Heist thrillers and spy thrillers—they’re often one and the same, except the spies are usually less interested in stealing jewels from vaults and more about snagging a far more priceless piece of intel, or even a person. But there are several unwritten rules to writing a good heist, I’ve learned.
- If things are going to go exactly as planned, then we never actually hear the plan.
- If things AREN’T going to go as planned, then we get to hear the plan—or some of it—so we feel the characters’ horror as everything goes off the rails.
But there’s a fun combination of the two that’s my favorite of all, one that’s used excellently in the remake of Ocean’s Eleven and in Scott Lynch’s fabulous Gentlemen Bastards series. We hear part of the plan, but we think it’s the whole plan. So when things look like they’re going awry, we don’t realize that it’s exactly what our characters want.And boy, do our witchy characters want to invite a bit of chaos into their lives!Aside from executing ANCHISES in all its twisty glory, with magical assists from the Hitchhiker and Gabe’s bag of charms, I wanted to accomplish a few other key elements in this episode. First, I wanted to make Tanya’s reaction to ANCHISES just as important to Gabe’s action. After all, when things are going right for Gabe, that almost by definition puts Tanya up shit creek. I loved how suspicious Gabe and Tanya were of one another’s motives throughout this episode, and how that led to errors on both their parts. Why can’t we all just get along?!Second, I wanted to show that just because an op is going well doesn’t mean all is rosy in CIA Prague Station. Gabe is working under two bosses, after all, neither who has direct authority over the other. And when you’re knocking the teeth out of corpses and shearing off their fingerprints, some tempers are bound to flare.And third, I wanted Nadia and Josh to get their respective moments in the sun. We get to see Josh fit a little more confidently into his first big op and play an important role, while Nadia, unaware of the chaos transpiring across the Vltava, undertakes an exciting witchy investigation of her own. They both do their parts wonderfully! They really can’t be blamed for just how absurd things get while they’re focusing on the mundane world and the magic world, respectively. They don’t know the dangerous mix that’s been unleashed when a defector is also a Host.But they’ll find out soon enough.
