Sorry this is quite late, I have been working straight for 2 weeks now almost, so my life got thrown into turmoil and I lost track of a LOT of stuff 🙂 Cool thing is, I’ll be on an episode of Three Rivers and Lie to Me sometime in December (the 14th for Lie to Me, waiting on firm confirmation of that.) Really nice to have a job, and two back to back is a total record for me! 🙂 I’ll do a blog entry dedicated to these jobs and my experiences when they air, so look out for it!
Now: Episodes 9 and 10 of The Guild!
What can I say about these episodes? I love them! They’re really the best ones of the season, everything has built up in a way that leads to the very bottom and the very height of the Guild this season. I know people were getting impatient about the Knights of Good fighting back, so when Codex and Zaboo track down Valkerie and p’own him, it’s pretty damned satisfying. Hopefully for you too 🙂
For Episode 9 we have the highlight for me: the last, great scene in the office, OUTSIDE WORLD! Actually, last season Sandeep (Zaboo) pitched me the idea of Vork and Zaboo torturing someone by deleting his or her armor one piece at a time. It’s a pretty traumatic event for a gamer, those pieces are HARD EARNED! I didn’t find a place for it season 2, but for season 3, with revenge a theme, it was perfect. When I first did a draft of the script, I actually had Codex in on it, going crazy and deleting the character’s armor. But I backed away from that because I didn’t want her to violate her character so much, and with Riley’s treatment of Zaboo, it fell into place that his vengeance would get out of control as a repressed reaction to her treatment. @mikerose is one of the FUNNIEST people I know, and this scene is just fantastic because of him. A few of his adlibs like “You Tiny Monster…” and “Your breathe is hot…” still make me roll on the floor.
Oh, and I can’t skip over Vork’s triple take when I call him a “poo face” earlier in the ep. It’s the best reaction he’s ever given. He’s normally pretty stone-faced, but director Sean Becker gave him a note to just “go for it” and voila, comedy gold. I really want an animated GIF of him doing that, haha.
EP 10! My favorite ep! I can’t tell you how incredibly I love this episode. Jeff Lewis is at his height of hilarity here, the scene where he’s proud people hate him was so hard to get through because of his WEIRD hand gestures! I was biting my cheeks the whole time! In fact, the speech where he says “Evil must not stop us…” was cut from the script, but I loved my line after that “this is a techno song, right?” SOOO much I threw all that dialogue back at him right before we shot. Credit to him for learning and delivering.
An interesting comment was made on Twitter, about everything being made “ok” because a man came back and took over. I certainly didn’t mean that at ALL. The fact is, Codex is not a good leader. She will never be a good leader, especially in the time frame of 6 days in this season. That is how people ACTUALLY are. She’s BETTER than she was at the beginning, but to think that she realistically could take on the mantle of Guild Leader (and REPLACE Vork which I didn’t want her to do) against the Anarchists was such a stretch for me, and a direction I didn’t want to go in with the script. So, Vork comes back, after his big journey, and puts the Guild back together. Codex will get her moment, don’t worry.
Every scene in ep 10 is so good I find it hard to not talk about each one. Sir Loop a Lot was a last minute rewrite, I originally had it as a typical FPS game, but I was so bored with that idea, so I was like, “Let’s go the opposite way”. Sean, Kim Evey and I did all the Loop-A-Lot Voices, we had WAY too good a time doing it too, haha. And Vork’s dog monologue is my favorite thing I’ve ever written, it cracks me up so much. Clara being hit on by the kid’s, the thumping of the toys on her chest is such a funny touch, and we had SUCH a fun time improving in the scene at the door, you’ll see with the outtakes.
Lastly, I just want to give major kudos to director/editor Sean Becker for making the last sequence SO DAMNED COOL. I wrote in the script “slo-mo Reservoir Dog’s-Style montage” but had no visual concept of what that mean. With our tiny budget, stealing shots, he made a badass sequence of geekdom. We look cool, then not cool, then cool again. Our composor Eanon Patterson as always does an AMAZING job creating a song for us to fit the mood.
2 more episodes this season! Woot!