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ASSIGNMENT: EARTH THE FIRST year of most TV shows normally establishes a tone, format and style of storytelling for subsequent seasons to follow. However, Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict looks set to be one of the rare exceptions to that rule. According to Paul Gertz, the show's former executive story consultant-turned-executive producer, the only thing viewers should ever expect of the alien invasion drama is the unexpected. "One of the things we really want to do with Earth: Final Conflict is to keep people guessing," Gertz tells Xposé. "You don't really know what you're going to see every week when you switch on the show. That's something The X-Files does really well; you turn on that show and you might see a monster of the week or you might see that overall arc they've got going. That's certainly the kind of thing we're trying to do on Earth: Final Conflict. "If you look at Float Like a Butterfly, Resurrection and Destruction, they're all pretty different shows. Some people don't like that kind of variety of storytelling, but I think the bulk of our fans do like it. I actually believe it's one of the main reasons the show was successful last year, and it's going to be a big part of next season. Next year is going to be packed with twists and turns and surprises, and I think viewers are just going to love it." Gertz is in a good position to comment on the creative development of Earth: Final Conflict, having assisted with the creation and realization of the show's ongoing story arc, and also devised and scripted more episodes of the series than anyone else involved with the production. In fact, Gertz has begun to find that the show is taking on a life of its own. "It sounds like a showbiz stereotype or cliché, but it's actually true," he insists. "When your characters tell you where they want to go - and I'm not talking about the actors, but the characters themselves - that's just the biggest rush you can get. When you take your characters into a certain place and they want to take you somewhere else, somewhere you haven't thought of before, it's just really, really exciting. "It can also have an affect on the show's ongoing storyline," he continues. "Obviously, we know where we're going with the show generally, but we don't exactly know what road we're going to take to get there; there are a lot of little details that we haven't decided, even though we do know where we're gonna end up. Now I probably shouldn't admit this, but last year we created a few characters that we hoped would become recurring characters, but for whatever reason, they didn't work out - either the actors weren't right, or their chemistry with the regulars wasn't right, there was just something missing. "Whereas on the other hand, there were other times when we created characters last year who we really didn't expect to come back; we thought they'd be great for a one-off appearance. And then for some reason, the character comes on the show, blows everyone away, really lights up the screen and has a great dynamic with our regular characters, so we try and figure out a way to get them back on the series. Lieutenant Beckett's a great example of that; we just cast her for one show (The Secret of Strandhill). We didn't know what a dynamite actress [Kari Matchett] was, or how great she could play off the Sandoval character, even though we wrote that in." Read the full story and discover more changes in store during Earth: Final Conflict's second season in Xposé. |