TIMESPANNER BONUS MATERIAL: 2020 Hindsight

  Time Spanner: "The Dan In The High Castle" is still available to listen to entirely legitimately for a month HERE (and less legitimately, archived alongside the pilot here.)

 I love this by robotqueenvictoria.

 There's not much sense performing a post mortem on a thing you've written, especially if you're as sloppy as writer as me - don't get me wrong, I like my stuff, but I seem to put the hours in only on the bits of writing that I find fun - the big splurges and then the problem-solving - rather than sorting out a structure beforehand and playing within that. It's quite an actor-y, hand-to-mouth, gig-economy approach: the unstructuredness feels freeing at the time, but in the long run probably provides less freedom than working with the resources available to someone with an actual plan (which is why I found it so rewarding to write for Shunt, whose shows already had a structure in place by the time I'd join the devising). Specifically, the fantastic exhileration felt when a last minute tweak helps me suddenly understand what I've written, is offset by the powerlessness felt re-encountering all the bits that go nowhere, written before that understanding dawned. But this isn't a post-mortem.

Rainbow over Vauxhall, February, 2020

 Today was a day for applause and thanks, so let me here assert that writing The Dan In the High Castle was a far from lonely experience. Seven months before the recording in November 2018, a first draft was read out at John Finnemore's flat. This had Martin and Gabbie travel two years into the future to discover a dystopia they thought was the work of Kraken, just as in episode that aired, but it ended with them escaping into a mysteriously optimistic 2019, and also their relationship didn't develop beyond Martin finally getting to do something fun with his excellent new friend. This might have made good on the promises offered by the pilot, but what it didn't do, as my sister Susy pointed out, was provide any possible closure if this was to be not just a sequel, but the finale. It was London Hughes who suggested Gabbie should punch Martin in the face. So I put that in and went off to redraft. I'd had a new idea about octopuses, which didn't make it in, and anway months passed and, as with the pilot, it was producer Gareth Edwards who paid for coffee after coffee while trying to convince me that as much fun as I was having penning screwball wise-cracks, the threats should be real, and "Martin should care". It was then ancient friend and collaborator Tom Lyall who pointed out over another coffee that Gabbie should be also be returned to 2016, as missing two years of one's life is obviously huge, and when I suggested Martin should nevertheless still stay in 2018, it was again Tom who said crucially, "Yes, and Gabbie should rescue him."
 "Gabbie should rescue him?"
 "Sure."
 Over pints, David Mitchell just said he loved it which was highly encouraging, but otherwise useless, but really encouraging, but otherwise no use, but great. 

Maida Vale studios, November, 2018.

 These improvements made, I sent the possibly final draft to John Finnemore because he's always lovely with notes, and he replied as nicely as any intelligence could that actually he prefered the read-through. This is how his reply ended:

 "I loved the last draft, and the biggest problem with that one - Gabbie's passivity - is now fixed. So it's in great shape. I just miss Martin as my life-line of fundamentally understanding what the story is about, because it's someone who wants something simple and human. More even than Arthur Dent wanting a cup of tea. More like The Dude wanting his rug back. Maybe it's his shoes. It's almost his shoes now, but not quite, because he doesn't really try. And anyway, it's not his shoes, it's Gabbie. It's got to be Gabbie.

Does that help? I cannot imagine it does."

 Of course, it helped. So I threw out the pair travelling to 2018 in order to get Martin "future shoes" and instead made their motivation Martin's investigation of a future in which he gives up Gabbie and the Spanner. And I added Gabbie quitting. And finally, one week before the script was recorded at Maida Vale, I added Martin offering the Spanner to Gabbie at the end. And I remain very happy with that ending, and as I say, wish I'd thought of it a little earlier so I hadn't wasted all that time giving Bridget a load of exposition about "The Usual" that goes nowhere. But if there ever is an episode 3, I am of course now stuffed.

I spent a lot of those months playing "Half-Life 2".