Strike pay
Caution, this post includes spoilers about Episode 409, “Blue Blazer” — proceed at your own risk!
As the writer of AGENT STOKER, it’s shocking that I haven’t worked bowling into this series before now. Maybe it’s because every episode already nods to baseball, and so the sports world is already somewhat covered?
But bowling has been satisfying to me ever since I was a third-grader rolling duckpin balls down the alley. In junior high school, I discovered Triangle Bowling, a great alley in Wheaton, Maryland across the street from Barbarian Book Shop where I’d pick up my comics every week. In 8th grade I was in a neighborhood bowling league, and again in 11th grade where Jim Becker and Cindy Kirkham and I finished second in the league. In college I got good enough that I’d regularly score over 200.
Yet the satisfaction isn’t really in winning or in the score — it’s in the physical satisfaction of taking something heavy, hurling it away from you, and knocking things down. Nothing’s better than a strike, but there’s also a great pleasure in aiming precisely enough that you pulled off a challenging spare.
In 1989, I directed a play at Maryland’s Round House Theatre, Steven Dietz’s MORE FUN THAN BOWLING. Its hero is obsessed with how he’s going to die before his time, and bowling is how he keeps the fear at bay. He thinks that by knocking things down again and again, you knock down death again and again. It made a certain sense.
Yet for all that, it wasn’t till I was thinking about what new backgrounds we could deliver for our amazing sound designer, Patrick Hogan — he’s always so great at welcoming new challenges and investigating how to bring about this or that effect in our soundscape — it was only when I was thinking about what we HAVEN’T done in sound that it came to me what great percussive vibes lurk in a bowling alley. And so it came to be that Stoker and Cervantes would need to find Rosa de Galilei in the most unlikely place you’d ever look for her.
This episode also gave our wonderful actress, Emily Deschanel, a chance to play something other than Rose’s enigmatic sternness. The trope of a hero who’s forgotten who they were is certainly a genre standard, but it was especially fun to see Emily voice the character of Rose, a workaday woman without big ambitions, easy to talk to, easy to hang with. And convincing such a character that she has preternatural talents, that was even more fun as it let my old friend Beth Ruscio, as Agent Cervantes, cut loose as the wild card woman she plays so well.
Satisfying some long-held story ambitions has been a great aspect of Season Four — and those ambitions continue next week in Episode 410!