SO, I WANTED to share a few thoughts on the writing and the conception of "
Shifting Waters," my third and final episode of
THE BORDER in Season Two. (The Season Finale airs next week.) If you're in Canada, and you missed the ep, you can catch it at your leisure here online at
CBC.ca; It's geo-blocked from other countries.
Yeah Yeah, Yankees, now you know how we feel.) It's also available for download in the Canadian
Itunes Store.
Stories often -- in fact, I'd say
usually -- come together in a haphazard way. You might have a piece of one story or another. Generally if you're working off a logline that was in a
bible document, there might be some sketchy piece of an idea at the core. Last year, I had a story that was about a celebrity adoption -- that was in the logline; but when my colleague Sarah and I sat down to break it, we were both struck by a book we had been reading about child soldiers called
A Long Way Gone; so that became the heart of the episode.
Similarly, I knew going into season two that it would be great to do something about
Arctic Sovereignty. If you're in Canada, you're taught in school that all those islands at the top of the world, stretching almost to the pole, and the
Northwest Passage itself, are all part of Canada. Most Canadians are surprised when they learn that most other countries, including the
United States,
don't see it that way.
The area is very much in dispute.As far back as Season One, I had an inkling of wanting to explore that area. Also, hey, the show is called
The Border, and there's no more forbidding border than the one in the north. But how do you make something about Canada's "
internal waters" and the Northwest Passage exciting? And
worse -- how do you do it when you obviously,
clearly won't have the budget to go shoot up in the Arctic?
I took a bit of inspiration from two sources. Aficianados of that first glorious year of
The West Wing might remember a powerful episode called
The State Dinner, where
President Bartlett has to deal with all these crises during the middle of the titular diplomatic affair. The climax of the episode involved him talking on the wireless to a small U.S. Navy supply ship that was caught in a hurricane. The scene was just
Martin Sheen playing off a disembodied voice, in the middle of the ocean, alone. You never saw the ships. And it was incredibly powerful.
There was also an episode of
MI:5 (Spooks in the UK) a couple of years back where there was a conference on Africa that all took place at this stately house in the country. And there was much maneuvering and goings-on.
So I figured that you could do an episode on the Arctic --
all about the Arctic -- without going there, by making it the
stakes. Have everything play out at a sort of
G-8 summit. Controlled locations, lots of opportunity for intrigue and derring-do.
When we laid out the season, I also saw that this show was going to come in slot 12. Which meant that it was going to be the
penultimate episode of the season. Often, in series, the penultimate ep is where you wrap up a lot of the plots that have been bubbling through the season, in order to give some real estate to the season finale. There's also one other consequence to coming before the finale. You know what you're
not going to get. There's not going to be too many explosions, chases, or overly elaborate stuntage. All the
boom boom and the
bang bang gets saved for the last episode.
So I found myself having to turn over and figure out a show that was going to be talkier, with less action, than a lot of our other episodes.
There's only one solution for a situation like that:
you've got to have high emotional stakes.And though we weren't going to go anywhere near the Arctic, you wanted the sense that there was something going on up there. Something immediate, and symbolic. Something that would serve as the
objective correlative of the struggle for the region going on at the conference.
Canadian troops are currently serving in
Afghanistan. And a sobering ritual takes place every time a body comes home, at least when it comes home, through Toronto and to the bases outside the city. This spontaneous thing
just started happening a while ago.
People stop their cars and wait on bridges on the Highway 401. They silently wait, and watch, for the funeral procession to pass beneath on the highway below. Having soldiers in harms' way has changed Canadians in some essential way. It has a resonance now that it hasn't had probably since the Korean war. I wanted to honor that change a bit.
Most people who were sentient at that point are going to remember the horror of the Russian submarine
Kursk, and the thought of those sailors suffocating under the water, far from home. And Canadians may vaguely recall a problem on a sub that we bought from the UK. It caught fire on its first voyage; one sailor died and the boat limped along in the open sea.
I decided to take these two true life incidents, and spin out fiction from them. So the Canadian sub in jeopardy in the Northwest Passage was born. I deliberately didn't reference either incident directly anywhere in the script. I wanted to prey upon people's vague recollections of something like this happening in the past. That real life resonance would add to the verisimilitude.
So we've got a conference on Arctic Sovereignty. And a sub's crew in jeopardy. And all that's pretty good -- but that's only a bare story area. How do you make it about the characters?
One look at the big board told me that this was the culmination of a multi-episode arc between
Charlotte Bates and
Mike Kessler. So somehow this had to reflect a struggle between the two of them. And we had, at this point, one other extant couple on the show --
Liz Carver and
Gray Jackson, whose professional relationship up til now had been complicated by the fact that they were also having a secret sexual affair.
This felt like something to me. While all the machinations were going on at the macro level with the Arctic conference, which was all about trust, there were trust issues going in the relationships, too. Thematic resonance. Check. And if you're going to have two relationships like that, it stands to reason that if one is about a couple contemplating taking a step forward, and going closer, the other had to be about a couple coming apart. So I felt like I knew what was going on emotionally in those characters. And if there was intrigue, we were going to have to have representatives of the various jockeying nations. That suggested a Minister and his American and other-nation counterparts. So now, all of a sudden, the guest roles were shaping up too.
But I still needed something; some
mechanism. Something that
ICS could
investigate, that would slowly reveal and twist and drive some of the revelations in the show. Looking at the calendar of when this show would air, and working backward, I knew that I wanted something that twisted in the end, that didn't go where you expected it too. I came up with a
MacGuffin -- a
Presidential Briefing Book for the Arctic conference. First we're not sure that it's real. Then it goes missing. Then it's found and it contains something explosive. Finally, knowing this would air in December, I wanted the final twist to be that the
outgoing government of the United States wanted
one thing from the conference, and the incoming administration wanted another thing. So the
President-Elect would work behind the scenes to try and get a different result.
Here's step one of the "
you must let go of your babies." My original conception -- the scene that I had so clearly in my head, right from the beginning, is Slade discovering that there's another group of people at the compound where the conference is taking place. Carver discovers the same thing, in a parallel investigation. And in the end,
Mike Kessler walks down a hallway and someone opens a door, and there at the window is a tall black man in a nice suit. Kessler thanks the President-Elect for seeing him, the door closes, and we CUT TO the next scene.
Now, clearly that wasn't in the show. For a whole bunch of reasons, Producer
David Barlow, and the rest of the story department walked me through a bunch of scenarios where that scene didn't fit. It put Kessler in a place we didn't see him in. It raised too many questions at the end when we were looking to wrap up; it was too outsized. Funnily enough, the reason that everyone brought up at the time was the one that I felt least worried about: what if
Obama doesn't win? I shrugged. I think I even said, glibly, "ah, we can shoot it two ways. Swap in an old white guy for one shot."
But concurrent to all the big story reasons why that was a bad idea, came one more, from legal. Thanks to Canada's reverse onus libel laws, our lawyers told us that we couldn't do that shot in my head. The actor
couldn't be a black man. Why not? Because everyone would assume that was referencing Obama. Yeah, so? It's a problem. Could we make it a woman?
No. No we couldn't. Because it ruins the immediate impact of just seeing the....oh....mmmm. Fine.
Sometimes it's very
frustrating getting things past. (This is the same reason, by the way, that the seal on the "briefing book" isn't really that close to the U.S. Presidential Seal. It's as close as they would let us make it. If you are going to write for the screen in Canada, you will deal with this kind of stuff all the time.
Just try clearing an alternate for Facebook. Brrr.)Okay, so we're not going to show the President-Elect. Grumble, rejig, rejig.
By the time I get to a completed outline, I try to construct my stories in a deliberate enough way that if you pull one thread near the end, something unravels near the beginning. There were a tense couple of days where there were suggestions like that that had me tearing my hair out a bit. The fixes suggested caused more problems; I had to come up with a way to take the spirit of the very good notes, which were mostly about clarity and motivation, and come up with a fix that didn't undo the other stuff I'd tried to set in motion.
The other big,
"kill your darlings" moment for me came just as I started to take the story from the bare bones one pager to something that could be beat out. This was near the end of the seasons, and for various reasons too dull to go into here, getting the story department together to break the ep became too difficult. I got feedback and help as I went along, and notes when I was done -- but I had to break this one largely on my own. Yes. It was hard. Which is why it took a while to get right, and why it convinced me that the easiest, fastest, and most efficient way to break story is always as a group. It allows you to bulletproof as you go in a way that working alone -- especially working alone fast -- just doesn't.
Anyway, I had a giddy brainstorm one night. The thing that was going to make this ep
sing. The thing that was going to give the show danger and heft and some extra
ooomph.
I was going to kill
David Suzuki.Not the
real Suzuki, of course. But if there was going to be a secret deal to sell off mineral resources in the Arctic, I wanted the guy who discovered that, who had a hold of the briefing book, to be a well known Environmental Television Host. I wanted him to be kidnapped for what he knows, and probably killed. And I
totally wanted to wink at Suzuki. I wanted people to come up to me and say,
"Dude, you killed David Suzuki! You bastard!"Alas. It was not to be. This one didn't even go to the lawyer. I checked with
casting and found that casting that role might not be the easiest thing to do. (Yes there were actors who might have been able to pull them off; no they were not in Toronto and available.) And a point was raised that if we were talking about the Arctic, didn't we need an indigenous person as an activist?
So a character inspired by
David Suzuki became
Shani Aariak. And once
that change was made, a lot of other stuff fell by the wayside, too. I wanted her to be conniving, maybe even a little crooked. But according to the
CBC Political Correctness act of 1978, it's apparently impossible to show a First Nations person as anything other than a saint. (I kid, the CBC had nothing to do with that; it's the drift of, well, it's just the way things go for
a lot of reasons.)
You pick your battles, and there was a perfectly legitimate way to service the story where the character was only ...
opportunistic, and not
bent. In the end, you have to be flexible enough to work with what you are handed. And you know what? It's probably the wrong call anyway, in retrospect. You fall in love with guest characters because they're all yours -- you get to make them out of whole cloth. But in an ongoing series, the story is not going to be about
them. It can't be. It has to be about
your people.
So what about that, then? Well, one of the challenging things about this outline was that I didn't know where exactly the subplot with Gray and his Dad was going until the outline was written. Scripts are written concurrently, remember, and the beats of that arc weren't solidified until late in the process. I had several different scenes and conclusions in there, before what you saw make it to the screen.
And then, occasionally, your research or your scout gives you a cool idea that you wind up folding in. In this case, we were looking at a location north of the city, a corporate training centre, that happened to have a running track that went through the woods. It was pretty cool. I wanted to use it. So I came up with Carver's running interrogation of the Secret Service agent. Luckily, the whole Secret Service being under DHS thing is
true (they were moved from Treasury in the post 9/11 establishment of DHS) so that gave us a way to see Carver working some intra-agency stuff, just like we always see between CSIS and ICS in the show. Once I knew we had that location with the running track, I came up with the jogging/sex flashback reverie that starts Carver in the show just for some symmetry.
The show came in over by three minutes -- which I think was the most over we were all season. So a lot had to be cut back. Missing from the show is scenes of Slade discovering that there are other people in the hotel, which leads him to Carver looking into the same thing from her investigation of the Secret Service agent. (The scene that led to the running track.)
There were a bunch of other trims here and there, mostly buttons on scenes that were probably unnecessary. The only scene I really missed was one where Liz Carver came over to Gray's apartment and discovered Dougie. And the two had a wonderful, awkward conversation where Carver tries to tell Dougie that she and Gray "just work together." And Dougie keeps repeating, "you just work together. right." Then at the end, when Dougie and Gray go to stash the unconscious guy, Dougie chooses that moment to tell Gray that "a girl came by today for you. Real good looking." It was great character stuff. But it was totally the right thing to cut. I don't know. I worry a bit that maybe now Carver's arc through the show doesn't seem too clear. She kind of disappears for an act. But you can't have everything. You gotta come to time, after all.
This entry, like the episode itself, is now
way too long, and I haven't even said all the stuff that blew me away in the production of this ep: the steady hand of
Director Brett Sullivan, the easy chemistry between
Graham Abbey and
Grace Park and
Nick Campbell, the fact that (and I'm
REAL proud of this, that this is the first time in 25 episodes of this series where Holland and Kessler actually
share a scene (they're usually on the phone,) the fact that if I had known the sub set would look so good, I would have written more there; the wonderful and easygoing nature of pros
Patrick McKenna and
Nigel Bennet, or even the cool fact that we just decided to give Shani a girlfriend instead of a boyfriend because we had lots of great Shani's but nobody for that other part...but for me the best story out of the production is this.
We shot the scene where Charlotte and Kessler say goodbye. And it was....
amazing.
James McGowan really, really brought it. We saw Kessler in a place that we've never seen him before. When she says, "congratuations on saving those people," and he responds, "I didn't save anybody," it was so...
desolate...that I got
goosebumps.
And then the next day the Lab called and said there was a scratch on his closeup.
We had to reshoot it.
And three days later, he looked at the scratched
DVD, to see what he'd done, and went out there, and did it again.
Better.
Man. Actors are
something.
Anyway, that's
Shifting Waters. Fun shoot. I enjoyed writing this script, and I liked how it turned out. Hope you enjoyed it, too.
