Padded cell service
Spoilers lurk herein concerning Episode 408, so listen to it first!
From the time we began AGENT STOKER, we challenged ourselves — let’s hold to the standard of how we’d like to be doing this as a live-action television series. Let’s have directors who actually work in TV, let’s use SAG-AFTRA actors with plenty of TV credits and make the show a signatory to SAG-AFTRA, let’s commission our own theme music from a working composer, you name it —
And another one of those standards was something that doesn’t happen so much in television anymore. It used to be the case that a season of television would allow for one of the episodes to be written by a freelancer, someone who wasn’t part of the regular room. Now that so many TV series are only ten or even five or six episodes, though, you just don’t see those freelance opportunities like you used to.
On AGENT STOKER, we decided that we should offer at least one script per season to someone other than our co-creator Brian Nelson. And not just any episode, but episodes that would actually make a solid contribution to the show. So in Season One, Dana Brawer wrote Episode 109 which introduced Agent Arkos, one of our most beloved characters. Dana herself made the choice to draw the name Arkos from the science fiction masterpiece A CANTICLE FOR LIEBOWITZ, maintaining our tradition of Agent codenames from beloved genre literature.
In Season Two, Dana returned to write Episode 206, which not only reunited her with Agent Arkos but also let her create our Israeli director of the Night Brigade, Ronit Bar-Gadda. The expertise in dark matter that Dana gave to Ronit eventually led to last week’s episode 407, in which Ronit left this planet to merge with the dark matter up there in the heavens.
Season Two even featured a second guest writer in Adrian Cruz, whose script for Episode 203 let him introduce the Passenger — voiced by Adrian’s friend Hugo Armstrong (whose voice was already established as the Passenger’s “body,” the late lamented Wellman of Season One).
After having two guest writers in Season Two, we dropped the ball in Season Three as we drove toward our epic climax of ending the universe —
But in this new season, we were determined to renew the tradition. And so we introduce the writing of Tori Larsen, whose Episode 408 starts in Perth, Australia but also references her own Canadian culture in many ways — not the least of which is the featured beverage Tori chose, “Moose Milk” (listen to the episode, already, if you don’t know what that is)!
And Tori also introduces a new actress and character to the Stokerverse — legend of the LA theatre scene Elizabeth Ruscio who plays the unpredictable Agent Cervantes. For more of her, tune in next episode!
One challenge of this episode is that it’s mostly set in the Perth apartment of our returning character Cordwainer Shute, so what were we going to use as a graphic? Considering that Cordwainer lost his memories and a bit of his soul, ending up in an asylum, we decided to go with the image of a padded cell. But we’ll keep watching for a chance to work an actual moose into a future story!