Brikar

Our final project in "Writing for Visual Media" is to write an episode of a television show currently in production, in teams of three. I originally wrote a backstory for an episode of "Enterprise" where the ship gets a new chaplain, who pisses off an agressively religious species. When we got put into groups, I ended up with two girls, one of whom had written for "Coupling" and another who wanted to do "Nip/Tuck". The three of us decided that our stories really didn't mesh (despite what the Prof was telling us) and ditched them all to write an episode of "Smallville".

It's been loads of fun, and I promise to upload the script to you guys when we're finished, but basically, this is what we came up with. We had to create a guest character, so we took the very, very basic basic of our three stories (that is, someone comes in and disrupts the group dynamic of the main cast) and tried to come up with something we thought would be really cool.

What did we come up with? Zod. Not really, but I'll explain why I call him that. We've completely re-created Zod's history, but bear with me before you start calling me all sorts of names ala Ron Moore...

Jimmy Zodowski doesn't know who he is. All he remember is growing up in foster home after foster home. Each time he develops a new special ability, his foster parents would freak out and send him off to the next one. Jimmy came to live with the Zodowskis three years ago. The Zodowskis were eager for a child, and they felt bad for poor Jimmy, who hasn't had any sense of permanence in his life, so they've tried their hardest to keep him.

But they're afraid of him. Jimmy's father heard about the strange things that happen in Smallville, and made a trip out earlier in the year, where he collected a sample of the moonrocks. He fed Jimmy a tiny amount in his dinner one night, Jimmy was weak for weeks afterward. The Zodowskis then made the decision to move to Smallville, where, with a greater supply of kryptonite, they thought they could control Jimmy's powers.

Because of his powers, Jimmy has a sense of superiority over the people around him. But he's afraid - because he's never had anything permanent, he can't stand any challenge to his superiority out of fear of losing it. When he meets up with Clark, Jimmy's dark side begins to erode any sense of morality he had left. When he discovers the true reason for the Zodowski's move to Smallville, he snaps.

In the episode, we'll learn that Jimmy's development has been quite different from Clark's - they share some powers, but Jimmy has some Clark doesn't have yet, and vice versa. For instance, Jimmy can fly, and he has his super-hearing, but no heat or X-Ray vision.

So how does this sound to all of you?

__________________
"A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown."

http://olympusmans.blogspot.com
http://benforrealz.blogspot.com

Brikar

Bump for Bean.

__________________
"A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown."

http://olympusmans.blogspot.com
http://benforrealz.blogspot.com

Bean

Coupled with your other post in the fiction section Bri, this sounds awesome. Almost as good a concept as the one you had for the time travel going backwards episode of ENT.

You really are good at this Brikar, I'm in awe

__________________
"I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I've tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing."

--James T. Kirk

Brikar

Thanks. It really is what I want to do for a living, write. I'd love to write television, be a show-runner. I think that would be absolutely fabulous. Along the way, a couple of feature films and a novel or two and I'd be in my happy place.

My Documents folder is filled with stuff - short stories, scripts, treatments. I even once planned out two years of a TV show I eventually at least want to pitch to some network (hopefully not UPN...) I found it again recently, and I was surprised by how strong a resemblance some of the details bear to "Enterprise," even though I'd come up with the idea something like two or three years before ENT was even announced.

It was about humanity's first FTL capable starship, one hundred years after the planet had suffered a great catastrophe - an alien invasion nearly wiped us out, Independence Day-style, but we beat them. And a hundred years later, now, we're branching out again. But just as this new ship launches, they come again and annex the entire star system, and our hero ship, the Adventurous, is the only one to escape. So the whole premise of the show was that they'd travel around to differnet star systems negotiating alliances to try and take back our solar system. It was heavily serialized, and basically a season consisted of 13 two-part episodes and every so often we'd have a B-story of the resistance on Earth struggling to get by.

But now I'm gushing... I'll post more "Smallville" in the fiction forum as it comes. The first act is due soon.

__________________
"A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown."

http://olympusmans.blogspot.com
http://benforrealz.blogspot.com