Today on the seaQuest MPS Blog is an early script revision of the second season premiere episode Daggers. Daggers seems like a placeholder title to me. "Well, it is about the daggers revolt, so lets call it Daggers until we come up with a better title...ahhh the titles are not onscreen, so who cares." Not to mention the "credits to be determined," which becomes Jonathan Falls. This has to be a pseudonym, because I can find nothing else by Jonathan Falls on IMDB or elsewhere online. Perhaps this means that the episode was a team effort of the entire seaQuest writing staff, or perhaps whoever wrote it was displeased with how the episode turned out and wanted to Smithee it.
Scripts for seaQuest used the standard color revision system, so after the writer's draft, you had white pages, pink pages, and then blue, yellow, and green, before starting again with second white, and so on. This is a pink revision from July 10, 1994, suggesting it is still early in the process. The episode was shown on TV on September 18, 1994, so there was only a couple of months between scripting and the finish product. The quick turnaround always impresses me with TV production in comparison to movies.
What is a dagger you ask...
Yep, this is the introduction of Dagwood and the other Daggers, or GELFs. In fact, Daggers is essentially a second pilot for seaQuest, now being shot in Florida, and introducing new characters, a new science fiction focus, and even a new ship, the seaQuest II. Several of the new characters are interesting, if drawn on standard tropes and written broadly two-dimensional for much of the season. And yes, there were some really terrible episodes in the second seasons, but Daggers was not too bad. It had some story issues...the super-duper military sub that the GELFs steal that only has a couple of rounds of torpedoes. Seriously, rather than think of a good way to end the showdown between the seaQuest and the GELF's sub, or perhaps have both ships actually battling it out with torpedoes and explosions on your Sunday night action-adventure series, the writers get out of the situation by having the daggers run out of torpedoes and seaQuest using nothing but intercepts. The episode also spends too long on the underwater shenanigans with the GELFs invading UEO headquarters. Yes, we see you are filming underwater and have little personal sub toys, but get on with it.
The new bridge set, however, was very cool...
Below the jump is another page from the script showing a deleted sequence and a pictorial comparison to the final sequence in the episode.
One of the reasons I like scripts, especially early revisions, are the chance to see deleted sequences and how the writer's changed things as they developed a particular episode.
The pink revision of Daggers had a sequence with Brody fighting off several daggers, shooting out the office window, diving through it, and "sprinting for his life" as he is chased by the daggers through the prison colony. With the GELFs closing in on him, he reaches an escape tunnel and dives in. In the episode itself, this sequence takes place entirely in the colony commander's office.
Oh no, what does this door-to-door salesperson want...
Escape tunnel now in the office...
Terrible visual effect of a dagger looking down at a blue screen, I mean at Brody in an escape pod...
The pink revision sequence with Brody running through the colony was clearly more dynamic, but would have taken longer to shoot, which is why I guess they cut it.
Next time on seaQuest MPS blog, Mark Simon's Storyboards: Motion in Art. A great book with a bunch of storyboards and other designs from seaQuest, including a design for the ultimately deleted tunnel that Brody would have been running towards as described above.
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