AUGUST 20, 2006
INTO THE HEART OF DARKNESS

"Into the Heart of Darkness" was another episode I thought there was a bit of a spoiler in the promos; it kind of gave away some of the fun of the episode if you didn't know what was going on (as we'd intended). Ultimately, I think the episode still works for people, even if they knew going into it that Sarah had been abducted and by whom.

That said, I think this episode turned out to be a really classic, spooky, horror-thriller that also really had what I love (and I think is the really the heart and core of the series): that love triangle, that Johnny-Sarah-Walt connection that really broke everybody's heart in the pilot.

In this episode, you can see how Sarah can be in love with these two guys, but you know Johnny is her past and Walt her future. I think everyone can relate to having to choose and The Dead Zone really is about those choices we make in our life and the emotional consequences that we have to live with based on those choices.

Deedee Pfeiffer was just a sweet and wonderful actress who played a real nutcase in this show and I thought she did a fantastic job doing it. Most people do not realize that she was pregnant when she came back to reprise her character – or, rather, to play this twist on her character – from "The Collector." We had to shoot her from the waist up and use body doubles in some places, but the whole episode almost didn't happen because she was almost too far along to fly to Vancouver to shoot the episode! So, we're just grateful that her doctor felt it was safe and allowed her to do it.

Deedee is a really, really tough, strong lady who really stuck it out for some long nights on set. Since it was pretty late in her pregnancy, we took a lot of care, tried to make sure she was comfortable, always had a chair to sit in, and, if she didn't have to be in the shot, we made sure to shoot around her.

James Head did a great job directing "Heart of Darkness". Though Michael Robison directed "The Collector" prequel from Season Four, James ended up doing some pickup shots that had to match what Michael had done in that first episode. James had to recreate that original factory set and do the Second Unit visual effects enhancements of the scene where Johnny goes back in time and is there watching himself, Walt, the Collector and Linda in order to try to piece together the puzzle through his visions of what really happened that night in the past.

Did the Collector and Linda survive? I really love it when we get to use Johnny's visions – or Vision Johnny, as I like to call him – in an action-oriented way: where we can see him walking through space and time; whether it's was one of those frozen moments where he can walk around and check things out, or whether it's a real-time situation where he's actually running through fireballs. That's the first time we've really seen him do that! We've seen Johnny have bullets fly through him (in "the Hunt for Osama" episode) and we've seen people walk through him, but this is the first time he freezes a vision, then unfreezes it and follows it all the way outside, through this big warehouse exploding around him. It was a challenge to shoot, but I thought James Head did such a great job – as did Production Design and the Special Effects and Visual Effects teams – in terms of all the explosions and frozen array shots.

It was definitely a big team effort on this one to recreate the sets from a past episode that had been thrown away and to try to cobble together all the different pieces on a TV budget so we could pull it off again. It was already a big episode with a lot of expense and a lot of location work, so we ended up only building bits and pieces of the big factory set for the scenes that we needed. This added a lot of extra discussion to the Visual Effects, the Set Construction and the Art Department meetings to try to figure out the exact shots we were going to do before we got there on the day. We knew the set was never going to look exactly the way it looked like in "The Collector," but everyone made a great effort ... though we did ask Production to keep a couple pieces of the set intact until we got into Post. I think we all thought that we might need a pickup or two, not knowing exactly if it'd all come together. We have to have a sort of run-and-gun style shooting on The Dead Zone, in order to attack these really ambitious shows.

With all that said, I thought Chris Bruno, in particular was outstanding in this episode. We really got to see a side of his acting that we hadn't seen before. We got to see Walt almost throw away his life in the final scene with the gun to Linda's head, thinking Sarah's dead. Ultimately, you really see the trust and the friendship between Johnny and Walt, not only how great their bond is, but to watch Michael Hall and Chris Bruno be in those kind of intense scenes. I just never get sick of it. The level and quality of their acting just keeps rising every season.

Same with Nicole deBoer. In this episode, we got to see a lot of what Sarah was going through, as well, when she was trapped down in the coal mine and dealing with Linda and the shotgun. It was just a really violent, raw series of scenes that writers Shin and Jim came up with, where they really put a family – all of our characters – in a dire situation and pushed them to the extreme. And, when people are pushed to that extreme, they do things and say things that they would never do. I thought, structurally, the guys did a great job maximizing all of the drama between our three main characters and crafted a really great, scary thriller that had such deep emotions as well as action. It really felt to me like a fleshed out little movie. I thought Tommy did a great job, as well, with some of the rewrites and polishes on the show. So, all in all, I would say that it was a strong episode.

Originally, "Heart of Darkness" was going to be the season premiere. Then, at one point, we even talked about really going dark with it by having Sarah lose her baby at the end! We thought of introducing storylines that showed us how the loss would pull at and hurt Walt and Sarah's marriage, and how it might eventually bring them closer together. But to have Sarah go through such a traumatic events, we felt like the character would have to be dealing with the aftermath of them throughout the entire season. And, after a lot of discussion with the network and everyone, we decided not to do it as a season opener and have Sarah not lose the baby.

Then, we began to consider making this episode the season finale; this was going to be the cliffhanger of the season and we were never going to know what happened to Sarah! But then we realized that we were really gunning for another season of episodes – for Seasons Six and Seven – which is what we were always trying to build up to. We ended up making "Heart of Darkness" the tenth episode when we decided to make the season finale a mythology episode that really drives the series forward in a bigger, more ambitious direction.

If you look at the last two episodes of the season, I think you'll agree that they are really two of our strongest of the year, both in terms of how much we advance the mythology, as well as the personal triangle between Johnny, Walt and Sarah. I'm really proud of this episode, "Into the Heart of Darkness," as well as what I think is one of our best episodes ever of The Dead Zone: "The Hunting Party," our season finale.

Enjoy!

Until next week,

Shawn Piller
Executive Producer

Past Entries:

• (8/13) Revelations
• (8/6) Vortex
• (7/30) Symmetry
• (7/23) Lotto Fever
• (7/16) The Inside Man
• (7/9) Articles of Faith
• (7/2) Panic
• (6/25) Independence Day
• (6/18) Forbidden Fruit