We got about halfway through breaking EP107 on the show before the overall strategy needed to change. At that point we vaguely knew where we were going, and there were certain huge finale moments that we knew would not change.
So, we’ve paused breaking specifics in 107 and have returned to this big grid/board that has squares going horizontally across for every episode (1-10) with a row for each major character. Each square is for the major plot movement & arc of that character for each episode. What I didn’t realize, even as the writers’ assistant, is how much of the previous arcs that we’d already established had changed. It seems that as you plow ahead with plot, it can really revise how you look at characters retroactively.
The first thing we had to do was reconfigure the previous episodes on that grid so that they really reflected where each character was “coming from” heading into the terra incognita of EP107-110. Or really, 109 since enough of 110 had been figured out by the showrunner in advance of the room ever meeting.
After we went back to the beginning, we had to skip to the end and work backwards from where we wanted each character to end up in the finale. Essentially, we were (and are) just trying to fill in three squares (109, 108, 107). But to me it felt like working backwards meant absolutely anything is possible (in a dire sense). It’s like a Rubik’s cube where you can take the pieces out of the square rather than just shuffle them around. We began the process last week, without the showrunner in the room — today, with him back, we’ll see if we can get past the questions and create enough of a road map to return to 107 and continue trucking forward.