JULY 30, 2006
SYMMETRY
by Chris Lynch & Loren Segan
Hello, Dead Zone fans!
Chris Lynch and Loren Segan here with our very first blog. We thought we'd take turns telling you how the story and script for "Symmetry" came about.
Loren Segan: I remember it this way ... we fell in love with the concept of Johnny having a vision at the time that he's touching more than one person. We asked ourselves, "How would that manifest?"
Chris Lynch: That was the idea that we started with -- Johnny touching several people at one time -- and then we just went from there and came up with the idea of telling the story backwards. That idea gets you to multiple visions and, if you didn't know where those multiple visions were coming from, then you get to the idea of the episode.
LS: We had that great old logline: they say that before you die, your whole life passes before your eyes -- but, if you're Johnny Smith and you're touching more than one person, whose life do you see? That was the genesis.
CL: It started with: if he was touching someone else, would he see their life as well? And then we thought, "Ooh! What if he was touching more than one person?!"
LS: And that brought us to having to start with the moment of Johnny almost dying -- where he's about to pass out from asphyxiation.
CL: So, we had to have Johnny near death and then worked backwards from there. We originally called the episode "Johnny's Ladder."
LS: From that moment, we just asked ourselves: "How did Johnny get there?"
CL: As far as the birthday party goes, we were looking for a symbol. We started off with flashes of the beach and seagulls, but needed a symbol of birth and death to go along with that.
LS: And then the idea came that Bruce and the party could help pull Johnny back to reality. We needed someone to be Johnny's voice inside him to keep trying to pull him back to his consciousness, to tell him what was really going on.
CL: So he could sort out everything that he was seeing, make a picture of it so that he could save himself. And the birthday party also gave us the item that he needed to save himself.
LS: The knife; the gift that JJ gave him the night before.
CL: Notice that it's the same knife that JJ found in the trunk in Johnny's attic in the episode "Panic." And can we just say that we LOVE the director of this episode, Rachel Talalay?!
LS: Really, the main reason we wanted to do this blog was to say that, for Chris and me, it was such a great experience to work with a director who constantly called and asked really important questions about an incredibly complex script. It helped us visually tell the story.
CL: And she got it, too! Even when nobody else got it, Rachel got it. We got a LOT of notes on the script and people were really scared. They didn't want to do the episode. And Rachel just called us up and said: "I don't know what the big deal is, it makes perfect sense to me. I know how to shoot it. It's going to be a great episode."
LS: From Day One!
CL: She always said that and she, literally, was the only one.
LS: Rachel was the constant champion. She was always trying to find a visual language to signify for the audience, to make it work, so it would be really clear. Once you get to the point in the story where you realize Johnny's having visions of more than one person, Rachel was trying to always choose a visual symbol for whoever's vision that was, so it would guide the audience and sort out the story. She was always trying to make sense of it in a visual way.
CL: There were many -- let's call them the "fearful" people -- who wanted to understand from the first page of the script what was going on. They just wanted or somehow needed to know from the beginning! We just said, "Well, what's the point of doing the episode after that?! What would be the point, if you showed Johnny, on the brink of death, touching several people and you understood that they were his visions? Why would you continue to watch the episode?"
LS: And then the promo clips go and give it away! I think Chris and I really wanted to push the envelope with "what could we do more with these visions?" The visions had (dare I say?) a formula to them and the way that they would work in an episode, the way in which Johnny would get visions, and how they would help him solve the mystery.
CL: Johnny touches someone. Johnny sees something. Johnny solves the crime.
LS: We really wanted to tear that apart and tell the story in a different way. And we really also believed that Michael Hall could handle such an acting challenge. He had to become all of these different people! And then you mush them all together, so that he's switching, he's constantly making these changes from one second to the next. Rachel Talalay was really on top of it with him in saying, "Okay, Michael, now you're Johnny, now you're this guy, now you're that guy, now you're Maiya, now you're the girl."
CL: I think it was really challenging for Michael Hall.
LS: Rachel was right there with him every second, really trying to help him through those things. And then John Adams was this crazy, comic relief. So, there were a lot of tonal shifts, moving all the time. There was a lot of pace to it, and I thought Rachel really did that beautifully. It all looked really cool. And the reveal at the end with the multiple Johnnies -- we had a name for that shot…
CL: From the film "Being John Malkovich," we called it the "Being Johnny Smith" moment.
LS: Rachel did a beautiful job with that "Being Johnny Smith" moment. In a way, we just really loved the drug trip aspect of it, taking the audience through this kind of weird psychological journey.
CL: A journey where Johnny himself doesn't know what's going on.
LS: Yes! When do you get to do that on the show? Where Johnny doesn't know? Where it's a mystery to Johnny? Johnny, himself, has to figure out what's going on in his own frenetic brain. We wanted the audience to ask questions, but the trick was -- and the network's concern at all times was -- why aren't they going to get frustrated and turn it off?
CL: We give more credit to The Dead Zone viewers than that! I don't think that, if you're that kind of viewer, you're watching The Dead Zone. You have to enjoy a mystery and go with it, or else you're not watching this show.
LS: We love the fun of it where one audience member would go, "Oh, I know what's happening!" and another would go "No no no! This is what's happening." "Oh, no, no, he's back in the hospital and he's with Sarah. She's the one. He's touching her!" You know?
CL: But there were many that really did not have faith.
LS: We, obviously, went through many, many drafts of the script. But whenever we felt like we were really mucking with the basic premise, we dug in our heels and said, "No, we can't give away too much here! Just be patient, it will reveal itself at the right time. It will be fine."
CL: And we think it delivers.
Thanks for watching THE DEAD ZONE. Enjoy!
Christina Lynch & Loren Segan
Supervising Producers
