Prop, UEO Hat, Daggers (201), The Fear that Follows (202)

Good morning from the seaQuest MPS blog.  Yet more hats here on sQ MPS, with a UEO hat featured in numerous episodes.  I only grabbed images from the first two second season episodes, Daggers and The Fear that Follows, but anytime there were UEO soldiers in the background, chances are some of them were wearing this type of hat.  I have commented on Daggers before when I posted an early script, but as for The Fear that Follows, talk about a mix of things that just do not come together.  Yea, the aliens from Such Great Patience, but they seem different.  They are no-longer exploring, but looking for the beginnings of life (?), because they are dying (?), and they think the beginnings of life might help them with their death (?).  Oh, and lets throw in some Native American mysticism, because that will be cool.  Even though the season one episode made it clear the aliens had made it here a million years ago, somehow they also returned and chatted with Indians who were around in the last thousand years.  Also, lets arrest Darwin, that would be a good way to open the episode.  Oh, and lets make everyone forget what happened with a little time travel.  Seriously, too many half-baked ideas.

The UEO hats on the show were simply a black military-style hat with a UEO patch sown on.

As seen in Daggers, with UEO 'soldiers' wearing the hat while guarding the GELFs.  I use soldiers in quotes, because of the second season's lax attitude to military protocol.  Seriously, you are prison guards and you are playing video games?   A great seaQuest drinking game, when the UEO or seaQuest military personnel act like they are not in the military; no salutes, no standing to attention, lax uniforms, etc.  At least they got that right in the third season.

Below the jump, a few more shots of the hat and people wearing this hat style in the show

Storyboards, Mark Simon's Storyboards: Motion in Art

A short post today on the seaQuest MPS blog.

Yesterday I posted a page from the pink revision of the Daggers script.  This script featured a deleted sequence with Brody being chased through the prison colony and diving into a tunnel with an escape pod.

What is really cool is that Mark Simon's Storyboards: Motion in Art includes numerous storyboards and production drawings from seaQuest, including the a sketch of the above-discussed deleted tunnel.

I encourage you to pick up Simon's book.  It is one of the few recently published books to have anything about seaQuest in it.


Next Time on the seaQuest MPS Blog: A framed storyboard from Dreamweaver.

Script, Daggers, July 10, 1994 (201)

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.