The spark for “Big Sky” came from real life. Once while I was up too late I watched a documentary called The Creek Runs Red. The movie is about Picher, Oklahoma, a town eventually rendered toxic by the consequences of decades of mining operations. Released in 2007, it was about how the people who lived there wrestled with their love for their hometown in the face of an environmental catastrophe.And that was before Picher was hit by an F4 tornado in 2008. That, it seems, was a kind of final straw for the town, which dissolved as a municipality in 2009. A few people still live there, but for all intents and purposes it seems to be pretty much abandoned. Apparently the story of Picher stayed with me—not only the idea that we still lose towns in this day and age, but the idea that if the town is isolated enough, very few people even seem to notice, which I find just a little heartbreaking.
Regarding the monsters themselves—the Tornado Eaters (which, to this day, I type first as “Easter” and have to correct)—the assignment from our initial season notes after our meeting was to give our people on Team 3 more than they could handle by themselves. I also wanted something that worked on the scale of the geography. I’ve never been to Oklahoma, but getting onto Google Earth, the flatness of the landscape reminded me of a drive I took through western Kansas and eastern Colorado several years ago. Before I went there, I’d never seen a place like that, and I still remember vividly the sense of being totally exposed, of thinking of the sky as a source of both enormous possibility and enormous threat. The story of Picher’s last years was about a small number of people faced with huge problems, way beyond their ability to fix; all they could do was react. And I’ve come around in the past few years to the idea that subtlety is kind of overrated. So I figured this would be a good time to go big—as big as the story could handle.If there’s been a shtick to my creature shop, it’s been to pull the monsters out of some aspect of the environment that they come from. So in a sense the Tornado Eaters are the outdoor version of the things in Episode 2: instead of being pulled from the walls and furniture of a run-down apartment in Madrid, they’re pulled out of the grass and trees, the piles of toxic dust, and most of all, that huge, huge sky.Picher’s real-life example, though, always kept the human cost in my mind when I had the assignment to write about a mission that the Society could barely contain. For all the monsters and magic in the story, to me its heart is in the people who live in the town, and about how Sal’s meeting them changes the way she thinks about the mission and makes her more skeptical of the Society’s motives in wanting to cover things up.
