Gee, wouldn't you know it?  I'm a quarter way through my fifth draft, and it finally hits me - I haven't given Walter an arc!

For those that don't know, Walter is an intelligence from the stars who communicates with a young boy named Andy, bringing him into the next phase of human evolution.  Andy's arc is HUGE.  Walter?  Um...

Looking at classic mentor roles in the films I grew up on, I'm finding that the most common lesson a mentor learns from a young student is the ability to let others in, or perhaps to rejoin the human race after a tragic accident.  Since Walter's whole motivation for contacting Andy is the salvation of the human race, and since Walter is doing all the contacting from a brass-tacks perspective, that's not going to fly.

Obviously, Andy's growth has to somehow connect to a transformation within Walter.  Trouble is, Walter exists on the very edge of our ability to understand already!  Andy's perception of Walter is more about the limits of Andy's mind, and less about how Walter is defined.

Whatever Walter is growing out of, it's something...  He's passing out of my ability to understand him, and whatever his transformation is, it should be a mystery.  I need to find a way to let him grow out of my understanding, and I need to let Andy find a way to relate to that transformation, and encourage it.

All that said, Walter's transformation doesn't need to complete his transformation on screen.  His arc isn't 100% in parallel with Andy - Andy is part of his journey.  Still, we need to see enough of it to get a sense of where it's going and be satisfied that Andy helped him on his way.

That's what I get for going out into the stratosphere with my supporting characters!  At the same time, we always talk about how aliens must be so much more highly evolved, and then we give them clean power and fusion blasters.  Get real. 

Today, I wrote the new draft of the conversation between Andy and Walter o the subject of death... and Walter sees it as the root of Earth's issues.  He treats it like an addiction.  Just quit, for God's sake.  Then, without the haze of habit and need clouding your vision, you can really start to see the problems you're facing and the solutions at hand.

That's evolution.

Is Walter becoming one with God?  To put it another way, is he on the brink of being pure energy?  That would be interesting, and true to the sci-fi genre.  It's also thematically flexible enough to live in the simple, human, dramatic world of Receiver.

A being that's almost pure energy...  Sounds like Walter to me!

I was wondering how to handle this little problem of mine, and something suggested I bring it here.  Thanks, guys.  I'm glad we had this talk!

I'd better not blog like this about my spec scripts!