Q&A Explosion

The writer of this episode, Albert Kim, had his wife Jennie visiting that day, and she got some amazing shots of the explosion down on Long Beach. This is the second time we detonated a massive fireball in the nation's busiest port. That should not alarm you at all.

I'm going to play catchup on some Q&A on my 12-minute break from writing the season finale. Let's see what odds and ends we have ...

Mike Cane: Still patiently awaiting my fix of Parker pr0n. How many eps are in the can now, btw? And is the debut now DEC instead of OCT?!

You got Parker aplenty coming up, particularly in this episode. Parker fight scene! In the meantime, Parker's character profile is up on TNT. At some point I will bully them into putting these things on YouTube.

If we go by the normal numbering system with the pilot being #101, we are currently shooting #110. Funnily enough, Jonathan Frakes is directing, and Brent Spiner is our guest star. I'm hauling Wheaton down for lunch on set so we can have a mini-reunion. And then I will make them wear the uniforms. And call me "Captain."

#111 was co-written by Chris Downey and Amy Berg. I'm hacking out the two-part season finale now, with Chris probably coming back in in to split the last few scenes. There's only three of us now, so we're spread very ... efficiently over our time writing and being on set.

The December debut has been in the works for a while. When all your other TV shows are ontheir hiatus, there will be shiny new episodes of crime and heist action on TNT.

Stefan: How about a millionaire CEO on the run series? He has a grip with a change of clothes and a wallet full of ATM cards to accounts containing a total of fifty million dollars. In each episode he meets up with people in screwed-up circumstances, from whom he learns valuable life lessons and helps with a carefully applied pile of cash.

The timing of our "vengeance against fat cats" show does seem to be fortuitous. We joked the other day that our promos should just be 15 seconds of Chris Kane beating the shit out of the CEO of Lehman.

The downside, of course, is that many of our cons depend on financial institutions that only exist before an utter financi-pocalypse and societal meltdown. By the time we air in December, we may have to bang out some ADR dubbing.

"Okay, roll the scene."

"... we can transfer the stocks into the fake corporations's name, and then trade them back for title to the land."

"Good, let's redub."

"... we can transfer the [potable water] into the [tribe's compound] and then trade them back for [pointy sticks] to [fight the cannibal homeless]."

emong: Who's the DP on the show?

Dave Connell. Unflappable Aussie.

kevin: Hey Jon, KidCthulhu and I are cable-tv-free. You know if Leverage is going to be available on iTunes?

It will be downloadable, and we are cutting the deal right now. Considering you can now get your television from XBOX marketplace, Amazon unbox, Netflix streaming (which will itself soon be available through XBOX), streaming on the network website and Hulu, and iTunes -- the bosses are hacking out a lot of complicated numbers even as we speak.


richard Jensen: Say, John. Not to rush you or anything. I know you've got hours of TV to get finished but I was curious about your thoughts about the Large Hadron Collider that's suppose to go online this week. Considering that I've heard people screaming about the possibility of micro black holes crushing the world into the size of a proton, I kind of curious to see what your take is. My feeling is if there was any cause for alarm, you'd be the one blowing the horn.

Well, I look at it this way. If we're perceiving the Earth around us at this very moment, then we're looking at a couple options.

a.) Earth was not destroyed.
b.) Based on variations in the experiment, the Earth was destroyed in certain timelines, but we're living in one where it didn't happen -- or were living in one where it happened, but are now only perceiving the timeline where it didn't because when it did, those versions of us died.
c.) The Collider destroyed the Earth, the universe spun down Earthless, and then reformed to spawn our slightly variant Earth, where we then -- following the natural evolution of scientific inquiry -- rebuilt it, but this time it didn't destroy us. This may have already happened nigh-infinite times.


imjohngalt: Oh dear God, how can this disaster that is the Republican VP nomination not wrench you away from your writing table? I would've at least expected a short conversation you've recently had with Tyrone.

Tyrone just keeps pointing and laughing, occasionally choking out a strangled "Fucking white people". The thing I find fascinating is that Sarah Palin was originally popular because people could relate to her as someone they knew from their everyday lives: the bubbly, over-achiever hockey mom who really gets involved in the community. Why she's fallen, hard, is that people realized she was in fact another person they knew from their everyday lives: that crazy mom who turns even the PTA into an insane obsessive power-play and forms weird hostile rivalries she executes through byzantine yet childish plots, seasoned with a dash of Fear of Anything Different.

Back to writing. I'll backtrack through the posts for more questions, but toss up anything you find interesting in the Comments here.