by Sean Platt
Don’t worry, I used to do that, too.
From very early on in the first season of Yesterday’s Gone, we knew the war between the Light and Darkness would come home, and it would be an all out alien invasion. No, scratch that — an alien occupation.
And we knew bits and pieces of the things that would lead us to the sixth season and the ending we have in mind. But a lot of the in-between stuff wasn’t clear. We needed to pave the road to the ending we want to tell.
Given that YG is our flagship series with the greatest number of fans, there’s also that pressure to deliver a story that makes you glad this went six seasons rather than wrapping in three. And we want you to finish wishing we wrote ten more! (Not that we have any plans for that.)
This season’s tasks:
Tell an awesome big story
Bridge the gap between Seasons Four and Six
Continue to develop and surprise you with Collective Inkwell’s brand of deep, complex characters.
Because while Yesterday’s Gone is a big action-packed spectacle, we always put our characters at the front of everything we do. And this season we needed to really put our favorite characters in some uncomfortable spots — especially Mary and Boricio.
On the subject of Mary, I noticed a few comments from people who thought that our female characters weren’t very strong in Yesterday’s Gone — something to the effect of the female characters suffering a lot of torment, and relying on men to save them.
This wasn’t a frequent comment, but even a few mentions will get us to look at what we’ve written and see if maybe there’s something we overlooked. It’s hard to see your own stuff objectively, particularly so close to publication.
So do I think our women are too weak?
No, I don’t.
Why?
Because we don’t subscribe to the current fad of creating super women (or men) who can do anything and kick all kinds of ass with a machine gun even if prior to the story they’d never handled a weapon.
I think there should be strong female role models in fiction, and that women in books shouldn’t be relegated to cliched “women in distress” roles or used solely as romantic interests, or props for men. However, I think that when you go too far in the other direction, you wind up being patronizing, and creating a wholly unrealistic character that nobody identifies with!
And here’s the thing — everyone suffers in our books. Men, women, children — everyone.
If you’re a lead character in a Collective Inkwell book, you’re going to have a rough time. Your hopes will be dashed, your fears will be realized, and … you might just get killed off.
Happy endings are a guarantee for no one.
I happen to think Mary is a very strong character, particularly given the shit she’s been through. But she’s not military trained, a secret agent, or a serial killer. She’s a mother pushed to the extremes in pursuit of protecting her child. But she still worries whether she’s doing the right thing. She still second guesses herself. Because she is NOT a super hero. She is human — like all our characters.
There’s a scene we wrote for Season Four where Mary and Boricio were attacked by the infected in the motel parking lot. Boricio told Mary to stay back while he took on the enemies.
Now, I can see how that might make Mary look like she’s letting the man take over, but you have to consider two things. One: Boricio told her to stay put. Boricio is pretty damned convincing when he tells you to do something. Second, even if Mary can kick ass (and she’s had weapons training), she still has to consider one thing: if she dies, her daughter is on her own. In other words, just because she can do something doesn’t mean it’s an easy decision to put herself at risk. Sometimes running or hiding is the wisest move.
While that might be seen as Mary being weak, many of our other characters (except maybe Ed Keenan) would’ve done the same thing in that position.
Hell, one of our weakest characters in the book is Brent Foster. If he were a female character, I imagine we’d catch all sorts of hell for all the fretting he does in the series. Hell, we have gotten flack for Brent being too whiney. But here’s the thing — he’s not unlike many men I know. Guys who aren’t fighters. Who aren’t skilled killers. Guys with more book smarts than street smarts, who tend to overanalyze themselves into analysis paralysis.
Like I said, we write human characters — warts and all.
But most of our characters aren’t warriors. They’re regular people put into difficult positions, fighting for their lives.
Boricio was another character we thought a lot about this season. Last season, a minority of readers felt that he’d been neutered a bit. “Boricio finds love and is hanging out with Mary and Paola? What a pussy!”
But I don’t think I’d want to read a series where the main characters were the exact same in Season Five as they were in Season One. We don’t want Boricio to be a one note character. We love the complexity of him having to reconcile his killer side with the now “fixed” part of himself.
He’s not a good guy by any means. But he’s also not the psychopath from the first season.
This season, we were tempted to push Boricio back in the other direction. But then, as the story unfolded, we said no, fuck that noise. We’re going to break him down even more.
Last season he faced his past in the form of a father of a young woman he’d killed. This season he faced his greatest weakness — the death of a love he’d finally allowed to flourish inside him.
Losing Rose (again) has done something to Boricio which turns him into the force he’ll be in the final season. It was a necessary journey, and one we enjoyed writing as much as Mary’s.
Lastly, this season saw us exploring Luca more. He’s still a kid, but a bit wiser for all he’s been through.
He’s also not the Luca we first started with (that boy had become The Light at the end of Season Three.) This Luca is even more complex, riddled with guilt, and struggling with the power growing inside him and The Darkness’ plans for domination — something Luca doesn’t think he can stop.
We originally planned to make Luca the embodiment of The Darkness. We were going to take our most innocent character, Luca, and turn him into the big bad guy while making our baddest character, Boricio, into the main good guy.
But as we were writing the story, it just didn’t feel right — at all.
Luca didn’t WANT to become the main bad guy. While he’d suffered at the hands of bullies, and had a few rough spots, it hadn’t changed his core. And in fact, the alien inside him responded as much to his kindness as anything — preventing Rose’s Darkness from carrying out It’s plan.
When we decided that Luca wasn’t going to be the main bad guy, and Desmond was instead, we briefly considered killing Luca off. However, we had plans for him in the sixth season. Paola wasn’t so lucky.
Given where the story was going, and what she (and her mother) had already endured, it felt like we’d be cheating if she had made it out of this season alive.
It was tough killing her. She was a resilient kid and we particularly loved writing the scenes with her and Boricio.
I think the only regret in killing her now is that we didn’t give her more point of view chapters. We considered upping her chapter counts this season but thought that doing so might give away our plan to kill her off. We’ve all seen the TV shows where a secondary character is killed off and you can see it a mile away because all of a sudden that character starts getting plenty of screen time.
We didn’t want to telegraph Paola’s death.
I admit to quite a bit of glee when we planned this out. First pretending to kill her when Desmond hid her away. And then we returned her to Mary, only to have her die almost out of the blue during their escape.
George R.R. Martin has nothing on us when it comes to killing main characters!
All of this is to say that we love our characters, and hope that it shows — even when we kill them off.
And here’s
the thing about readers’ opinions: remember how I said that some people thought Mary was too weak, Brent was too whiney, and Boricio had been neutered? Well, they’re perfectly entitled to think those things. There are no perfect characters, just as there are no perfect people.
Our characters are all flawed in some way, just like us.
These are as much your characters as they are ours. And we’re honored that you care enough about the people in our world to develop strong feelings — good and bad.
We hope you enjoyed this season as much as we did writing it. Thank you for continuing this journey and inviting us into your lives — it’s an honor that continues to humble us.
We can’t wait to show you what’s in store in the final season, which you’ll see early next year.
As always, thank you for reading,
Dave (and Sean)
October 4, 2014
Season 6
::Episode 31::
(FIRST EPISODE OF SEASON SIX)
“Wounds”
Prologue
Paul Roberts
Three and a half years ago
Paul knew he wasn’t alone in the dark alley.
He could feel the presence of something lurking in the shadows. The only question was whether it was human or alien. He picked up his pace, stolen antibiotics tucked into the pockets of his jacket, pistol in his right hand. If he didn’t make it home, his daughter, Emily, was as good as dead.
The cold sweats, puking, and 104 fever weren’t a normal illness. No, it was the plague that had killed so many — including his wife — since the aliens landed six months ago. Paul had hoped they were immune, seeing as they’d survived the first outbreak. But maybe the illness had mutated. If they’d had a natural resistance, that no longer mattered. It was back to finish the job.
If Paul lost Emily, he’d have no reason to go on. No reason to hide from the roaming aliens, or worse, the savage humans left behind. A bullet in his head would be better than another day alone. He was only alive and fighting to keep Emily safe.
She can’t die now.
Paul chided his own lack of preparation.
He’d built a secret shelter in his apartment building’s basement then stockpiled food, weapons, and emergency medical equipment. But he’d failed to replenish the stash of antibiotics after Jane died, and now his daughter might follow her to the grave. And just like that — the power and money he’d acquired as a TV producer of hit reality shows like The Box, Sing for It, and American Adventure was all for naught.
Paul was two blocks from home when the men appeared, spilling from a building’s rear door, holding guns and bags of loot. All four saw him immediately.
Their guns were aimed before he could raise his.
He was outmanned and outgunned. At their mercy.
He put his pistol down on the asphalt and raised his hands, trying to appear as nonthreatening as possible. He had a second gun in a back holster beneath his jacket, and a knife strapped to his wrist — both last resorts.
Three of the men might’ve been brothers. They were all within a few years of each other. Lean but muscular, broad shoulders, dark hair, brown eyes, scruffy beards. Paul pegged them for partly Italian. The fourth man was older, heavyset, graying hair and a ruddy face. Maybe German. Paul wondered if the eldest man was their father. It seemed odd that an entire family could survive the sickness, but a shared genetic trait, or whatever the hell it was, could’ve spared them like it had for Paul and his daughter.
Ruddy Face spoke first. Stern and calm, aiming a shotgun at Paul. “On your knees.” This was all business, at least to the older man, but he could feel the others’ anxiety, visible in their bright-red auras. If he weren’t careful, this robbery would turn to a murder.
Judging from their duffels, they’d already loaded up from whatever shop they’d just left — a bakery, an electronics boutique, or a clothing store, Paul figured, assuming he remembered the shops’ locations correctly.
Paul went down on his knees, keeping his arms high, eyes on Ruddy Face.
“I don’t have anything worth taking.”
One of the young men came over, bent down, and grabbed Paul’s pistol. “I wouldn’t say nothin’.”
“Empty your pockets,” Ruddy Face said.
Paul had nothing in his pockets, save for a small lock picking set and, of course, the medicine.
He placed the lock picking set on the dark wet asphalt, followed by the medicine. Four large bottles of antibiotics, one hundred pills in each one.
“Whoa, those pain pills?” the guy said, holding Paul’s gun with his eyes on the bottle.
“No, they’re antibiotics.” Paul thought about explaining that they were for his sick daughter. But he didn’t yet know these men, and letting them know he had a young girl at home, unprotected, might lead to an uglier death for Emily. In the invasion’s aftermath, people hadn’t come together as they had after September 11. They’d turned on each other instead, committing the worst of atrocities.
Paul had tried plugging his ears but heard it all the same: a paralyzing aria of murder, rape, and God knew what else might have been happening beyond his protective shelter, where predators surely ripped prey to pieces. Mankind’s history repeated. If anything, the recent era of relative peace was an anomaly. Before then, before civilization, mankind had been cruel, barbaric, worse than animals. Now society’s shackles were gone; mankind at his worst was free to do what he did best — kill. Survival of the fittest. Or cruelest.
While Paul didn’t consider himself a cruel man, he would do whatever it took to protect his daughter.
The young man bent, retrieved the pills, then studied the labels.
Paul waited, hoping the man would see they weren’t Oxy or some other recreational drug, and would toss them back.
Ruddy Face intervened. “Give those here. We can use ‘em.”
“Please,” Paul said, meeting the man’s eyes, “please leave me at least one bottle. I’ve got a sick one at home.”
“A sick what?” one of the young men asked. Unlike the older man, his voice was cruel, as was the scar running down his right cheek. He stared down at Paul, his trigger finger itchy.
He heard the scarred man’s thoughts as clear as day.
Maybe he’s got a bitch we can take.
Judging from their new clothes in a mishmash of styles, these men weren’t used to money. Their shoes had no scuffs: shiny black boots, expensive loafers, and dress shoes, none suited for the apocalypse. Ruddy Face was dressed in older clothing — jeans, dark shirt, a well-worn leather jacket, and comfortable-looking sneakers.
“A daughter. She’s ten and has a terrible fever.”
“You sick?” The man who’d taken Paul’s gun fell two steps back, still aiming at his forehead.
“No, no, she, I mean, we, survived the sickness. She has something else, and she’s burning up. She’ll die without those pills.”
The scarred man said, “We’re all gonna die anyway.”
Paul looked to Ruddy Face. “Please, sir, just one bottle. You can keep my gun. Just let me get back to my daughter. She’s lost her mother already.”
The old man stared at Paul, evaluating.
“I got a better idea,” the scarred man said. “Why don’t you take us to your place and give us your stuff?”
“We don’t have much,” Paul lied, meeting his awful eyes. He got a glimpse of the man’s stream of thoughts. He was already picturing shooting Paul right in the head. Maybe he’d even make the little girl watch, before he turned his attentions on her.
“I don’t believe you. Stand up. We’re going to your place.”
Shit.
Paul had to play this cool. There was no time to try and infiltrate all of their minds. If he chose the wrong target, he could trigger a chain reaction of unintended horrors. He’d nearly caused a riot early after The Fall, and had been lucky to escape with his life.
He met Ruddy’s eyes, trying to figure out the relationship betw
een the men. If he was their father, why was Scarred Man barking orders? Was he their leader?
“Come on, Tony, let’s just let him be,” said the young man holding Paul’s gun.
Tony is the scarred one’s name. And he is their leader.
Who is the older man?
Tony snapped, “I didn’t ask for your opinion, so shut the fuck up, Marco.”
Tony stepped forward and aimed his pistol between Paul’s eyes. “You gonna get up, or you wanna die right here?”
The man glared at Paul, revealing his issues with disrespect. Paul had to be careful not to piss him off and make it personal. At the same time, he had to stand his ground. A man like Tony wouldn’t respect weakness, and would see it as further invitation to take. He had to tread the line carefully. If Paul was too strong, Tony would see him as a threat to his authority and shoot him on principle.
Paul stood, meeting Tony’s eyes.
“Tell you what,” Paul said, “I’m not going to give you everything. I have a child to look out for. She needs medicine. And we need some supplies. But I understand what’s happening and will give you everything I can if you leave us be.”
“That’s not good enough.” Tony’s eyes narrowed on Paul.
“Then you may as well kill me. If I give you the medicine, my daughter’s dead.”
Paul wouldn’t back down. His heart raced, hoping his gambit would work. If not, Emily was waiting for a father who wouldn’t come home. The thought of her alone — scared, waiting, wondering if her father had left her abandoned or orphaned — was breaking his heart.
He couldn’t show his sorrow. Had to be braver than he was.
Paul looked from Tony to Ruddy Face, going into his head.
His name was Frank, and he was sick of Tony’s shit. The younger man was constantly challenging his authority and pushing Frank to do things. But at the same time, Frank knew that Tony had won over the others. If he screwed up, they all might turn on him.
