conforms to whatever cultural definition he's bound by at the time. Once the majority of humanity decided Christmas was December 24th, that's where he landed.
@Peaches: Dean Devlin has said that all the episodes would have extended versions on iTunes. Not so for this episode :( Any particular reason for that? I'm sure there had to be some great things that got cut for broadcast airing.
Actually, no, this one came in dead on time in the first cut. 
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See you next week, and enjoy tonight's Noah Wyle-flavored shenanigans.

LIBRARIANS #104 "and Santa's Midnight Run" Question Post

Bruce Campbell as Santa.  You're welcome.  questions, snark, confusion, rage away in the Comments.

LIBRARIANS 101/102 +103 Answer post

Since I already did the write-up for 101 and 102, I figured I'd fold those fan questions in with the 103 stuff.

The challenge to episode two, in any ordinary show, is to really hammer home what the week-to-week of a show is, from tone to plot construction to character.  Advertising, promotions, casting etc get you Week One. Week One gets you Week Two, but so often Week One is a giant high-concept blow-out, so you need to transition people into the show proper.  It's rare to shake all the loose bolts out very quickly -- in Hollywood there's a generally known if not universally agreed-upon theory (I'm an adherent) that most shows on TV don't quite figure out what they are, how the actors and characters interface, what the template is, until episode 5 or 6 of the first season. This is now a fun game to play with your friends when discussing your favorite shows.

FWIW, we actually shot the 2nd broadcast ep ("The Homecoming Job") of Leverage 6th.  "The Bank Shot Job" was broken and shot first after the pilot, but aired 6th.  Librarians 103 "Horns" (no way I'm using the long form of the titles in these posts) was shot 4th, aired 3rd, but really 2nd because of 101/102 being more of a movie entire.

We needed every inch of that time.  As mentioned, we needed to establish all the methodology of the series, but in a show where we spent the pilot burning down the previous template.  No single Librarian, no artifact hunting like the movies (Warehouse 13 owns that particular franchise now), totally different team dynamic.  How do their cases work?  How do they get to where the cases exist? How does the procedural engine of the show function?  You ordinarily have the time between the selling of the pilot and the shooting of the pilot, and then between pilot pick-up and production, to figure this stuff out.  But as mentioned, this show came together in five weeks, from greenlight to first day of shooting.  We managed to buy a bit of time with the longer production cycle of eps 101/102, but not a ton. There was a lot of spot-welding.

The "rules of magic":  Back in the movies each artifact was a one-off; if we were going to do a show, there needed to be an internal consistency to the supernatural physics of the world.  The network very politely insisted on having magic explained to them in great detail -- they had never made a magic show before, not all the execs were fans of the genre, and well, there's always the fear you're just "solving problems with magic".  They were very supportive, as always with our friends at TNT, but wanted some hard boundaries thrown up.

I'll admit a certain amount of frustration with this tendency in modern television.  Although magical fantasy as a genre is widely accepted by audiences,  it's a young genre in TV, and as a result gets a lot more scrutiny from execs.  You can point out that there's an enormous amount of bullshit on CSI, or most of the science in science fiction is one cool high concept that frankly does not in any way work in real life like the way it's portrayed in the show, but it has the air of legitimacy to it.  It's technology. People respect technology and science, we're hard-wired to do so in Western culture.  Substitute "technobabble" for "abracadbra" and you have 90% of procedurals.

Basically, if we'd called the Back Door a "teleporter", I could've gotten away with explaining it in a couplet.  By calling it a "Magic Door", we needed to dedicate an entire scene to it.

When you add that well-executed magic is inherently surreal, you wind up with a lot of squinting.

There's also the Goofy/Cool challenge.  Everyone -- myself included -- wants to make something people enjoy.  Networks are staffed by people, actual human beings, and you would be stunned at how many of them are genuinely concerned with not making something "goofy".  They want to make cool stuff, they want to be cool, and not cool in the sense of "what I call a thing I like" cool but "hip as judged by society" cool.  A couple years ago I had an exec (not at TNT) express fear that critics would make fun of them (the execs) for making a certain show.

We often joke that Hollywood is high school with money.  It is nightmarishly truer than you know.

The problem, of course is that "cool" and "goofy" work like this


            |
            |
COOL  | GOOFY 
            |
            |

where that line is an infinitely thin and completely subjective space within which genre shows travel.  Most creative people are totally willing to drive their little idea through that space, banging off the guardrails, and non-creative people are by their nature repulsed by that space.

Other acceptable metaphors:

-- COOL as an elevated roadway over a swamp of Goofy
-- COOL as a molecule made up of Goofy atoms (probably better)

All to say: you'll never make anything worth caring about until you're willing to risk making a fool of yourself.

Where the hell was I -- oh, right, I forgot how these things tend to wander. The "Rules of Magic" in the Library-verse turned out to be an excellent idea (thanks Execs!), as they gave us a structure for the cases in a show where there was really no established template.  As Jenkins explains: "Power/Focus/Effect". If you pay attention to that equation, you'll actually find that shows are fair play mysteries.

So this episode had to establish how we got to the cases without abandoning our gorgeous Annex set, establish the rules of magic for the Library-verse, and most importantly, set down the relationships of the main characters in the new configuration.  I'm a big believer in addressing show structure in text, so we decided in writing the awkward, nobody-knows-what-they're-doing second episode.  It's going to be a while before they're a well-oiled team (just like us!),, and addressing that seemed honest. We wanted, too, to make sure that the friendships didn't just gel because everyone's working in the same building. They're strangers.  This is how they become friends. (Unlike Leverage, I don't think this is a show explicitly about family.  But that's me.)

The last item to put in place was tone -- not just in dialogue, etc, but in choosing the type of case the team investigated.  A big theme of the show is "What does magic look like in the real world?", so a straight up old-school X-Files-style investigation seemed a nice template for this one.  We looked to the columns of card son the walls, all the monsters and mysteries obscure and famous, and decided a legend people were familiar with would be a good way to ease into the show. A missing person case that transforms into the secret of a corporation feeding interns to a Minotaur screams X-Files S2 to me.

Writer Jeremy Bernstein had done the research on this, and he did indeed lead us through the entire, sordid version of the original myth.  This led to a wasted afternoon of me riffing off the ancient Minoan Court's R&D budget and Daedelus and the one sane guy in a very weird research project, reined in only by Kate Rorick's iron will.  Being trapped in a maze for an entire show was passive and had only a single goal (and limited sets), so turning it into a Grudge-like curse seemed a nice twist.

We originally experimented with a CG minotaur, but the suit made more sense for our filming schedule.  To properly light and shoot for a CG character you'll insert later which will actually INTERACT with other people -- oof.  The human "Man-o-tour" was originally a combination of neat magic idea ("monsters are among us") and getting to then open up the action. The fact we could nab Tyler Mane for the X-Men reunion was just icing on the cake.

Tricia Helfer joined us courtesy of producing director (and director of this episode) Marc Roskin, who'd directed her on another show.  She's one of the best at delivering a "banality of evil" speech, and was a very good sport about having a tiny redhead clinging to her for a big chunk of one act.

Right, let's see what's in the questions.  That's always more interesting.

101/102

@Unkown:  a.)I haven't seen the movies, so maybe this was an established thing already, but Flynn in the pilot seemed to have a great deal of the Doctor Who nature. Was that intentional? b.) The show is obviously going to be compared to WAREHOUSE 13. What do you see as the important differences?

a.) No,in the movies the gimmick was as Noah describes it "Indiana Jones played by Don Knotts." We wanted to keep the movies in continuity, knew that we wanted to explore the neophyte-style characters with the NEW characters, so keeping Flynn that way made no sense in the timeline or show structure ... and the Eccleston reboot was sitting right there.  I also like writing dense speeches for Noah, he likes saying them as fast as possible, and so there you go.
b.)  I was the loudest voice in the room that we could not just continue on the the idea of a weekly artifact hunt.  I mean, I don't want to just be a rip-off of Friday the 13th: The Series.

Ahem.

No, I'm a big Warehouse 13 fan, and although many fans have been kind enough to point out that the Librarians franchise predates that show, they own that space. We're more a magical investigation show.  A lot of the show is about how magic is just out there, already permeating society.  It's a looser, more distinctly magical world.

@theuglybugball:  a.) Will Jake Stone ever get a cold beer. b.) What happened to Lamia

a.) Not from Jenkins.
b.) Knocked out, and back this week! She and Jake Stone develop a very ... weird relationship.

@Joe Helfrich: Are other episodes going to be streaming online?

For sale on iTunes and Amazon, the extended cuts (I think those are up on all services now), not streaming until we find out if there's a Season 2 or not.  One of those things you need to negotiate for all new shows.

@Ara: Are the Leverage10- podcasts available online?

I'll check.  They should be. Aren't they still up on iTunes?

@Anonymous: The first season has already been filmed. Will feedback from critics and viewers influence any of the upcoming episodes in terms of editing choices? Or is everything already "set in stone"? (Sorry, couldn't resist that.)

To be honest, even when shows shoot and air closer together, feedback from fans usually falls in too late to influence anything anyway.  Even then we will occasionally go "hmm" and explore something, but never re-direct.  Our show, we don't give up creative agency.

@Tom Galloway: Interesting bit; assuming Eve is meant to be team lead, it'd appear she's significantly less smart in the general IQ sense than the rest of the team. I'm not saying she's not competent; it's obvious we're getting another does of competence porn, but Jake and Cassandra are specifically called out as super-geniuses, and Ezekial's background and set-up would appear to put him up there as well. While she seems to be positioned as common sense (as is Jake).

Thing is, that makes the set up for Eureka spring to mind, and sorry to say I really disliked the set up of a town of super-geniuses very frequently needing the token non-genius "regular guy" to solve the problems. It'll be a fine balancing act to have her utilize leadership skills and her explicit field experience while still having the others outshine her intellectually.
I actually consulted on first season of Eureka (wrote the ep with Joe Morton's wife returning) so I get what you're going for here. (I also did standup with Colin, back in the day)  But Eve isn't just common sense, she's also crisis management and an investigator. She directs the others, and in the situations where she's missing or incommunicado, you see the team really struggle.

@Anonymous: In which circle of hell would you place the fans who complain about Christian Kane's hair?

We trimmed him in Leverage, so we've been easing them to this.  As Rebecca Romijn joked, we have the hair hermetically stored for future use, just in case.

@the_eye: I noticed in the scene in the "Black Forest" that the Land Rover had German-looking number-plates. Fine so far. Then I noticed that it was a plate that (currently) can't exist since the prefix you used doesn't reference any actual location. Is there a legal reason for this? Triggered by this I was reminded of one of the last Bonds (Quantum of Solace, I think) where there's a scene in Austria and there also, we get Austrian number plates but impossible ones.

Yep, the same reason we don't use real phone numbers and have to use law books as library books (we'll get to that later).  They're called clearances, one of the most useless, time-consuming elements of film and television producing.  We need to make sure that nothing we do in the show can be connected in any way to anyone alive, lest they sue us for implying ... I don't know, that they rent their truck out to world-spanning Librarians.  

It's one of those petty things you need to do to make sure that just in case, as one lawyer explained it to me,  "you get the craziest client in the world in front of the craziest judge in the world with the craziest jury in the world, you're covered."

@vickysg1: One question: with Unforgettable cancelled, will Jane Curtin be in more episodes next season? (There's no doubt for me there'll be a second season, of course.)

We hope. She was originally in both halves of the premiere, but we had to cut her down to just those scenes due ot her availability on the other show.  She actually flew in the last week of shooting the season to do those scenes, which meant we had to sit there, all season, with the pilot unfinished.  If we' d lost her then, things would have been ... unpleasant.

@Neil W: Is there anything else you might have done differently if it hadn't been made in such a rush?

In retrospect, I think we might have tightened up the season arc, and done another production pass on a few of the scripts to streamline them for both physical production and effects. Otherwise ... eh.

@Isaac: ... for some reason, I really want to see the Librarians meet up with people who seem suspiciously similar to Elijah Snow and the PLANETARY crew, but I suspect that's not possible.

No, but the influence of Planetary on this show will grow more obvious as the season goes on.  It's certainly one for the touchstones for the show.

@Neil Jasper: Perhaps its the role-player in me that put this thought in my head, but a question occurred to me when I saw the magical box that Flynn opened in the opening sequence, and again later when Cassandra disarmed the mesh over the stone -- Who makes those traps and security measures? Are they still around, and do they get ticked off with people like the Librarian and the Serpent Brotherhood getting past their inventions?

That card is actually on the wall.  It's a group of artisans, and they are still around.  And yes, they get annoyed, but it only spurs them to finer work.

@jill: So happy to have you back! My husband and I are both law librarians, so the randomly scattered Federal Reporters cracked us up - weeded legal materials make for cheap and authoritative-looking set dressing, I guess!

Pre-cisely. Here's the trick with books -- they're copywritten, and by publishers, who are about the only humans on earth who actually give a shit about control of books rights.  Even the COVER ART is designed by and therefore belongs TO somebody.

So when you're filling a set with books, you have a giant pain-in-the-ass problem: how do you "clear" (ah-hah, remember that from above?) a whole library of books?  Many sets use pre-printed spines, which you just lay over boxes. We wanted a living set, though, one you could yank books from, shoot through the shelves.  In that case, we and pretty much every television show on earth use law books, because the law is in the public domain,  Anything government published is fair game. 

Nobody notices except if you deal with law books on a regular basis, in which case it screams at you like a bonfire.  This is one of those things where you shrug and say "eh." Welcome to television.  I have a similar problem with mathematics or physics on whiteboards in TV shows, where it's plainly some random trigonometry scrawled for background. That's why millions of Leverage viewers have unknowingly come to know my handwriting, because any time I could, I'd be the one to fill a board with equations. 

@Anonymous: The randomly arranged volumes of the easily recognizable Supreme Court Reports interspersed with other colored books was very distracting to quite a few of the viewers I conversed with. Maybe this is a sign that the plots are not riveting enough to skimp on the props?

See, this is the same question, as the previous one, but this person is being a dick.  I can say that, because this is my blog, not a TNT blog.  Don't be a condescending dick. No one likes it.  You are not clever.  Go watch another show.

@Stacey: The little leather ties at the back of King Arthur's crown which only appeared when Lamia was wearing it--olde magick or movie magic?!

Nice catch.  Movie magic. It was custom made by someone who specializes in medieval and LOTR-themed weddings (which is awesome), but sized before we had the actors.

@ellabell: 1) In the beginning it appeared that the series was about to take place in New York, and based on your previous comments I know you don't like that / didn't want to do it. At what point was the location decided / how was the plot point of moving the library / home base outside of that area approached? And, was it just a no-brainer to move it to Oregon based on your previous experiences?
2) I loved the in-references to Leverage ("adorable", the Dagger of Aqua'ba), and my friends that were familiar with the previous movies were also very pleased with all the nods to continuity. How did you / the writers approach the balance between creating something new that was accessible to new viewers that also appealed to your previous fans?
3) I would LOVE more elaboration on the "diametrically opposed pairs in order to best showcase your themes" part, but if you want to wait for the (now promised, and we will hold you to that) book, I'll be the first in line! :)
4a) The only bit of mixed reaction that I've come across with respect to the pilot has been the romance / kiss at the end. Can you maybe discuss the reasoning / thought process behind it? I'm especially interested in the contrast with Leverage as the romance was underplayed for so long, yet this showed up in the first (...second?) episode. (I'm approaching the line of your fourth caveat, but I'm just really curious, especially if it has callbacks to the movies.)
4b) Any chance of some non-heteronormative characters? (*insert reference to your own joke about Det. Grayson and having real lesbians on TNT)
5) Can you give us a quick rundown of your writers' room? Scrappy assistant? With such a quick turnaround from the greenlight to the production, how was the hiring process different from normal? How did you balance hiring staff you knew / had worked with before with getting in new blood? Because it wasn't part of the usual staffing season, did it limit accessibility or help it? (imdb shows that the only new name is Rorick -- and I think it's really cool that you hired someone from alt-media / Pemberly. Did her resume cross your desk? Or did you seek her out because you're a fan of alt-media?) Was it the same with picking directors?
6) How much input does the network have? Is this still a little more arm's length like Leverage was? Is it easier to work the execs on this show because you already have a relationship with them? Or has there been enough changeover that you're starting fresh?
7) Are you approaching the structure of this series / the characters like another true five-hander?
8) Are you going to publish your characters sheets for us? :)
Ellabell!  You're back!  And properly numbering questions, to, which I appreciate.

1.) We knew we wanted to take away the Library proper, to give Flynn a clean start. KNowing we were going to shoot back up in Portland, and loving the city, we decided to honor it by shooting Portland for Portland.
2.) We tried to use the Doctor Who reboot -- bonus joy if you know the continuity, but it all stands on its own.  Hopefully.
3.) I will put up a photo sometime later in the season, because there are spoilers on it.
4a,) To be honest, it was two things.  First, there are so many "will they or won't they" shows, it just seems like that's the boring trope.  There are other damn relationships besides potentioal ones.  Why not just kick in the door?  He's attractive, she's attractive, they're lonely and Eve Baird would ABSOLUTEY do that kind of thing just to shake him up a bit.

That said, no one's saying that this will go well. So let's explore that. Let's explore the long distance relationship, and the power struggle that happens when Flynn returns to the team which Eve's been running very well, thanks.  It will not go smoothly.  Words will be exchanged.

4b.) Season finale.

5.) The writers room for the show is very small.  Not only did I need writers I knew because I didn't have time to train people, a lot of writers were already working when March rolled around.

Paul Guyot (@fizzhogg) from Leverage and a bunch of other stuff. Paul was #2 this year, and spent much of the season up in Portland while I hammered at the scripts. Paul is not a genre guy in any way, shape or form, so he was a good check on the room going too inside.  He is a big softy, though.  He digs the emo.
Jeremy Bernstein (@fajitas) from Leverage.  He's also a biochemist and wrote the shit out of Dead Space 2. Jeremy is a hard core sci-fi and fantasy fan.  He's also a research nut, and will hose you down with tru-facts on any story you're breaking.  His shows tend to have some complicated little puzzle inside them.
Kate Rorick (@NobleRorick) was the new writer -- my company had read her for something else, and when the staff was coming together quickly we were lucky she was available.  Besides being a genre fan and writer, she's a classic literature and history buff who some of you may know as the author of a very successful romance series under her pen name Kate Noble.  She also did the novelization of the transmedia hit Lizzie Bennet.  She is inordinately patient with the rest of us.
Geoff Thorne (@GeoffThorne) is a much beloved Leverage writer  and sci-fi novelist who likes to dig in on the high concepts.  Let's go steal a Parker! Let's do the straight-up haunted house Librarians!  He is just nine kinds of enthusiastic, a massive geek, and a great writer.  You can read Prodigal, his retrieval team/magic world comic on my site, Thrillbent, here.
Adam Hann-Byrd (@BigManTate) is our writers assistant. He wrote a really fine script my company was submitted a while ago, and when the slot opened up we decided to give him a shot. A writers assistant, for those who don't know, is the person who has to take 8 hours of people screaming ideas at each other, posting then tearing down index cards, jam it all together and make it make sense.  And get lunch. NEVER FUCK UP THE LUNCH.  I will leave you to ponder his twitter name and do the IMDB search ...

6.) The network was as always amazing. Our execs got and dug the show.  There's a new boss at TNT, of course but he came in after we wrapped. I'm sure, although he may change the programming direction of the network, the current  execs will continue to be our friends.

7.) Yes, in the first season, every character gets a showcase ep or two. There are always some "big heads on the poster', as the marketing people say, but we consider each character to be the lead of their own version of the show.

8.) I WILL GET RIGHT ON THAT.

@Kelly Kluckman: 1) I love that Jones has a strategy for traveling back in time. Does he have a plan for other unlikely situations? Everyone has a zombie plan but how about traveling to the future, an alien invasion, a deep one uprising or an outbreak of super flu? 1.a) Also, could he build a steam engine on his own or was he counting on help from the others?  He's on top of things and that's awesome. I like that he's looking up ways into the palace just because they're heading in that general direction.  2) Did Stone say it was "old" iron or "cold" iron 2.a) How bad would it be if the fae got a hold of the crown? Or could you command magical critters with the crown?

1.) As a matter of fact, yes, and you hear one of them later in the season.
1a.) He actually good. He's quite clever with tech. Although he and Jenkins do not care for each other, they come to grudgingly admire each other's work.
2.) "old iron" but there's no reason not to keep that phrase in mind for later in the season.
2a) They couldn't use it. Merlin put in a failsafe.

@seraS: . 1.) I wanted to ask about the poem on Lamia's arm, The Second Coming. I've never really seen it translated into Latin before. Was that just to showcase Jake's skill set and maybe to add some mystery to Lamia's character, or was there another reason?  2.) Actually, now that I think of it... I do have another question. Is Jenkins going to take over Charlene's job of asking for the LITs' receipts? I mean, someone's gotta keep the books, right? :p And it just wouldn't be the same without someone nagging about this.

1.) We actually had to have it translated. In the extended version, you see that she has multiple symbols of magical apocalypse tattooed on her arm. It's her thing.

2.) Jenkins is a little different than Charlene, in that he really, really would prefer nto to be assuming that job. He has other, annoying and possibly fatal habits.

@Laure Killian: (re prosciutto cutting torch) I hope the Theo Gray video will silence skeptics. If not, tell doubters just to ask their nearest welder about the feasibility of the device, 'cause it'd pretty much work. Since watching the show on iTunes Monday night, my son the welder has held forth... at length... on multiple occasions... about possible optimizations for the prosciutto cutting torch. A high carbon content in the meat is apparently critical to the success of the torch, so prosciutto is probably better than bacon. Unless it's this one particular kind of lean, smoked bacon his favorite lunch place flies in from Montana every week. He says buffalo jerky and smoked coho salmon might also be worth testing. When the weather improves, he & his deranged welder buddies will probably do some trials to be sure. (True fact: Welders are just not normal.) As we live near Portland, you may hear about the tragic aftermath when their experiments go awry.

I ABSOLUTELY DEMAND YouTube footage of your son bacon-welding. DEMAND IT!

@Peaches: If I remember correctly, in one of the original Librarian movies, Flynn accused Judson of being over 2000 years old. Now in the premiere, we see Charlene rushing in with a sword and tattered clothes after presumably going a few rounds with the Serpent Brotherhood. When The Library starts to fold up, Lamia tells Cassandra “the first Librarian has cut the anchor chain”. So was Judson the first Librarian with Charlene as his Guardian? Is he really that old and is Charlene of similar age?

Judson was the First Librarian. We will reveal that Charlene was a Guardian, was at one point Judson's Guardian, but it would be a spoiler to reveal if she was his original Guardian, or how old she is.

@Peaches (again): So if the potential Librarians got their invitations to interview for the position 10 years ago, how old were Cassandra and Ezekiel? Lindy Booth is playing younger, but John Kim seems to actually be that young.

Ezekiel did indeed get his invitation when he was a teenager.  His life path since then ... well, you'll see.

@Boholano si Lyn: My question relates to the character names. How do you come up with them? Do the names come first or the characteristics? Is it just a matter of picking them out of a hat or just finding something that clicks? I know on Leverage "Parker" was a reference. Any floating around The Librarians? Like Cassandra- she was telling people something and no one believed her- reference to the mythical Cassandra?

To tell the truth, this time it was just me, with a fistful of Irish whisky, thinking "What's the pulpiest sounding names, with lots of quirkiness and alliteration, I can come up with?" Lots of K's.  They just ... sound right.

@Art Connery: So, how many times did Christian get hurt, heal the next day and you swear your usual saying? Was Lamia her own Busey?

Kane got hurt only twice, really, and Lami ais Dulaque's Busey.

@John Johnson: (technical bit regarding henges) Yes, correct, there are henges in Germany, nut none in that style in the Black Forest area. We had a historian or two run that down for us.

103 "... and the Horns of a Dilemma" questions

@Chris Zook: In which scene with the Minotaur did Christian break his thumb?'

The run down the alley, ironically, not when he hit the wall six feet up. Cut the corner too tight.

@Jessa: Two questions: 1 Will we actually see Jake's family if there is more than 1 season (not just a mention of then as it was in Leverage)?? 2. Since he isn't an Eliot Spencer character when it comes to women...could/would you have him have a love interest if the series continues? Possibly cassandra??

1.)  You almost met them.  Would've if there'd been 13 episodes.  That said, you will hear the entire story of why he never left home.
2.) He meets someone later in the season he has some chemistry with, and I think he and Lamia have a somewhat unhealthy relationship.  He and Cassandra are still working out their friend stuff.

That said, 'ship to your hearts' content. It's your fandom.

@LynRasa:  This episode felt very, very fast. So did the premier, but that got slowed down a little by Flynn's tendency to spout and well, awkwardness. 
1.) Is this going to be an ongoing thing? It felt like we could only be half/two thirds done, but then I looked at the clock and there was less than a minute left. Is it always going to feel like this? Lead/Rush/Rush/Rush/Win/Character Tag?
2.) On a related note, how is The Librarians working around the commercials? You talked a lot about 5/6 act structure re:Leverage. I didn't get too strong a sense of act breaks here. Letting the chips fall where they may?

1.) This was a straight-up chase episode,  so we kept the momentum very high. As much pressureon the characters as early as possible.  The rest of the eps stay tight, but this one and the finale are probably the snappiest.2.) For now, the chips fall where they may. We do write to the act breaks, but not strongly. We get a better sense later in the season.
@Thomas Ahearn: Can you tell us what's going to happen to the Minotaur? I doubt it's a good thing to have one running loose in Boston. Or is that going to be dealt with in a later episode?
He's now loose to return to the magical worlds (hello!), stopping by only to settle some debts.
@Caliann Lum: Is it true the entire season is already written? If so, what are your writers up to now?
Written and shot.  Everyone's basically waiting to see if we're picked up, but they;re also writing their own projects just in case.
@Nusaiba Chowdhury: I was wondering, is the Jake/Cass/Ezekiel relationship(s) mirror that of Eliot/Hardison/Parker? They were the thing I loved most about Leverage (besides the takedowns) and I'm already starting to love the Librarians in Training. 
As a matter of fact, we have all sorts of notes up in the writers room reminding us NOT to structure the show that way.  You'll see them split up into two-and-two pairs quite often, and those are generally the axes of the relationships. Stone and Ezekiel will never, ever be friends.
@Kelly Kluckman: 1) What was Stone reading in that last scene?  2) Who played the minotaur? He was great. 3) How old is Jenkins? How long has he held his position? Does the Library send out cards for researchers?  4) Why didn't Charlene ever use this "back door" to save on plane tickets? It seemed to work pretty well, all things considered, and no one has to worry about loosing luggage. Hopefully. 5) Are the new recruits apartment hunting in Oregon or are they camping out at the Annex? 
1.) An illuminated manuscript form the Middle Ages.
2.) Tyler Mane!
3.) Shh.
4.) Jenkins invented it the Back Door. His meddling with/hacking the Artifacts was a bone of contention with Judson, and one of the reasons he's at the Annex. He is a bit torn, in that he;d prefer to be alone, but having the Librarians there gives him a reason to tinker and subjects for his experiments.
5.) You almost saw Jake's apartment. They've got local places.
@Stacey: Why Boston?
We wanted an East Coast city, and we knew, for reasons, that Portland doubled Boston well.
@Sarah Roo: So, character background question: in the premiere, we learn that Jake has been researching and publishing in art history under a pseudonym. How does he have the time and resources for that? does his pseudonym have some kind of university affiliation so that he has access to an academic library? And does he, like Eliot, only sleep 90 minutes a day?
The internet has been a boon to Jacob Stone. He also makes little runs to museums and libraris when they're close enough to pipeline jobs.
@LynRasa: Thought of another question, sorry to double post, you'd mentioned in Leverage commentaries that certain writers tended to dig in on certain characters. Has that already developed in The Librarians writers' room? Obviously, as you said, Jake Stone's Turner rant was you, likewise Cassandra's math. What about personalities? Are the writers matching up to characters by complimentary skills? by complimentary personalities? by brand of sarcasm? by something else I haven't thought of?

And how are you actually referring to the characters? I keep finding myself switching between Jake and Stone, between Cassie and Cassandra; there's a certain tendency for the other characters to just call Ezekiel Jones 'thief'. It feels like the military influence has everyone calling Eve 'Baird'. I've found myself avoiding calling them Stone and Jones, using at least one of the first names to avoid the rhyme. How has that settled in for the writers?


1.) Right now it's still a scrum, but I'm definitely noticing Thorne's digging Jones, Kate and Paul really wrote some amazing stuff for Cassandra in the Science Fair ep ... we'll see.
2.) In the room it's Baird, Stone, Cassandra and  Jones.
@malcolm: I noticed that a lot of the fights happened off camera. Is this going to be the style of the entire show, or just this episode?
We actually ran into some issues with Rebecca's fight double schedule early, so she's go tmore later. That said, we're a different show than Leverage, so it's not a focus.
@NomadiCat:  Is Jenkins Nicolas Flamel? What with Jenkins dropping lines about Alchemy and Nicolas Flamel always showing up where you need him in the same episode, and being a grouchy reclusive arcane-focused scientist type in general, I am willing to wager money that he is. The idea truly delights me.
Nope, although they are friends.
@Anonymous: It seems like there's a million "evil factions" misusing Magic out there. Are there "good" factions others than the Librarians? Will we get to meet them?
Yes and yes. I'm not sure if the O2STK (corrected, thanks!) reference made the cut, but know it's canon ...

*************

RIght, I think that's most of them, or at least the non-spoilery ones. Head back to the main page ot post your questions for #104, and we'll see you on Twitter!

THE LIBRARIAN #103 "And the Horns of a Dilemma" Question Post

Hey all. I think now that the show is up and running, I'm going to use the old form, where I wait to see the questions and then do the behind-the-scenes write up depending on what you seem most interested in.

So, post your questions, confusion, joy and snark in the Comments below.  I'll be posting the answers to last week's questions tomorrow.  If you're new here, check the last post for the posting rules.

THE LIBRARIANS 101/102 post-game: "and the Crown of King Arthur" / "and the Sword in the Stone"

Wow, this joint is dusty.  Damn Twitter, with its instant gratification.

For those of you just joining us, this post-game was a Leverage tradition which held up pretty well until air dates and production started overlapping, thereby consuming my spare time.  I am sure there will be a fair number of Grifters standing in the corner, glaring at me.  Don't worry, kids, if I'm in here re-arranging the chairs, I'll get to the old business.

So, here's where we usually do a brief bit about how each episode came together, then in the NEXT post answer any questions you may have. If you'd like to see how that usually goes, just click that "leverage" tag over on the right hand side, and those posts will come up.  A few caveats for the new folks:

1.) I tend to swear.  Be aware.

2.) Argue to your hearts' content, but please be respectful of each other. I've never had to ban anyone, and I expect that same level of restraint with the new show.  This is my house, not yours, and I do not consider asking anyone to leave my house "censorship."  Basically, don't be a fuckwit.

3.) It doesn't have to be a question.  Your comment below does not need to be a question, it can just be a comment or a shout-out about something you want to discuss with other fans.  That would be cool.

4.) Us writers, you fan.  I love your input, your questions, your theories, even your disdain when it's amusing.  But end of day, my scrappy writers and I are the ones who have to fill 50 pages of empty paper every week which are simultaneously amusing and shootable on a brutally tight budget and schedule and makes three levels of executives happy.  Basically, know that I dig that you watch the show, we should be pals, but that particular line is not crossed.  Our choices are our choices and we earned the right to make them, even if you don't like them.

Okay, now to the show.

How did this happen?

You can find plenty of videos on YouTube of me discussing this, thanks to some podcasts and bloggers, but here's the short version.

I'd done a rewrite on the 1st and 3rd LIBRARIAN  movies, but really wasn't that involved, back in the day.  I mean I enjoyed them, but they were very much Dean Devlin, Noah Wyle and Michael Wright (the former head of TNT)'s baby.  They were like THREE MEN AND A BABY, but the baby was an adorable family-oriented action-adventure movie franchise.  For years, they attempted to navigate a weird bit of contract thorniness involved in transforming TV movies into a series.  Finally, last summer, they called me.  "We have the rights!  Now lets make a show!"

The trick, of course, was navigating Noah's schedule.  Falling Skies was still going strong, and there are a considerable number of legal whizzbangs in place preventing actors from being the lead on two shows simultaneously. So we knew we need alternate leads.  "Leads" plural.  We didn't want there to be another "Librarian".  We weren't replacing Noah; hell, he was looking at busting his ass to shoot as many episodes as he could.

Oh, and we couldn't have Bob in every episode, nor Jane.  This was getting interesting. (NOTE the 1st: This is always tough for fans.  Roles are attached to specific actors, and sometimes we just can't have them due to scheduling or contracts.  One of the reasons I like animation ...)

(NOTE the 2nd: You can always get Mark Sheppard. Not because he's easy, but because I seriously believe there's three of him.)

We certainly as hell weren't going to do a cold reboot. Those movies had FANS (as we've seen from the premiere numbers, a surprising number), so the challenge was to honor them as much as possible, make the tie-in as tight as possible, but still have a base upon which to build with new actors.

At some point, rewatching them, we said "Hey, what if we did more than reference them?  What if we actually made this in continuity?"  That solved a big problem for us -- Flynn Carsen after a decade of doing this would be pretty good at it, or dead.  So let's make the fact he's good at it a plot point.  It came at a price. Solitude and sanity, to protect the rest of us.

But if he's around, even intermittently, how do we balance the rest of the team?  He's a polymath, what do the rest of them ... do?

Nicely enough, Lester Dent solved this problem for us in the 1930's.  Lester Dent wrote Doc Savage, among a million other things, and very much built the pulp base upon which the rest of us toil.  Doc was a polymath superman, but his friends were specialists who would solve the only nearly-impossible problems in a story while he wrestled Incan cultists (yay!) or lobotomized prisoners to cure them of their "criminal tendencies" (er, boo. yikes).

So we split Flynn Carsen up into his disparate expertise ... ises. - isi? Anyway, we assigned art and history to one, sciences to another, and tech/tomb robbing to a third.  Three neophytes seemd like three identical beats, so again we went back to the movies.  Hey, who ARE all those people on the stairs in the first movie ... ?

Okay, they were geniuses, and could've been Librarians, but weren't.  What the hell did they do with their lives?  That's when the themes of the show began to emerge.  About loneliness, and choice, and how everybody has gifts, but not everybody choose -- or is allowed to -- use them.   There's a complicated bit of business about characters are lenses, and so you should build them in diametrically opposed pairs in order to best showcase your themes, but that can wait for the very boring and specialized book I'll write some day.

All of this was done on an  insanely tight schedule.  Most shows have three or four months to get up and running.  To beat Noah's deadline for returning to Falling Skies, we had five weeks from greenlight to camera roll, with nothing but the first script written.  We shot out of order, on location, so the production team could buy enough time for the paint to dry on the sets. Writers were hired four weeks out, some of the actors weren't locked until the week of shoot.  This was interesting, as it meant the writers were well into episode four writing dialogue for characters that we had no idea how they talked.

As for the actors you haven't met in the movies:

Rebecca was on a short list of potential leads.  One of the signatures of The Librarian movies is the action heroine partner.  Not kidnapped, nor rescued, nor vixenish -- she can and should always be able to kick Flynn's ass.  Rebecca had just done King & Maxwell with Leverage co-creator Chris Downey, and he couldn't be more effusive with his praise.  RR can land a joke, too; in person she's relentlessly dry and funny.  You'll see us tweak Baird's delivery style closer to her own sense of humor over the course of the season.

Kane, well we knew we wanted to go against type for the art historian.  Even the rough ideas we had were close to Kane as a person, and when he turned out to be available it wasn't a hard choice.   Kane's tragedy -- and I tell him this all the time -- is that he's a bit too good-looking to have to rely on his comic timing. Which is magnificent.  Ironically, although the character background is close to his personal background, the role itself is a chance to show off some of his other chops as an actor.

Lindy is one of those actors that everybody in Hollywood knows is good.  Kind of the "player to be named later". The role of Cassandra was a straight audition -- the character wasn't even "Cassandra" at first, because we auditioned all ethnicities and we wanted to keep the concept loose, until we found the right person.  She just frankly out-muscled the other actors.  The audition pieces were the hospital meltdown and the henge mathematics/meltdown.  Those pages ate a LOT of other actors alive, but she blew through them like a champ, and hit all the emotional beats.  So straight-up audition there.

John Kim was submitted on tape from Australia.  We screened the tape, all agreed "Much like Ezekiel's super-power is that he's charming, this kid is charming." It was also his first series shoot, and the other actors teased him mercilessly.  With love.  Usually.  And yes, that is his real accent.

John Larroquette is John goddam Larroquette. We were very lucky he was available.  He brought so much style and tone and unexpected pathos -- seriously, he constantly surprised us -- that we eventually started writing the role much bigger than we intended.  Jenkins winds up with a nice little season arc.

Some cool behind the scenes production facts, and then I'll open the floor to questions.  SPOILERS AHEAD.

The opening sequence
A rather large number of the soldiers around Baird in the opening sequence are, thanks to some friends of production,  actual SEAL team and Delta Force members, past and present.   They have ... been places. The large fellow to Baird's side at the door is Delta.  This amuses me to no end, as I imagine some terrorist watching the show in a bar in Karachi and saying "Hey, wait a minute..."

Oh, and she's carrying a Glock 17, so Baird does indeed have enough in the magazine for that shootout.  Not only did we count, Rebecca called us on it to make sure.

The missing magic artifact lost in an abandoned Nazi store-room very much establishes the tone of the show -- our show posits that there's a secret (INSANELY COOL) history of magic, and its remnants are scattered all over the place.  Very fine writer Ken Hite (@kennethhite) recently wrote a book called The Nazi Occult which is a fascinating piece of work.  It's meant to be a sourcebook for role-playing gamers and others, so it blends real Nazi occult history and practices with fiction, as if everything that could've happened, did happen.  Basically, everything in the book which seems too insane to be believed is true, and the boring stuff's the bits he filled in.  I can't recommend it highly enough.

The sequence was originally set in a church until we found that location, which was also much closer to other locations we needed.  So the bit was rewritten.  Hey, you want your precious words perfect, go write a novel.

Charlene and Jenkins
Charlene was originally in both parts of the launch, but her other show unfortunately meant we couldn't make he shooting schedule work.  She eventually came in and shot all her scenes in a single day at the END of the season.  I think that she winds up with a very nice hero moment instead.  I do miss the original script beat where she's the one who saves Flynn and you discover she was Judson's Guardian, but we'll figure some other way to bring her back ...

Meeting Ezekiel Jones
is in the theater in Portland which served as the Parliament House in San Lorenzo in Leverage. That is indeed the Dagger of Aqua'ba. (whether I mean it is the same prop or the same object ... as I used to say in the Leverage post-games all the time, you choose whichever makes you happier)

The Prosciutto Cutting Torch
Works, more or less.




Excalibur
Of course we know Excalibur wasn't the sword in the stone in Malory's version of the story. Note how I said "in Malory's version of the story" because it was, in fact, a made up thing.  In the Librarian-verse, it's the Sword in the Stone.  Which is fine, because in that case it is still a made-up thing. As a long-standing nerd, this particular style of pedantry always drives me mad.  It is not one of our better traits.

 'Cal was established in the movies as the Sword in the Stone, he's certainly the closest thing Flynn has to a recurring friend. It was Michael Wright who suggested setting these two in a more classic European treasure hunt, and that led us pretty nicely to Arthurian myth.   I knew I wanted to use ley lines as the gimmick with which to return magic to the world, and "ley line" screams "earth, rock, stone" etc.  You can see where this is all intersecting.  His sacrifice was meant more as closure on the past series than as a sacrifice, but we knew something more was going on here when crew members began to cry as I pitched the scene out for the visual effects guy, without even seeing it.

I do suppose we could have been truer to Malory's version (note I do not say "more accurate" as Malory's version was, again, a made up thing) but given the choice between taking a page of dialogue to explain that Excalibur is not the sword in the stone and instead spending that time making you cry over the the "death" of a meter of metal, I will spend my time more wisely. Did you feel something? Good, right choice.  I don't feel beholden to the a plagiarizing rapist under house arrest. Let him write his own damn show.

The Tower of London Stone Heist
is all one shot, if you go back and watch, including John Kim disappearing act as two extras cross. Razor bit of timing, there.

The Levitating Stone
is just the old wire dog-collar trick, with Noah selling the shit out of it.  How professional is he?  He spent time experimenting with different vibrational frequencies, finding the resonance of the wire so the STRING part would flutter and bounce while the Stone stayed relatively motionless, and therefore in focus for the camera even as they ran down the street. I mean, damn.

Stone's run on John Turner
If you stumble across my writing, you notice I reference Turner quite a bit. He's my favorite artist, so I can write character discussions about him without slowing down to do research.

Right, this always goes better when I'm answering your questions, so have at it.  I'll try to answer as many as possible by Sunday, and put up a question post for "and the Horns of a Dilemma" at the same time.

For 10 episodes or 100, it's great to have you along for the ride.

Try not to die.

ARCANUM: What's with this Hiatus, Then?

This technically doesn't happen until Arc Two ...Basically, I neglected to quit my day job.
When Leverage wrapped, I had two projects to occupy my downtime: the Thrillbent 2.0 launch and the founding of my own production company, Kung Fu Monkey Productions. It takes a good year of development to pull any projects together for TV development, so I figured I had some room to spend exclusively on Thrillbent.
Arcanum is a difficult comic series -- it's meant to duplicate a TV series, which means breaking 13 full interlocking stories per arc, rather than a single serialized story. There's also, for a fantasy series, a ridiculous amount of research. Savvy readers will be able to figure out from the real-world clues already dropped under exactly what location the Arcanum facility is constructed. The full timeline of all the plot links stretches from historical figures of the mid 1800's through World War One to modern times. This is my Big Swing, so to speak. But, as I'd just gone from "A Show Eating My Life" to "Relatively Unemployed", Todd and I jumped in with a certain comfort in the lead time we'd built up.
What I did NOT anticipate was rapidly closing the deal with my friends at TNT for a new pilot or two, my friend Dean Devlin getting the rights to a dream project we'd talked about for years, and the fine folks at Cinemax giving me a call for ... something. Never mind the ruthless efficiency of the young people who work at my company, who scared up about 20 projects I'm NOT writing for development. Essentially, my TV career post-show did not suck at quite the volume I believed it would.
All that to say there was no way we could keep jamming the art through as my Arcanum scripts got farther and farther behind. We needed a gap for me to get the first batch of stories fully completed and give Todd and Troy a chance to do their best work. I'd also like to start doing what the Eighth Seal lads are doing -- offering Arcanum issues on Comixology ahead of their Thrillbent release. 
And so Arcanum takes a rest until September, with the exception of some concept art and research notes we'll post occasionally. In the meantime, the Monday slot will be filled with Todd and Geoff Throne's great indie action book, Prodigal. Supernatural treasure hunters who punch stuff, fight ninjas and dragons, and banter. It was this book which made me ask Todd to come on to Arcanum, and of course you all know Geoff Thorne from Leverage, so I'm sure you'll dig the series as much as I do.
Thanks for your tolerance as we screw around with our little publishing experience, and be sure to check out Thrillbent's other titles.

ARCANUM: The Sausage, as She is Made.

Rather than take all the fun out of the fiction, I thought I'd give you a quick background on how Todd, Troy and I put together Arcanum. Everyone works differently on Thrillbent, but this is the general production template.

I write each episode, defining each slide and generally calling out the panels.  Every now and then I'll just suggest something, not detail it out.  The fight between Cole and the Elven Swordsman in Episode 002 -- or #102 if we're using standard TV episode numbering, which probably makes more sense in this format -- was originally scripted as "Give me as many panels as you think interesting, across as many slides, to show me Cole using stick-fighting to take this asshole apart."  Sometimes I'll call a editing pattern, which Todd then translates into page space. In today's installment, for example, I called for a 50/50 to mimic a cross-cut between Subject Zero and the door to the vault opening. In my head they were side-by-side, but Todd designed it as a top-and-bottom spilt, which worked even better.

Todd then sends me layouts, a sample of which appears as the header for this blog post. I approve, he then does the full art digitally, combining colors and inks and what-have-you, whatever guys like him do to make the pretty pictures. It all seems very difficult, frankly.

When Todd delivers the color pages, I tend to re-script.  Not a massive re-write but sometimes I look at an action or an expression and realize I want to adjust. Sometimes I see that thanks to Todd's art, I don't need certain dialogue.  It's a much more fluid process than print production, a bit more of a conversation.

With the script properly adjusted, each dialogue line being numbered so the letterer knows what goes where, I take Todd's art and export all of that week's installment into a single pdf document. I load that pdf into Goodreader, my iPad doc reader and editor of choice. Using a stylus I lay-out where each dialogue balloon goes, or at least suggest it. Mark taught me how to do this, but I'm a sad dilettante compared to him. He can see the page layout instantly, has an almost musical sense of how comic page storytelling should work. I kind of galumph along.
 

This often leads to further tweaks to the script. With all that done, I upload the script, lettering-guide pdf and the original color art to our FTP server. Troy Peteri, our in-house letterer and general file genius, letters the comic, does the final image prep, and dumps it back onto the server.

On the appointed day Lori Matsumoto, our general site coordinator, makes sure the comic goes live, sends out the appropriate texts, emails and tweets, and off we go.

We're a little more complicated than most similar sites as we're coordinating a giant chunk of continuous, new material. But I find it boggling and impressive that most webcomics are a one-person show, a single person tackling all that, often three times a week. There's a reason we use them as our distribution/production model rather than print. That sort of hustle is what you need to move the model forward. Time will tell if we've learned the right lessons. Go ahead and read today's installment here.

ARCANUM: Immortality is So, So Creepy

Even pseudo-immortality, the thousand-year lifespan, has a nasty ring to it.

Not just because of what it might mean for the individual who's rocking the forever-life, either -- and there have been plenty of discussions of that idea, both in the vampire myth and in science fiction. One of my favorite authors to tackle this idea is Richard K. Morgan in his Altered Carbon series. In this universe people are implanted with tiny upload hardware, almost impossible to destroy, allowing your persona to be transferred from body to body. Not quite the traditional view of immortality, but the tone -- the weary, noir sensibility of an endless dream-like loop -- is spot on.  People who've lived too long in the AC universe are fundamentally wrong in an alien way. They have seen and done too much. They've gone past nihilism. There's an ... absence where the fundamental connection to other humans should be.

No, what's even creepier to me is what a society of such people would be. Look around us now. Boomers are freaking out over millenial values, just as their Greatest Generation parents freaked out over theirs. I have people working for me who've never even seen a dial telephone.  Change hurtles ever onward, and the only thing more corrosive than the fact that the future isn't evenly distributed is the fact that there are plenty of humans who don't want this future at all.  It's all too much change, it may be literally too much change to process for human hardwiring. Many older humans are living future shock, right now. It was ever thus.

But the difference now is that those people are alive.

In 1900 the percentage of the American population over the age of 45 was 17.8%. In 1950 it was 28.4%. As of the last census the share of the US population over 45 is 36.4%. Hell, the 65+ share's gone from 4.1% in 1900 to 13.3% in 2010. More and more people still in the society, with greater and greater influence, still constructing societal and legal norms based on emotional, psychological, cultural and technological frames of reference that are less and less relevant.

We'd all like to think we'd reinvent ourselves, re-assimilate, learn and grow along a constantly regenerative learning curve. But most of us wouldn't. We're just not cognitively wired for it. We crave stasis, because our lizard brains crave safety and security.

Now, am I bashing older people in general, painting them all as regressive? No, of course not. But the law of averages is the law of averages, and people are people, and the vast majority of we humans formed our core values in our adolescences, locked our social and political opinions in our early 20's. Grudges dig deep. To call out a specific example: no matter who you voted for, wasn't it a little goddam tiring in the 2000 election to still be refighting the 32-year old Vietnam War records of the two candidates for the US presidency?

Now imagine it was the Civil War.

Imagine it now.  A functional lifespan of, say 200 years.  Working with people who owned slaves.  Trying to negotiate international trade treaties to deal with global warming by reconciling voters who watched their brother's head get spun into a fine red mist by a Boston infantryman or a Georgian cavalryman. Getting funding for stem cell research from voters who grew up believing not only were black people a genetically inferior race, but other versions of white people were, too.  200 years is what Bruce Sterling posits in Holy Fire , a gerontocracy, and it's a goddam mess.

Now make it 500 years.

Nothing ever forgotten. Nothing ever truly passing.

The death of history and the birth of the Long, Eternal Now.

So when you posit a race of beings who stare at us pitilessly, as so much mortal cannon-fodder in the midst of their centuries-long feuds, I do not fantasize about meeting them. I want them to sod off post-haste to the Grey Havens, good and gone.  The prospect of them returning, and dealing with them as an enemy with reality-bending powers and millenia of strategic experience, does not fill me with elfin glee. That's horror, to me.

A new installment of ARCANUM, as usual, can be read here.  And you can browse our other comics, from continuing series to quirky short subjects, here.

ARCANUM: Clarke's Law, Harry Potter and ARCANUM

Or at least Clarke's 3rd Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I have a physics degree from McGill University in Montreal, where several well-meaning humans -- with the exception of a Thermodynamics professor who intentionally posted incorrect office hours -- attempted to instill in me an appreciation for the order of the universe. The problem is, of course, then if you learn to speak the mathematical language of physics, the "order" gets pretty damn weird. Or, as my Quantum Physics professor said on the day we ground out the math for quantum tunneling: "This is the bit where people's brains begin to crackle."

It's hard to understand, as we wander around with cell phones in our pockets, the disruptive effect quantum mechanics -- the physics of the unknowable, or at the very least the physics of the best-guessable -- had on the scientific world in the beginning of the 20th century. Einstein's famous "God does not play dice with the universe!" quote comes out of this era. To put it bluntly, the smartest people on earth were, on a daily basis, losing their shit.

ARCANUM is born out of two impulses. First, blending body horror with fantasy, much as Charles Stross found the inherent harmonies between Chtulhoid Horror and Cold War sensibilities in the Laundry Series. We'll discuss that later. But it also comes out of my love of science fiction, specifically my amusement at how the most important, disruptive moment in most alien invasion movies is tossed over the movie's shoulder. The aliens have come from beyond the stars, they have come for our ...

 ... wait, what? No, they don't want our seawater, they don't want our brains, whatever you -- THEY CAME FROM BEYOND THE STARS?! Assuming that's not a generation ship or some self-replicating/self-perpetuating nanobot swarm, those aliens just BROKE PHYSICS.

Except, of course, in the (mainstream) alien invasion story, they didn't break physics. In every (mainstream) alien invasion story they're here. We can shoot them, and talk to them, and be dissected by them, they're wandering around in our physical universe and so are beholden to the same physics, Newtonian or Quantum, that we are. So that fictional universe has rules, the aliens just ... apparently ... know some better ones than we do?

But faster-then-light travel mucks with such fundamental boundaries of our physical universe that if they can circumvent that, they can damn well circumvent any of the boring rules which would allow us to interact, or perhaps even perceive them. There's an inherent paradox -- if the aliens are interstellar, they are certainly not walking our streets in hacked-together HALO armor gunning down humans. Unless that's, like, a thing they get off on. Which would be double-plus unbad now that I think about it.

For chrissake, in the 21st Century one country is untouchably pounding the hell out of terrorists and unfortunately placed Afghani weddings with remote-piloted drones operated by kids from half a planet away. And we don't even leave our local gravity well except for special occasions.

Those aliens would not be fight-able. They would be unknowable. They would incomprehensible. They would be soul-shatteringly terrifying. They would be terrifying sky gods who rain down destruction on a helpless human populace as if by ... magic. 

So why not jump straight to magic?

This is tied to one of my pet peeves in the Harry Potter universe (stay with me). I am always a little disappointed that Hermione Granger (the hero of the series) at no point says "You know, I rather like science. Has anyone noticed that none of what we do obeys the laws of physics, and yet we co-exist with the world of Muggles where the laws of physics hold sway? I mean, shouldn't we talk to some clever Cambridge blokes about the fact that we gesture and point with a stick and manufacture objects out of thin air --"

 -- THEY MANUFACTURE OBJECTS OUT OF THIN AIR?! Assuming that's not a self-replicating/self-perpetuating nanobot swarm, those tweens just BROKE PHYSICS.

You see what I did there. (After all, the Harry Potter Universe is Secretly Terrifying).



The structure of Arcanum is derived from my instinctive love of that paradox. There are multiple alien invasion styles to choose from, of course. To emphasize the horror aspects, I'm patterning our magic invasion on the slow-burn secret invasions of UFO or The Invaders or the criminally short-lived Threshold. If anything even vaguely resembling alien tech were discovered, you'd see the US government immediately put two programs in play: 1.) a Manhattan project to unravel the broken physics of said tech and 2.) a secret military/intelligence agency to keep tabs on it. Just substitute "magic" into those sentences and you have Arcanum.

Next time: immortality is so, so creepy.

In the meantime: Catch this week's Arcanum here.

Start from the beginning here.

Read Mark Waid's Insufferable, his awesome super-hero meta-story -- what if you were a dark detective of the night, and your teen sidekick grew up to be a douchebag? -- starting at the beginning here. The latest arc, Volume Two, starts here.

Read our gritty, true-life crime thriller The Damnation of Charlie Wormwood here.

And sample all our comics, from our continuing series to one-shot experiments to shorter (8-10 week) series, from the THRILLBENT HOME PAGE.

ARCANUM, Thrillbent & Digital Comics

So my new comic, Arcanum is up at the new, relaunched Thrillbent 2.0 site. Let's tackle things in order, General to specific.

DIGITAL COMICS

For about three years, Mark Waid and I would go to lunch and have the same conversation. Or rather, the same two conversations simultaneously:

1.) John: You need to BRAND YOURSELF. You are value-added, you need to be doing more creator-owned stuff!

2.) Mark: Digital comics are THE FUTURE-BALLS!

He may have phrased that slightly more elegantly. But Waid's had close to 30 years in the comics business, and he'll tell you himself the growing cost of shipping paper around was affecting not just bottom lines but creative decisions at the big publishers (This was before the fine folks at Comixology even existed). Waid wanted to experiment  with digital delivery at some of his other gigs, but the will -- and financing -- wasn't there.

At the same time, he'd become fascinated with the new story-telling techniques being shown off by guys like Yves Bigerel. Waid was really churning a lot of interesting ideas about the economics and the storytelling form.

At the same-same time, I was on my 4GM hobbyhorse -- although by that point we may have crossed into open-source warfare theory. Comics, even the slightly fancier ones Waid was plying with, were dumb files. We all had computers and tablets in our homes. The Coasean Floor was in theory next to nothing. What the hell? Where were all the creator-owned comics being delivered straight to a willing and eager audience?

The answer, of course, is that they were just called "Webcomics" and were already wildly successful. Well, some were. Others weren't.  Same's true in any business. But they were out there, and they weren't paying the distribution cost for 7000 pamphlets to be sent out to 2000 physical stores in order to tell their stories and reach fans.  They were paying very reasonable hosting fees and reaching THE PLANET EARTH.

So we started scrawling on napkins. Little words to live by, like: "Everyone already has a wide-screen" and "Motion comics are the devil" and "The Reader controls the flow of information" and "Information must be dumb." We talked to the webcomics people, trying to figure out what we could use from the single-page comic model in long-form storytelling. Mark made some speeches that pissed everyone off. We put a little money aside, we called some friends. That led us to ...

THRILLBENT COMICS

Mark created a new comic in the wide-screen format we'd come to believe would serve as a shorthand industry standard, and structured it in a pulp update fashion. One page at a time seemed like too little narrative, particularly for a weekly update structure. I'd like to give full credit to Warren Ellis's webcomic FreakAngels here -- we glommed his 6-page format as our base, and tweaked it to be 8-10 "slides" in our format. As usual, Warren's about five years of everybody else. Luckily his drinking inhibits his world-conquering instincts. Various versions of the comic reader we use have existed, this one is just tuned to my obsessive notes about skeumorphics and the physical artifact of the page turn ("No mouse, arrows=page turn" reads on of my blurry little scrawls).

That's a big thing to understand. We're not saying we're "creating" anything here. The webcomics people built the model, Warren created an early model of the narrative structure -- no, we're synthesizers and advocates. We're the guys who are tugging on the sleeves of our friends in long-form storytelling and saying "You could do it this way."

The question, of course, is how you make any goddam money doing it.

We don't know.

That is the sound of my business manager's head exploding.

That's not to say there's no way to make money at it. The trick is, now we have to go figure it out. Comics are learning that, just like music learned and TV is beginning to learn, there's no future in taking the check and just doing your job within the existing structure.  

That's not to say there's no work out there in the established marketplace. I just had lunch with an agent who said "Look, there's a good living in being the Executive Producer who babysits cash-rich network shows." Not everyone's cut out to be a marketing human. But there's something new here, something cool and challenging, that may cost you in time or money but the trade is freedom. It's going to come form the edges, of course -- established people like Waid in comics, or Rob Thomas and Veronica Mars Kickstarter in TV -- but those humans will be good test cases and have the social capital to burn.

Comics in particular is a weird case. The mainstream comic companies have so few people writing so many titles, it may in fact be easier to become a writer on a television show than to become a writer of comic books, by which I mean to say still very goddam hard. But for a medium with far fewer capital requirements, that flies in the face of sense.

So, how to make a living doing this type of digital comics? We're going to try ... everything. Our collections will be on sale on Comixology, of course and we'll have a storefront up soon. All our for-pay installments will have a little extra, some DVD bonuses, as it were. We've got a Thrillbent app in development that will do some very cool stuff, allowing you to read the comic, look at the inks or read the script over layout, all when you buy one issue of the comic collections. 

Most of our titles, when they hit enough readers and chapters to make sense, will Kickstart to physical collections. I've participated in a few successful Kickstarter campaigns now, and I'm impressed at how a particularly well run on can both invest the current fans of a property and create new ones. 

We may also experiment with time-shifting: the weekly installments are always free, but a collection of the next month's or so will be for sale, giving you both the spiffy collected portable version and a jump ahead on your favorite stories.

This may evolve as the site ages and we scribble numbers on index cards with Sharpies and frown -- you know, business things. We may go to a subscrpition model for some content, we may find ways to do ads within the comics reader ... we don't know. We'll be looking at a lot of different solutions, and anyone who has a bright idea, or even some success with their own model, should definitely drop us a line. I'd say "swing by the forums", but we're still arguing about whether we should have forums.

At the same time we're still putting up the pdfs and cbz of each installment for free. Grab the first week of Arcanum on pdf (link down there on the bottom right fo the page), toss it in your favorite reader on "full screen" and "slideshow" setting in the View menu and rock out. We like the "Get it free, but the more convenient form is for a little money, plus it helps us out" model.

We're even making a pretty radical jump with this version of Thrillbent: embeddable comics. Embedding/sharing is what made videos and music go viral, and as I said our comics are dumb files. Share 'em. Put them on your site. Make our content part of your content. As I said at WonderCon, nothing's more important than treating your audience like partners instead of suspects.

ARCANUM

Mark's carried the bulk of the content weight, time for me to share.

Arcanum is a partnership with Genre19 artist Todd Harris. Those who watched Leverage know I'm fascinated with systems. How they break, how they react, how they both define and are defined by the people within them. I wanted to combine one storytelling world system -- counter-terrorism/intelligence -- with one that it was not equipped to handle.

Also, my mind was fried by the UFO-conspiracy show U.F.O. when I was a kid. I LOVED the idea that instead of a giant alien armada invasion, there was a pitched, secret battle going on between one government agency and the mobile, untrackable forces of an enemy who struck in small, subtle ways in order to disrupt our lives, all while refusing to play by the "rules" of modern combat. Anyone who's gone through a TSA line lately will tell you this story has some modern-day relevance.

But what if the enemy literally didn't play by the rules? What if they were so totally alien as to be beyond alien? As a lifelong fantasy fan, I was always struck by just how comfortable we've become with the Tolkien tropes of fantasy. There's even a thriving sub-genre of urban magic where elves and dwarves and other fey live right along in the human world, some secret some not, but integrated.

Call me crazy, but if confronted with a big-brained biped who solved interstellar travel but otherwise obeys all the laws of reason and phsyics or immortal creatures who can bend the laws of time and space at will, I find the damn magic users more terrifying. 

To borrow from Charles Stross's excellent blend of Cold War tropes and Cthulhu (read the essay in The Atrocity Archives ), I think the alien invasion story spot-welded to the most traditional fantasy tropes I could find will create some fresh horror. Because Arcanum is a sci-fi horror story. It's going to get very dark. Consider yourself warned. This is a covert war against a hyper-intelligent enemy which shares neither our biology nor our morals.  With all that entails.

Here's the first installment of Arcanum. Click on the image to advance it. You can also check it out, along with other cool stuff, over at Thrillbent.