Production: The Removal of the Antagonist

Even when into production, major changes can happen to the story. Lines can be rewritten, based on the sudden removal of; characters, locations and production hitches. During the production of 'Doctor Who - The Waters of Mars' when shooting in the National Botanic Gardens of Wales.. The issue of bird song became an issue with dialogue, despite the fact that the Gardens was doubling as a space station on Mars.

Russell T. Davies, co-writer of the episode, was contacted and on the evening reissued rewrites that sated the birds were part of the artificial ecological system. This however is a minor rewrites, whilst bigger one shave occur ed they are rare.

However one of these situations occurring during production (to see other minor changes see the section 'From Script to Screen') included the loss of the antagonist.

This was for varying reasons, firstly the loss of the cafe' scene. It meant a major section of the foreshadowing had been lost. We were left with the character being accused of being deus ex machina.

There was the issue of casting. The truth is we didn't want massive sections of exposition, so As shooting came closer it became apparent that (considering we do not have access to professionals or the world of casting agencies) it would be hard to get the femme fat ale character stereotypes would be needed to defend the credibility of the character. This meant we couldn't use anybody our own age, we needed somebody older, more dominant.r, exactly as how we envisioned.

We went through a hiatus of believing that it as we couldn't find an actor to fit the role, we should find a role to the actor. In the previous year we had played characters wearing masks. As we were already bringing back the protagonist from that year, we considered resurrecting his adversaries also.

The issue with this was, that the mystery of the characters worked in our previous project. As the specification was the opening of a thriller, we cold ask as many questions as we wanted without having to supply answers. Yet now we had to create a complete production and to deal with those characters satisfactorily, it would have been a story on it's own.

So we made the dramatic decision to have no antagonist visible on screen. You can not have glimpses of a villain then rely upon them heavily in the plot. It undermines both the set-up and the pay-off. You either have the antagonist quintessential to the story or you hide them completely. We decided that we could use the camera to suggest the character as being watched. Then the screen to cut to black, and have the sound of the character (the character who has remained in silence for the whole production) screaming. This could then lead to the ending scene as planned.

Tim McNiven