JULY 16, 2006
THE INSIDE MAN, PART II
by Karl Schaefer
And then, if it wasn't busy enough, we thought we'd throw JJ in there, just to be running around in the middle of it to cause even more complications. So, even if Johnny did get it figured out, JJ was there to suck him back into trouble. With all those elements going into the story, then it was just a matter of moving puzzle pieces around, and trying to keep Johnny guessing and the audience guessing as to what's going to happen in the course of the episode.
As to planning the heist itself, first I tried to start with: what was the big set piece? What was going to be the main thrust of the caper? The big visual moment that you would see? The technical part of the heist? And could we do something different with how they break in? Because you've seen a million heist movies, it's kind of hard to do something original that we could also do on a television schedule and budget. I came up with the idea of the bulletproof glass case around the relic that they would freeze with liquid nitrogen and then suddenly heat and shatter it. It was glass that you couldn't drill through or blast through any other way, but you could freeze it and heat it and shatter it.
So, we had that element of it and the fun of: how do you get the guys into the heist a different way? So, we had the small explosion and the smoke bombs and the setting off of the alarm to clear the building. Then the Fire Department arrives... and the firemen turn out to be the actual thieves who go into the building, disguised as firemen, while the real firemen never get the 9-1-1 call.
You just find different pieces that you like and then you kind of set it up like a real heist and plan it out. You start out with: how am I going to protect this item? Then, now I'm going to be the bad guy, how am I going to break into it? You keep adding things on both sides. If it's too easy to break into, then you go back and come up with some other defenses that are a little harder. The main thing was coming up with the motivations of all the different characters that gave you the twists and turns in the plot and the reveals as to who people were and what their motives were. One of the things about THE DEAD ZONE is Johnny does know so much about what is going to happen, it's the gaps in his knowledge that a lot of the drama comes from. The director, Michael Robison, did a great job with this episode.
The fun was coming up with the design of the museum. I think Lance King and all the Art Department in Vancouver did a fantastic job coming up with these different displays and relics. The whole scope of the museum and everything turned out much better than I had originally envisioned when we were just trying to do a bottle show where we shoot the entire show on a set in order to save some money because we've gone over budget in other episodes. Sometimes those episodes turn out to be the best ones, because you have a very narrow set of parameters to work within and it forces you to kind of write like old television drama – like THE TWILIGHT ZONE and things like that – where they had very limited resources and it was all about the story. That's what we were trying to pare it down to for this episode.
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