I did not see much of Tru Calling in its first run, but with Scifi Channel showing periodic marathons, I've seen almost every episode and I have become a fan. Today they showed episodes all day and I found myself wishing I knew where they were headed and I got lucky by finding a blog post from one of the writers. Since I remember a few Tru Calling fans on the list, I decided to post her explanation.
What do you think? Tru Calling staff writer Doris Egan has revealed details of how the show's long term story arc and mythology would have played out had the series not been cancelled!!! And it worths read it, I can sure you... Saturday, April 30, 2005 - For Tru Calling fans Yes, there were more than three episodes, and the last one aired pretty much leaves you wondering what's going on in the storyline. That's just the danger of television; a novel ends where it's supposed to end, but TV is a collective endeavor whose product depends on a thousand different judgments about business and programming. I'm sure that's no shock to you. Ordinarily I wouldn't talk about where the arc was going, but then, ordinarily there's another half-season where you'd get to watch that arc play out. I know some people got really involved in the second season and you feel you were left hanging. So, for you: I'm going to be talking about "spoilers," if they can be called that when a show is over. First, I joined TC late in the first season, when the idea of Jack had already been introduced. I thought, "Good timing. I'm joining when the fun part starts!" We dived right into my episode, "Two Pair." By the end of that, it was clear to the audience that Tru had an opponent, someone who was working against her to maintain the timeline as it was. The idea was never that he'd be a villain in the classic sense, but that he had a different view of what was "good" or "bad" in these circumstances. The rest of the season expanded the cat-and-mouse game between the two of them. Here's where I go into some of the mythology you never got to see explained before the show disappeared. Of course, canon can be boring when it's just written out, so let's play with this for your amusement. Suppose Tru rushes to save a woman about to die, only to find Jack in her way. ------------------------- JACK: You can't keep doing this just because you have the power. It's wrong. TRU: I'm saving that woman's life! How is that wrong? JACK: Who the hell are you to decide you can tilt the balance of the universe? Everything we do has consequences, Tru. Everything. You save one person, and what happens? TRU (with her best sarcasm): She lives. I see what a problem that would be. JACK: It would be, because there's a plan at work here bigger than anyone can comprehend. This woman lives, and that plan gets thrown off track. She's home when the next-door neighbor has his heart attack; she drives him to the hospital. He lives, and goes on to abuse his two children. One of them grows up to be the next Unabomber. The other marries a man who was originally destined for someone else, who would have been his partner in discovering a cure for cancer -- TRU: You can't know all this! JACK: I know there's a plan, and I know you're destroying it, like a child who doesn't understand why Mommy won't let her paint on the walls. ------------------------- One of the aims of season two was to gradually outline the overarching mythology for the audience. There was a lot of discussion of this at the beginning of the year. I'm a big proponent of the idea that on any show it pays to have the mythology straight in the writers' minds, even when they aren't going to show all their cards to the audience right away. Because the audience can always tell when you're making it up as you go along, and they feel taken advantage of. Mind you, there are going to be some refinements and additions that are indeed made up along the way; and if they work, that's all you can ask. I'll start with the big-picture idea here: There are two great Powers in the universe concerned with humanity's fate. (This particular part of the mythology I feel I'd better admit was mine -- because while television is a group effort, and most of the mythology was on the way to being implemented, I'm not 100 percent certain it would all have been. And should you find this specific idea incredibly dumb, I don't want anyone else blamed for it.) World mythology has a lot of ways of presenting fate -- three old women weaving, that sort of thing. For the moment, interpret "Powers" as you will -- single forces, groups; religious, non-religious. But since Jack's calling was clearly to stop Tru, there had to be two warring forces at work here. (Or one with advanced schizophrenia.) The first Power long ago laid out the original plan the Earth has been following for millennia -- to what end, we don't know. (Jack's side would have you believe that despite pain along the way, this is our best possible future.) Over time, a rebellious second Power arose that wanted to intervene and make changes. To "improve" things, whatever the risk of throwing the great plan off track. (Again, improve by whose definition? This was something to be gone into over the show's long term.) The rebellious Power -- and here I suspect I was influenced a bit by Philip Pullman's "revolt against Heaven" -- was more accepting of individual freedom and choice. So this is what they do: When a person dies who is on the crux of some change of Fate, someone who could influence things more than usual one way or another, this Power. opens a door, you could say. And they offer that person a choice. You can go forward, or you can return and finish your life. If you truly want it, ask for it. Every time Tru saves someone who asks for help, she steers our race's destiny a little further from what was originally planned, and a little closer to what the -- let's say, the editors -- want. It would be interesting if somewhere along the way we discovered that one of these plans will end in a barren piece of rock and no human race. But which one? What we have are two competing Fates, battling for control of humanity. And now back to the group process. We would have learned that one of Jack's advantages over Tru is that his mentor, Tru's father, is alive, and can fill him in on the long line of knowledge from his predecessors. Tru's mentor should have been her mother, but she died unexpectedly; the episode I was writing when the show was cancelled would have taken place during a bank robbery while Tru's father was consulting his wife's old diary he'd left in the safety deposit. (Nice touch: Jack doesn't tell him about the robbery when the day repeats -- because Tru's Dad has to be there to choose the hostages who'll be shot, just as he was forced to at gunpoint on Day One.) Besides dealing with the main plot, he has to make sure she doesn't read the diary and learn a lot more than she should. (And Jack has to intervene in the hostage situation to make sure exactly the same people die on Day Two.) That's the big picture. And now we come to the specific arc that the audience was dropped out in the middle of: the consequences of what happens when Tru uses her gift for her own plan, all fates aside; when she saves a friend who didn't ask for help. (To be continued in part two.) Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - Tru Calling, continued In response to some questions: It's been asked how the aims of the two warring Fates are conveyed to the humans doing their work -- would we have seen these powers, as one did on Buffy, for instance? Probably not, or at least, not blatantly. Remember that Buffy was a very different kind of show, where green-skinned demons could routinely sit around enjoying very dry martinis and contemplating their Sinatra collections. I hesitate to use the word "realistic" about a show in which dead bodies talk to the heroine, but tonally Tru Calling was much closer to life as we see it daily. Once the tone for a show has been established, it's hard to break without losing the audience. That being said, one can massage tone from time to time; and one thing I'd hoped to do further down the road in the second season was suggest that for Tru -- perhaps because of her double parentage -- the border between life and death had worn thin. In some time of great emotional distress, when she's questioning everything, she might have a dream in which her mother talks with her directly; or she might sit, exhausted, at a lonely bus stop and get into a conversation with some stranger that ends up touching on what's been troubling her. Only later is it implied that the stranger was dead, and possibly someone with a special interest in her -- perhaps a friend of her mother's, perhaps someone who had the power before her -- who knows. It was just a moment I thought might be interesting to get to, partly because we eventually needed to see Tru question what she's doing. So if the Fates aren't going to be giving Tru or Jack specific orders, how do they know what to do? With Tru this question isn't so difficult; even if you have no special knowledge, if you discover you can save people's lives, you're probably going to do it. I know I would, and really, it's what every hero in a "do-over" sort of story does -- look at Gary Hobson of Early Edition, or Sam Beckett of Quantum Leap. It's all very well for the crew of the Enterprise to agonize over "changing the past," but they're already far in the future (from our point of view) and are themselves the direct product of that past timeline. They can say, "We've got a nice little Federation of Planets thing going on here; why mess with it?" In Tru's world, you're changing a future you don't know to another future you don't know; and along the way you save a life, so why not? It's hard to stand by and let someone get killed. What's more problematic is Jack; if he had no special knowledge, why would he assume that saving lives is a bad thing? The answer is, he does have special knowledge. Not of the future timeline (at least not specifically); but he has access to the knowledge his predecessors have passed down since the first ones got their marching orders. And he had a Near Death Experience with some special moments. Remember I suggested that there was a qualitative difference between the power that laid out humanity's grand plan, and the rebellious power that wants to change that plan. The former is more authoritarian in the way it deals with humans, while the latter gives individuals the choice to cooperate or not. Just as the latter offers selected people the opportunity to ask for help, it gave Tru her gift as a gift. Jack, on the other hand, was clinically dead. In his NDE, he came face to face with something he can't entirely remember -- but he was told that if he were returned to life, he'd be working for them. (Which brings us to the question: if Jack was given his life back as payment for services to be rendered, what happens if he ever decides he doesn't want to render those services? And yes, that was going to be an exploration for a later part of the arc.) Once he revived, he wasn't sure what to make of all this. And then his day started rewinding -- whenever Tru's did, though he didn't realize this yet. He ended up in a psych ward. And that's where Tru's father found him. He'd been waiting for someone like Jack to appear, and mental hospitals were a prime hunting ground. When someone showed up talking about re-living days, he knew he'd found his man. So he went to Jack and said, "I know exactly what you're going through -- " (and he could describe it, exactly) "--and I know what happened when you were clinically dead. And I know a lot of other things you'll need to know, so I suggest you listen to me." Through Tru's father, Jack has access to the knowledge of generations of his predecessors. Tru's mother should have been her mentor, but she died when Tru was too young, and anything she'd written down was confiscated by her husband. And in answer to another question: No, I don't think that the champions of both types of Fate routinely married each other. That would be rather giving the game away. Oh, and as for the power Tru works for -- the fact that they're more oriented toward individual freedom may cause you to think their plan is the one we'd want to have play out. But I wouldn't bet the entire future of the human race on the fact that they seem polite. Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - The teeming masses have spoken Right. I can see from the several thousand people who have written me about it, you want to know about the Jensen arc. Remember the basic mythology: two warring powers of Fate, one of whom offers selected souls a chance to return and live again. Now, we don't know which power is the "good" one, if we assume there is a good one; the power behind Tru clearly doesn't make this offer to everyone who ever dies, or even everyone who ever died violently. That power has an agenda of its own, to shape human fate in a certain way, and the threads it pulls are in service of that. The individuals who are saved have roles to play in their lives that will send history off in new avenues. All that being said, the power Tru works for does offer more than its opposing force does; it offers a choice to those it selects. Jensen dies. The audience point of view is not privileged to see what happens to his soul (for lack of a better term) next. But we know he never "wakes," he never asks Tru for help. Either his soul never had that door opened for it -- never had the chance to return -- or he refused it. In which case, his soul's gone on to wherever souls might go. Tru, however, saves him just the same, when her day rewinds. When Jensen's dead body lies in front of her she doesn't know the truth, that he's already gone -- though she may have some suspicions that what she wants to do is wrong, or dangerous; Davis suggests as much to her. But she's had enough of losing people. Enough of rearranging her life for some power she can't understand. She makes her own decision and it's to stay awake as long as it takes, because if Jensen won't ask for help, someone else eventually will; and she'll save them both. The hell with Fate. But Jensen's soul is already committed -- it can't return, but his body, memories, and the habits of his personality continue after the time he "died." The idea was that over the course of the arc we would gradually see anomalies of character develop -- unsettling moments, as the imprint of Jensen's personality disintegrates, at the same time it becomes fascinated with death, in an almost wistful way. This would be pretty damned creepy, coming as it does alongside Tru's growing physical intimacy with him. Jane Espenson wrote a beautifully disturbing scene that I'm sorry you'll never get a chance to see -- on one level, it's just Tru and Jensen talking on the sofa during a movie, and on another level, oooooh. As the arc plays out, we hear the jarring comments he'll occasionally make, the way the things that used to mean something to him -- like his need for his father's respect -- are just no longer vulnerabilities. We see scenes that suggest a growing involvement with violence, in an unsettling but ambiguous way, so Tru can't be sure it's there or not. Till one morning Tru wakes in bed with Jensen and goes about her day, which rewinds over the murder of Jensen's father. Just before the rewind she learns that not only did Jensen do it, he's been behind a string of recent killings (born of his fascination with learning about the thing he's apparently been barred from -- i.e., death). She rewinds -- and wakes up in bed next to him, knowing now that he's a monster. And that she created him. This was once a young man who won her with his generosity and understanding, his good humor and sweetness. He's still bright, he's still clever, there's no evidence against him. And he'll be creating a lot more victims, starting on this rewind day with his father -- unless she takes the responsibility for putting an end to him. So she finally turns to the person with experience in ending people's lives: Jack. That's the basic arc; it would have brought you about halfway through the season. There were plans for the second half, partly based on the fallout from all this, but as you weren't left hanging in the middle of that arc, it's not as urgent. speakerwiggin asked: So at the point he dies in day one, his soul (for lack of a better term) is gone. So when she rewinds...she's not technically going back in time to a point before he was given that decision, and by saving him, she doesn't take that choice away from him...but, technically, on the rewind, he's soulless? and in some strange way things continue to be linear? Am i digging too much here? I thought about going into this in the post, but wasn't sure how anal people wanted to get. I should have known. :) The short answer is, no, time is not rewinding in the way you're thinking, or at least time in this instance isn't a mechanical river that unfolds without input from anyone. It might help to think of what happens as editing; you're going back over a paragraph and rewriting parts of it, but the original paragraph is there. (Otherwise, why would Jensen have deja vu? If you think about it, you'd say, "Wait a minute... Jensen had deja vu, but he didn't live through this twice, he only lived through it once, so how can he be remembering things that didn't happen?") I remember how shocked I was the first time I saw a documentary that talked about time, space, and motion as inter-related. The thought-example they gave was, imagine that all motion ceases in the universe. It ceases for three seconds. For three seconds, no atom, no molecule, of star or ocean or person moves. For those three seconds, there's no time. And I thought, of course there's time -- there was three seconds of time! Or... was there, if there was no one to experience it? But time is independent of experience! It's an objective thing! ...Isn't it? Then they started to talk about how, if our universe is simply one in a series of universes that expand and die and are born again, there's no reason to think that the laws of physics for the next universe may not be entirely different. Effect could precede cause, for instance. At that point, I have to take my purse and go out for a latte. But to bring it all back to Tru: We do not know the nature of the soul. Let's say that the soul, like God, transcends time and space and the pecularities of this particular universe. The soul leaves the universe of physical law that we know, exits through door, stage right, and enters a realm of existence utterly unknowable to us. It is no longer in our space-time. The editors can't stuff it into Jensen's body, because it's not there. The linear view of that soul, what we as humans see (like a one-dimensional creature looking at a three-dimensional object -- ever read Flatland?) -- would show it in existence up to, say, 5:45 on September 4th. At that point, it left linear time, never to return. The editors can run us all back over that paragraph, right up till 5:45, but they can't go any further with Jensen. He's an anomaly who should not exist in space-time as we know it. Tru's father would see him as an abomination. I will also add, this is the sort of philosophical discussion that could be peeled back for days. Television, because of its time constraints, is intolerant of explanations that can't be rendered in less than a sentence or so. I think there was rightly some hesitance to get into this sort of thing on the show because it opens a can of worms that would require essays to discuss. So at the end of the day, I'd say... go with it. Or not. It's up to you [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
