Through a mirror, darkly

[danceswithwords]

LJ has eaten every comment I tried to make today up until an hour ago. Not just thrown the stupid database error that you can recover from by hitting the browser back button and trying to post the comment again; irrevocably eaten. NOT ON, LJ.

Let's see if it will let me post this.

Comments

[katie_m]

Interestingly, it sounds like that scene was originally much milder, and was changed on MS and CB's advice. (Mild spoilers for the movies behind that, as well as MS being enormously dumb about The Shroud. Oh, MS. You are so wrong.)

MS: Yeah, that was something Rob -- I think it's OK at this point to sort of talk about. Rob, he wanted some sort of confrontation of sorts to take place. He had a written a particular version of that scene that wasn't what we did.

Claudia and I kind of balked at it, because it didn't feel like the characters. It didn't really feel true to the relationship as it had developed. The way it was written, I think, was a bit more ... What struck me as a bit odd is that they sleep together out of the blue. All of a sudden you have Daniel coming to her, going, "What does this mean? Does this mean we're in a relationship now? Tell me what this means."

It kind of castrated the character a bit in terms of the resistance he put up for so long, that why would he all of a sudden arbitrarily sleep with her? Why would he all of a sudden deal with her in a different way? Because he understands the animal that she is. There's always been this underlining, keeping her at arms length because of the fear of getting too close.

Out of that, through that, Rob turned around and wrote the scene that he wrote, and we decided to take our own stakes with it, where there was all this pent-up animosity. A lot of what's going on between Daniel and Vala has been about the unspoken stuff, about who they are and where they're coming from. There's been an accepted understanding about who these characters are, but they've never dealt with each other in a head-on kind of way.

"Unending" finally sees Daniel breaking through Vala's armor.
We've never seen her truly vulnerable to Daniel, and we've never seen him be absolutely truthful and direct in terms of is own baggage that he carries in relationships, as well as what she represents to him. That felt a lot truer to us. And because of the nature of it ... we didn't want it to be PG, or just to sterilize it by having it be just a conversation. We wanted all the emotional baggage for myself, the emotional baggage of not just her, but the emotional baggage of everything that she represented, and how vulnerable he was making himself to come across in a way that was, let's face it, defensive.

In reality, when people are defensive they behave in a not-quite-constructive kind of manner, and we wanted to make that as real as possible, because the reconciliation was going to be there at the end. It wasn't out of character. It was very much in-character, but it was a level, a place that the character went that we hadn't seen him go in real life before, and that was very important for us to do.

So yeah, it's a little bit "not Stargate" in a lot of different ways. And I know people have commented on that in terms of it not looking really out of the place for the character, but at the same time it's very much in place for the character in my mind.

GW: Do you think that resolution at the end of the scene comes about because Daniel was testing her, or because he's truly, genuinely surprised by what her response is?

MS: I think both. I think that there's an innate testing that's going on through the course of that, and he's expecting a certain response. He's expecting a more sort of playful, more sort of "How dare you." He's expecting her walls to go up, because it's almost like a poker match. He's waiting to see if she's going to be vulnerable first before he is -- and because she's so vulnerable, and he didn't expect it, that we see that resolution, that turn around with him.

It is a test, but I don't think he was expecting it. That's the genuineness of it. When he sees her actually hurt, he's actually mortified himself that he's taken it so far. Yeah. I haven't actually seen the scene, but that's what we were commenting on the day. All those notes felt right.

[danceswithwords]

Thanks for the link; it's interesting to hear the backstory on that scene, and helps explain why it was so surprising (it wasn't the writers' first instincts, which are always to go for the safety). I'm glad they at least tried to address some of the underlying issues, because I don't think it would have been convincing to have them just fall into bed together. And then they overshot their mark, but hey.

As for MS's take on "The Shroud"... Well, he was right about it being really talky, I will give him that.

[asta77]

I agree with a lot of what Michael says here, largely because they are all points I've made in trying to rationalize the scene. It's interesting to note he talked about all this without seeing the final cut. If he had seen that he may have realized there is a difference between unpacking the baggage and throwing it at the other person. There are some great ideas there, but Daniel still comes off as too harsh.

[cofax7]

You know, I still don't think the business was that out of character for Daniel--I just want Vala to have beat him up a bit first.