This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Renita: The bare bones of this episode are done now, though it still feels lacking somehow, so if anyone has any ideas on how they could improve on this, feel free to pitch in. The basic idea with this was to take mjb's suggestion of making Season 3 Darker and Edgier and crank it to the max with a heavy dose of Mind Screw thrown in for good measure. This is an episode as written by a staff consisting of Frank Miller, Rob Leifeld, Hideo Kojima, Russell T Davies and the production team from Advent Children.
Mjb: Great, and I see you jumped right in with the content from the third episode. This really felt like a villain team-up, so a few more would still have worked. But that wouldn't really add meaning, just content. Anyway, the ending is serious, so do you have a plan for a follow-up? After the Nerdly pair, the Days of Knight pair, and the season 3 opening triplet, I realize an immediate sequel isn't in demand. But a follow-up to this would help with the darkness in the second third of the season (amazing how we're already done 5/13). If nothing else comes up, the follow-up could either be the season finale, or better, lead to it. The Executives are a massive piece of Sealed Evil. Frankly, we should avoid actually bringing them in this season. But an episode where the Benders stopped the Council's plan to contact them... Good work on this one.
Renita: I was very careful how I worded Loki's warnings. He said that the artifact in question would help the Dark Council summon the Executives, not that it was the only thing that they needed in order to do so. I would like to throw more villains in there. I was originally going to have a montage of clips where Sue and Krystal get to fight people too, but it sort of felt forced since I wasn't even giving the villains dialogue at that point. The villains getting away with the artifact was more me adding fuel to the fire in regard to the theory that Nucleus is a split personality of Nerdly like he was to his future incarnation in the comic. I originally intended to have a scene with Naked Boss and Sturgis Kahn meeting outside the musuem talking about how Nucleus was on his way to further hint at this. A couple of ideas how this could work.
a.) Exactly like Future Nerdly, Nucleus was created through nanomachines and drugs.
b.) An episode is dedicated to Nucleus-as-created-by-Doctor-Myro in the future where he fights the Vampbenders across the timestream, ala The Chase in Doctor Who. It ends with Nucleus dying in the past and his organs getting harvested for transplants. We then retcon Nerdly's backstory to say that he had to receive a liver transplant in his youth and received Nucleus', because, well, it was there.
In any case, I'd be happy to do a follow up episode if people would like me to, but since there are 13 episodes in a series and I've already done one, I'd feel bad if I hogged another one at the expense of other people. If I were to do another one, I'd keep the Dark and Edgy format experimented with in this episode, but try and tread new ground. Back in Black was very Matrix-y in feel, so I'd probably go with something more fantastical next time, picking up on the Loki plot thread and having him transport the Vampbenders somewhere, like, say, Hell or some Cosmic Horror dimension.
Mjb: Yes, I wondered when he appeared. We have 3 different character clones running around, but he's the most established of them now (I'm going to figure out if Avatar Leeroy was ever resolved, and clear it up if not).
Anyway, don't limit yourself to "1 episode per season." We don't have 12 other writers to follow that idea. As far as I know, all the recent content comes from you, me, Robert, and The Bad Wolf. Oh, and Vert did one novel. That's five people doing any work, four producing any episodes, and two who have recently made anything more than 1.0. Yesterday, I finished the fourth episode in a row (admittedly, it was a pilot that reached such lengths as to require splitting). So don't cut down, write when you have an idea. I've seen no one else on the forum board since the month started, so don't expect much about what people want.
Renita: Nucleus, in the comic, was intentionally badly written (since he was made a split personality of Future Nerdly, yet we saw the larvae in Doctor Myro's lab in the first issue ala The Future is Now, so that was a continuity hole waiting to be patched up, but which of course, never was) since the entire storyline was a parody of Adaptation Decay. Nucleus' presence in Back in Black is more Mind Screw than anything, but ideally, the plot point should be resolved now that it's there.
