Writer/co-executive producer Alan McCullough in his Sanctuary digs. Photo by Jeff Weddell and copyright of Sanctuary 2 Productions.
When Stargate Atlantis' TV run was brought to an end after five years, series writer/producer Alan McCullough, who had previously served as a writer/story editor on Stargate SG-1, relocated from the Pegasus Galaxy to take on a new creative challenge. He joined Sanctuary as a writer as well as co-executive producer and penned four scripts for the show's second season. In his first one, Hero, Chris Gauthier, best known as Walter in Eureka, plays an ordinary man who is transformed into an unlikely costumed crusader against crime in the show's fictional New City.
"Hero was a really fun script to write," says McCullough. "It's a fast-paced and humorous episode, which I never really had the opportunity to do on Stargate. There was always humor embedded in the dialogue in Stargate, but it was rare that I got to write a comedic script. There were people who were sort of the go-to guys for that; Martin Gero and Brad Wright, in particular, and Rob Cooper also wrote a couple of great comedy scripts and Carl Binder wrote one, too. So when I came on Sanctuary there was a chance for me to do the same.
"In Hero, our people are on a mission to track down an Abnormal when all of a sudden they're thwarted by a guy in a neoprene suit. He drops out of the sky, grabs the person we're chasing and flies off, so we're left wondering where the hell this guy came from and how he can fly. He's apparently human and appears to be wearing a homemade outfit, but nevertheless seems to possess miraculous powers. Chris Gauthier played the part to a tee. He was hilarious in it and brought so much to the role.
"The actual shooting of this episode was difficult because there were a lot of stunts. We actually brought in a flying rig which, I believe, is one of the most advanced ones you can get. I'm not well-versed in the technology of it, but you sit in front of a giant computer screen and program in all the moves you want to do and draw all the vectors on the screen. The operator then turns the rig on and it flies you around in the exact way that it was programmed to. So they did a full day of shooting just with that rig and came away with some fantastic stuff, including a scene where, at one point, our superhero has to fight a monster.
"Again, it was a fun episode and Chris has a blast and we had a blast working with him. It was a nice break, too, in the season. We had just come off shooting the two-part End of Nights, which is an energetic and tension-filled story where we're fighting for the survival of the Sanctuary, and if you saw the episodes you know that something big happens to one of our characters at the end of part two. Then in the following story, Eulogy, we're dealing with the death of a character. It's a very poignant episode, so it was good to then come in with episode four, which was lighter in tone and a total breath of fresh air. Personally, I think Hero is one of the best scripts I've ever written and one that I'm really proud of."
There was a very specific idea in mind for McCullough's next Sanctuary script, Veritas, but, as is often the case in the world of TV, it eventually evolved into something quite different. "We started out with marching orders to come up with a background story for Bigfoot [Christopher Heyerdahl]," explains the writer. "We pitched story after story to the Syfy Channel but there was always one thing they didn't like, so we would go back and try to retool the script. However, by pulling out that one thing, the whole story collapsed.
"So we'd start fresh, and ultimately we came up with a story that the network loved but that had nothing to do with Bigfoot's back story whatsoever," chuckles McCullough. "It does, however, involve Bigfoot in a very major and pivotal way. At the very beginning of the episode, Will [Robin Dunne] arrives back from a trip and he's frantic; he's been told that Bigfoot has been killed. Will goes to the morgue where he finds Bigfoot lying there with two bullet holes in his chest, and we further learn that Magnus [Amanda Tapping] is the prime suspect.
"From there, it becomes a bit of a murder mystery that takes place within the context of the Sanctuary. They have specific charter rules for how they deal with situations such as this, including summoning what's called The Triad, which is a group of telepaths that arrive on the scene and start questioning people. Within the Sanctuary network we have individuals with these incredible abilities, so why not use them to solve crimes. Will, of course, sets out to prove that Magnus had nothing to do with this, but the deeper he digs, the more evidence seems to mount that she actually did shoot Bigfoot.
"It's a real mindbender of an episode where, quite honestly, all is not revealed until the very end. We designed it so that at every single turn you think, 'Oh, they're going to tell us who really did it,' but you get no satisfaction until the story is nearly over. This was another fun episode for me to write and, coming off Hero, much more of a subdued, emotional type of potboiler. We had a great guest-cast, too, including Erica Cerra [Deputy Jo Lupo in Eureka], who did a fantastic job playing one of the telepaths. And Amanda Tapping did an incredible job directing the episode."
The writer's third Sanctuary script, Penance, reunites Helen Magnus with an old friend, Jimmy, played by Tapping's former SG-1 costar Michael Shanks (Dr. Daniel Jackson). Although it would have been tempting to pair them up on the screen, Shanks actually shared the majority of his scenes with the show's newest castmember, Agam Darshi, who plays Kate Freelander. Writing-wise, this one was a bit of a whirlwind for McCullough.
"We received notes on the outline last Friday night from Syfy," he recalls, "so I started writing the script on Saturday and Sunday and, hopefully, I'll finish it up today [Monday, June 1st, 2009]. It's certainly the fastest that I've ever had to turn around a script. This one starts out with a really action-packed teaser where our characters are in Old City to meet an Abnormal who's a 'mule.' By that I mean he has a pocket in his body that can transport hazardous or very sensitive material, and in this case he's carrying a container for us in his belly.
"So we get there, but, of course, the bad guys are on our tail and all hell breaks loose. Our people get separated and Kate and Jimmy end up trapped in a derelict hotel room. Kate has been shot and the two of them spend a considerable amount of time together getting to know one another. In the process, Kate opens up to Jimmy and we discover a great deal about her past, including how her father was killed. With Kate being a new character this season, we felt this was a good opportunity for audiences to learn more about her. Meanwhile, Magnus and everyone else are out there looking for Kate and Jimmy, and it's a bit of a chess match to see who's going to arrive first and save the day.
"The neat thing about this episode is that we're going to be doing some location shooting. We do almost all our filming downstairs in the studio, much of which is using a green screen, and we also shoot outside on the studio lot or in the nearby streets. We usually don't have trucks to go out on-location with, but for episode eight [Next Tuesday], we're packing up all our equipment to go film at a pool. Thanks to some scheduling magic, we have the truck for the rest of the week, so we're taking advantage of that and going to shoot for two, possibly three days on the old Watchmen set. At least that's the plan. We went out to look at the set, which is on Marine Way, and we're going to use that as Old City. It's perfect because the story has a lot of skulking around as well as gunplay and a bit of a car chase, so I'm really excited about that."
Despite being a freshman with Sanctuary, it has not taken McCullough long to find the voices of the new characters he is writing for. "Obviously I'd worked with Amanda before, and although this is Helen Magnus and not Sam Carter, I still hear Amanda's voice in my head, so it's just a matter of finding the right words," says the writer. "Ryan Robbins, who plays Henry, has a very distinctive voice, so I seem to be able to hear his voice quite easily, too.
"The character I struggled with the most was Will. I've since found his voice a lot more, but with my first script, Hero, I really struggled. Ultimately, I don't think anyone picked up on that. The episode moves so quickly and there's so much going on that I don't think you would have the time to sit there and think, 'Hmm, that didn't quite sound like something Will would say.' I noticed it, though, and when I'd write a line I'd think, 'That doesn't sound right,' so I'd delete it and write another one. So it took me a while to get Will's dialogue to sound right, but episode seven is wall-to-wall Will and I think I found his voice a little better for that one.
"It helps, too, that Damian Kindler [series creator/executive producer] is always around, and we go through the scripts with a fine-tooth comb. We'll look at each line and if there's one that bothers any of us, we'll find another way to say what it is we're trying to say."
The writer's fourth and final contribution to Sanctuary's second season is part one of the show's two-part season ender, Kali. The germ of the idea for this episode came from a prior one, while the setting was the result of a previously discussed story that never came to be. Catching up again recently with McCullough, he was happy to talk about Kali's development.
"Earlier in the season we were breaking a story called Justice," recalls the writer. "It was set in a small town, which is tough to do on our show as we don't have suitable sets and didn't want to go out on-location. So Martin Wood [executive producer/director] proposed setting Justice in a Mumbai slum, as that would be relatively easy to re-create. We loved that idea so much that we decided to save it for the [season] finale. Unfortunately, Justice never got produced, which is too bad because it was a great story.
"The idea for Kali came partly from Veritas, where we introduce an Abnormal called Big Bertha, who is capable of creating earthquakes. I'm pretty sure it was me who suggested that we use Big Bertha in the season finale as well. I proposed that Magnus had lied to the heads of the Sanctuary network about destroying the creature and secretly kept her alive in an enclosure at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. And then later on in the writers' room, we came up with the idea for the Makri, the small spider that telepathically links to Big Bertha.
"We went back and forth for weeks with this story," continues the writer. "It's probably the toughest one I've ever had to break. We knew we were on to something and felt like it could be big, but we just could not find the story for the life of us. Eventually, and after numerous rewrites, we shaped the story into Kali, parts one and two. Later in the process I was reviewing part two, which Damian wrote, and went to him with a logic problem. Basically, something Will was doing made no sense. And I distinctly remember what followed next; Damian sat back in his chair, thought about it for a long time, and then said, 'I think I know what to do - Will has to dance a Bollywood number.'
"I nearly fell off my chair. He was exactly right, of course, but I thought we'd be marched right out of the TV business for good if we tried to do a full-scale Bollywood number in a Sci-Fi show. Luckily, Mark Stern [Syfy's Executive Vice President for Original Content ] bought into the idea and off we went.
"Also late in the game, Damian, Martin, Amanda and Robin were invited to Tokyo by Syfy Asia and decided to take advantage of the exotic locale to shoot a scene for the show. We brainstormed and felt it belonged in my episode, and it turned out to be a great way to start things off. Shooting the Mumbai sequences took place on our [studio] backlot, which is where we built a massive labyrinthine Mumbai slum, and it looked photo real. To top it off, it was over 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 Farenheit, pretty much the whole week we were filming. Everyone was dying from the heat, but it helped with the authenticity. I'm not sure how we're going to replicate that in part three, which will likely be shot this coming February or March."
Having thoroughly enjoyed his first year with Sanctuary, McCullough is eagerly awaiting the start of work on season three. "I'm definitely looking forward to the challenge of us doing 20 episodes and really pushing the boundary with our season [story] arcs," he says. "And also somehow getting ourselves out of the conundrum we created at the end of Kali, Part 2."
Steve Eramo
As noted above, photo is by Jeff Weddell and copyright of Sanctuary 2 Productions, so please no unauthorized copying or duplicating of any kind. Thanks!
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