JULY 9, 2006
ARTICLES OF FAITH
Hello, everyone! Shawn here, again.
"Articles of Faith" was a really strong episode for us this summer, written by one of our veterans Michael Taylor, who originally wrote Season One's "Dinner with Dana".
Michael had basically been -- as we all had been -- really trying to find an episode for Kristen Dalton to come back and this felt like a perfect way in, being that she's a reporter and probably got her start at the Faith Heritage newspaper.
The episode deals with a lot of issues: tolerance and spirituality and religion and discrimination in terms of racism and sexual preference, as well as in terms of people's religious views. It's one of those great episodes with great twists where I don't think anyone would have seen the ending coming as to who the killer really was. It seemed, all the way through, that we made it so clear who it was. We realize that when people promote hate and intolerance there are a lot of different victims that come out of it.
We debated airing this episode earlier in the season -- it was originally scheduled to air second -- but we ended up moving "Independence Day" to that slot because it was a strong Johnny-Bruce episode. Then we decided we hadn't seen a lot of Walt yet, so we decided we wanted to put "Panic" next in the episode 3 slot and "Articles of Faith," we decided, would be moved to episode 4.
We had a lot more flexibility than we usually do in the air order, because we wrapped Seasons 4 and 5 together last fall and all the Season 5 episodes were completely done before we began airing this summer.
Perhaps because of this, some of the fans have noted in their blogs that Johnny doesn't seem to be feeling bad about Rebecca's departure or Miranda's death. But you can see clearly in this episode that, when Dana returns and although there's obviously some unfinished business there, Johnny, emotionally, just isn't prepared to sort of deal with that. He's kind of shut down -- based on Rebecca, based on Miranda -- and, at the end of the episode, you really see that he's a pretty hurt guy who's just really not ready to open up to anybody. We thought about airing this episode a little sooner in the season, but that just didn't happen.
Until next week,
Shawn Piller
Executive Producer
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