JULY 16, 2006
THE INSIDE MAN, PART I

My name is Karl Schaefer, executive producer for the Dead Zone and writer of "Inside Man." Hope you enjoyed the episode and thanks for checking out my blog entry.

When I first came to THE DEAD ZONE during Season Two, we had talked about doing a heist episode of some kind. We nicknamed it "Reservoir Johnny" when we were working on the story, the idea being that Johnny touches somebody and sees in a vision that the guy is on his way to be a part of a "Reservoir Dogs"-like heist. In the original version of the story, the man Johnny touches triggers a vision of an elaborate heist in the near future. But before Johnny can act, the man gets killed accidentally.

What Johnny sees in the vision when he touches the guy after he's dead is that, if this guy doesn't show up for the heist, something is going to go wrong and a bunch of people are going to die. Just then, a cars pulls up and the door opens and they mistake Johnny for the now-dead heist member. It was an anonymous heist, like in "Reservoir Dogs," where they'd never met before the day of the heist. So, Johnny has no choice but to go along and see if he can thwart it and, in the original version, every time he gets a vision during the course of the heist, he sees that, if they don't get away with it, people are going to get hurt. Johnny has to help them escape. Part of the idea, initially, was to see Johnny have to do a bad thing in order to do the right thing.

And then it became, "All right... what do we steal?" So, I started just googling thefts, looking at art heists and things like that... and I found that all the major art heists lately aren't complicated at all. Guys just run in and pull a picture off a wall, run out the door of the museum and jump in a car! And they haven't been able to stop them from doing that. But then I saw that there was a big trade in stolen relics, particularly religious relics. At the same time, we decided to try to make it a bottle show, to contain it and shoot it on a set that we could build. The ideas came together: what if it was a religious icon of some significance? That, if Johnny touched it he might see Christ? If it was the finger bone of John the Baptist? Because, if it was a legitimate finger bone of John the Baptist, it might have touched Christ at some point. I also found out that there are thirteen or fourteen finger bones that supposedly are from John the Baptist so, unless he had thirteen fingers, some of them were fakes. Which added a whole other aspect to the mystery for Johnny.

From there, it was a short jump to the idea that the relic was on display in a traveling sort of museum show of religious relics that had come to Faith Heritage. That gave us the whole angle with Reverend Purdy having secretly purchased the relic because he wanted Johnny to touch it. That would give Reverend Purdy his faith back, if Johnny could tell him he'd actually seen Christ in a vision. But, of course, in the end, Johnny realizes that Purdy has done this kind of nefarious thing and won't touch the relic... or, if he did touch it, he doesn't tell Purdy what it is he saw when he touched it.

So, we added that Purdy angle to it, and then it became, "Well, who would steal the relic?" Is there a way we could have (in order to have a lot of twists and turns and reversals in the story) a good guy who was the ringleader of the heist? Could he have a good motive for stealing the relic? And that lead to the idea: what if the relic had been stolen in World War II from a small community that was sort of built around a church that was the center of this relic? So, that gave us the lead bad guy.

We had all these crossed motives that, at that point, made for an interesting story. Even when Johnny could get visions of what was going to happen, he didn't know the others' motives, since Johnny can only see what they do, not why they do it. A good story for us is one where there's a lot of open interpretation to what Johnny is seeing in the visions. With Purdy having all these ulterior motives and all the robbers having different motives and Johnny getting these visions off of everybody and trying to determine who was up to what – we knew we had a good story.

(continue reading the "Inside Man" Production Blog)