AUGUST 6, 2006
VORTEX

The way I've often approached DEAD ZONE stories is to think of how Johnny might get involved in some interesting arena, some subculture or event that resonates with our culture and the world at large. In this story, "Vortex," Johnny finds himself infiltrating a Waco-like cult to save a little girl whom he's seen being killed in an explosion. Typical Johnny heroics in one sense, less typical in others.

Okay, Waco, David Koresh – we all remember the pictures and all think we know the story. Crazy cult leader and his rabid followers go toe-to-toe with equally hardcore FBI agents and the result is… bullets, flames and death. But what's behind the pictures? What were the deeper forces at work that resulted in such a tragedy? Was it avoidable?

I'm not trying to tell history lessons on THE DEAD ZONE, but I don't mind taking the chance a story sometimes offers to learn about something I didn't truly understand before. With this show, I started by doing some reading. In a book about cults called Snapping, by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, I read about something the authors called the "death spiral" – how, when an armed radical or apocalyptic group like Koresh's goes up against an organ of society with its militarist credo, the result can be something like a tornado: threat feeds threat, and violence feeds violence, until one side or the other or even both is consumed. Waco is one example. The bombing of the radical back-to-nature MOVE organization by the Philadelphia police was another. Once those forces are unleashed, they're hard to contain, because they're fed on both sides by intolerance and paranoia. (Hmm, are we detecting a trend with my work this season after "Articles of Faith"?)

Then I read "A Place Called Waco," a survivor's account by David Thibodeau, and got an eye-opening insider's view of what went on inside Koresh's compound. Thibodeau writes how "in today's media-saturated environment, the word ‘cult' is an instant a road sign for the audience: WEIRDOS AHEAD." He showed how the cult members were real people, but he also showed how they fell under Koresh's dangerous spell, himself included. I watched a couple of documentaries, too, including "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," that raised equally alarming questions about the nature of the FBI response.

All these sources came back to that same basic idea: what happens when conflicting ideologies collide without attempts at mutual understanding. Maybe cultists like Koresh are at the extreme fringes of our society, but you can also see similar polarizing tensions playing out in society at large, as when conservative politicians tried to stoke the war fires by declaring, "You're either with us or against us." Or: "You're either for the war, or you're a traitor." When no in-between viewpoints are tolerated, when all that's understood is our side or theirs, conflict seems inevitable.

I think all of these ideas ultimately played into my DEAD ZONE take on a cult story, informing my depiction of the players on both sides. And then, having settled on my notion of this dangerous, volatile and morally ambiguous arena, I did what I always do: figure out how to stick Johnny smack in the middle of it.

It turned out to be an interesting fit. After all, Johnny's got his own apocalyptic ideology. You might even say that he's a "cult of one." So this offered us the chance to take another step in advancing our DEAD ZONE mythology. Namely, in getting himself mixed up with an apocalyptic cult, Johnny, for the first time, finds a reason to share what he knows about the Apocalypse he's seen in his visions with a large group of people in order to help save their lives. In other words, I felt an opportunity and a reason for Johnny to put something out there on the table that he's kept in his pocket all this time: his visions of the overhanging threat of Armageddon.

I know this is just a TV show. But with all the dark news parading across our newspapers and TV screens, I guess I'm hoping there's at least a tiny bit of wisdom in a story like this. That, typically, the only way to stave off a disaster – never mind an Apocalypse – is find the empathy and understanding that lets two parties step back from the brink.

Anyhow, I hope you enjoyed "Vortex"... and I hope you get to enjoy more DEAD ZONE stories in a Season Six and even Seven.

Michael Taylor
Supervising Producer

• (7/30)Christina Lynch & Loren Segan on Symmetry
• (7/23) Dan Truly on Lotto Fever
• (7/16) Karl Schaefer on The Inside Man
• (7/9) Michael Taylor on Articles of Faith
• (7/2) Adam Targum on Panic
• (6/25) Chris Bruno on directing Independence Day
• (6/25) Adam Targum on Independence Day
• (6/18) Shawn Piller on directing Forbidden Fruit