Episode 12 is Exhibit A for me when I think about how much I’ve enjoyed the collaborative process. At the end of our writer’s summit, we had a couple sentences’ worth of notes for plot points that needed to be hit in this episode. By the time we were eight episodes in, somehow none of these plot points seemed quite as relevant or interesting, and I went into the meeting for episodes nine through twelve with absolutely no sense of what the episode was going to be about. By the time we were done with the meeting, having talked about how the episodes should hang together, I knew pretty much exactly what my assignment was. Go team!For the demons breaking into the Vatican, the fun lay in realizing that I was actually writing a heist story, and I love heist stories. Even more fun was to be able to replace some of the standard heist-story stuff—one guy is good at picking locks, one guy is good at talking his way into things—with crazier magical things. Though once I’d latched onto the idea that this was a heist, I liked being able to give the demons really mundane reasons for wanting the
Codex. They don’t want to take over the world or plunge the souls of humanity into eternal damnation; they just want to retire to the coast with a nice car and a view of the water. To me, it made their characters more interesting, and made it make more sense that they’d be a little blindsided when they realized, too late, that they were playing a more serious game than they thought.But the emotional core of the episode for me turned out to be the scenes between Sal and the Hand. It was up to the previous episode to do the Big Reveal, but I ended up being the one to get to write their first real conversations with each other. For a little while I struggled with the dynamic between them; it’s not obvious to me from the outset what the relationship between a human and supernatural being should be, beginning with the question of whether it’s even comprehensible. But as I felt my way into the episode, I realized that what we—the team—had created in Sal and the Hand was essentially an abusive relationship. The Hand was the worst boyfriend ever, the horrific husband Sal was desperately trying to divorce. But in the meantime, they were stuck with each other, the pieces of the history between them just lying around like a set of extra-sharp knives. That dynamic was enough to drive the episode for me right up until I got to scratch the itch I seem to constantly have to create mayhem on the page, take the set we’d constructed over the past eleven episodes, and tear it all down.
