With the release of the long-awaited final episode of
Slayer Academy, it’s time to catch up with showrunner and co-creator Lee A. Chrimes on bringing the second of his major MZP projects to a close:
So! The End. For now, at least. Jumble of emotions or powerful stirrings of pride? Pride, most definitely. I think for all the rocky moments we had during Season Three (*our ‘difficult second album’ phase), we pulled things back into shape magnificently well throughout Seasons Four and Five.
When we started Slayer Academy back when it was myself, Chris Kelly and Paul Robinson, we were just a bunch of kids (the show’s been on air since 2005, after all) enthusiastically hurling ideas out there with little care for keeping things coherent and consistent four or five years down the line. We may have planned all the way up to Season Six (and I wish I could still get to those old plans, they’d make for very interesting reading), but as the production team changed during Season Two and plots, characters and arcs shuffled accordingly, the show ended up in a completely different place.
As I sat down to write the finale, a lot of the legwork hard work had already been done - Season Five had been an extra year in the making both due to time constraints on all of us in the Real World, and also because we were making sure everything was tied up. Character arcs had to be closed off, stories brought to a proper end and also that the closure the show gave felt right. Buffy ended on a huge turn in the mythology, but while the stories of the characters were far from over, they were within the context of the show as it had been. I think that’s what we aimed for here.
So yeah - pride. We did a good job.
How did it feel when that last ‘End of Show’ was typed? Relief, I think, but not that it’s all over and I can move on and THANK GOD I don’t need to look at these people again, because that’s not the case at all. It’s ‘relief’ in that the show has come to fruition with a finale that I and all the staff are happy with, and given the mess we got into during Season Three, and the long production periods for Seasons Four and Five (plus the big, unplanned delay we had to take after 5x15 and again after 5x20).
If the finale didn’t feel right I wouldn’t be releasing it, put simply, and as always I’m being as careful as I can to avoid plot holes or logic gaps, or anything else I won’t have an opportunity to correct (as of right now there are a couple of things that need fixing, like making sure one character knows something in 5x21 they need to know in 5x22, and things like that). We all know the Ethan Plothole in
The DSR’s finale, and much as we may rib Tony for it the fact remains it’s an easy thing to do.
Okay, so it took an extra few sheets of notepaper alongside the storyboard to make sure I knew who was where doing what to who at every moment to make sure everything flowed correctly, but given the reduced number of players by that point (much like the S4 finale, in fact), it was surprisingly easy to manage. Compare that to the potential logistical black hole the Faith finale could have been (but in the end went 100% smoothly), and again a lot of the work was done before I started.
What about the final scenes? The whole show hinged on a good ending - did you achieve that?Absolutely yes. The first version was a touch too brief, so with a few additions and some excellent suggestions from my team (Alden, Tom, Chris and Li) I think it’s now a perfectly-pitched coda to the show. I obviously don’t want to give anything away but I think fans will be pretty happy with everything. Much the same as I made sure Faith’s final moments were a reflection of where the show was at that point and the heart and soul of the show overall, the last scenes of Slayer Academy should stay with you.
After making a classic mistake with the Buffy S9 finale and turning it into an extended lead-in for the movie (something we were forced to do for production reasons on Angel too, despite me being a lot happier with Broken Wings than Original Syn), then I made sure not to repeat that with Faith or Slayer Academy. Even with Ragnarok set for later in the year, we made sure early on that the SA finale wouldn’t just be a feature-length lead-in to the events there - we had to give the show its own, contained ending and then pick up threads as necessary later on.
We’ve also had the well-received (if a bit too bonkers for its own good at times) Buffy Season Eight comic completing a 40-issue run recently, and that was definitely an influence both on Slayer Academy and the Ragnarok miniseries, primarily to make sure we didn’t follow the same route and strive to make the two threads very different wherever possible. I think we managed that - the comics went off on a completely different tangent in a lot of ways which made us breathe many sighs of relief! It’s been documented before now that the Fred/Illyria plot on Angel came about after Darren had mapped out the Dawn/Ulithios arc for MZP’s Buffy S8, so we were glad to avoid a similar coronary!
What was the planning process going into the finale?Going into the finale, it was very much like the Faith finale ‘Election Day’ in terms of setup - the characters splitting into smaller groups to tackle individual aspects of a larger threat, before combining at the finish for the victory, before an extended epilogue to close off any loose ends. This meant that in addition to the printout of the storyboard (I need to have these in front of me when I write, it helps me to visualise the flow of the story from beginning to end - like the index cards some people use), I also had a sheet of paper with a rough map of the Academy campus, a list of players on both sides and then arrows and notes to help me check who was doing what to who, as well as where and when. These kinds of visual aids are essential when writing a multi-location, multi-character action sequence, otherwise you can get in an awful mess and have people popping up where they’re not meant to be, or taking too long to show up somewhere (or getting there too quick).
It was then a question of looking at each character and working out where we needed them to end up. Alive? Dead? If dead, how, where and when? If alive, how would we end their story on screen? Then there was the element of making sure everybody had something to do - in a series finale you can’t really leave anyone out. You’ve got to make sure your characters all get a beat to themselves, something significant, whether it’s a single act, a memorable line or some other contribution to the story.
With all that worked out, then it just ran like the writing did for Faith’s finale - knowing who’s got to do what and when means all I needed to do was connect the dots and watch as it all hooked up.
How did Slayer Academy come about? What was the inspiration? The original concept of ‘Slayer School’ came to me back in 2004 whilst working on Buffy Season Nine, and the introduction of Sofia is what prompted the development further. She was written in as a successor to Buffy right from the start, but kept in the background enough to not derail Buffy’s own narrative (like how they used Billie in the last season of Charmed. Not that I watched that just because Kaley Cuoco was in it. LIES). Giles then tells people about the Academy as it’s under construction behind the scenes, so Sofia could go from the Original Syn movie into 1x01 ‘Scary Monsters’ as both an established and new character.
The ‘Slayer School’ concept as it was originally developed was a great one - I may still be able to find some of the development notes, although they may have been lost to the mists of reshuffles and spring cleans as they were part of the old version of the MZP forum. The idea was to take the fallout from both Buffy’s finale ‘Chosen’ and Original Syn - namely the Activation of hundreds of new Slayers worldwide plus the opening of several hundred Hellmouths the world over - and combine them into a globe-trotting, ‘Alias-with-vampires’ action show. We planned spinoff seasons with a black ops unit, had a more rapid cast turnaround as Slayers ‘graduated’ and were replaced every couple of seasons by a new cast, and overall it was envisioned with a very different vibe.
And how do you feel it developed over time?I think setting it in the English countryside influenced the direction of the stories - we weren’t in a big city and so the isolation of the campus lead to us focusing more on internal stories from Season Two onwards. Global travel was prevalent throughout the show, but the main mistake of plotting we made was to spend the first half of Season One rapidly introducing too many new characters. The girls would travel to another Hellmouth, close it, recruit the local Slayer and jet back, only for said Slayer to fall foul of overcrowding and not be seen again for many weeks. Poor old Keeya only notched up three speaking appearances - her introduction, one briefing scene and then her death! This meant that the core team of Sofia, Skye, Alita, Frankie and Greg kept having to fight for screen time within their own show.
Also influencing the early approach was producer Paul Robinson’s push for a more soap-y vibe to the Academy-based stories, which didn’t turn out to be as good a fit as we’d have liked and led to some very muddled plots (like the Greg/Aiden romance) and episodes I’m no longer keen on (‘The Slayer Who Loved Me’, which was a bit of a misfire even though canonically it introduced a vital McGuffin for future seasons). That’s no disrespect to Paul, just that his style didn’t suit where the show evolved to in time. His Kennedy miniseries, though unfinished, seemed to go down pretty well with the fans, so he’s got plenty of props to his name either way.
Anyway, with the more solid, character-driven Season Two leading into yet more new faces for Season Three, the show did lose its way a little bit and force us to start getting rid of characters. This is where the show earned its reputation for a high character death quota, something I tried to fight against right to the bitter end. Three new Slayers and a half dozen new bad guys was just too much for us to keep on the books, so by the end of S3 several big names were gone from the show, and some frantic mid-season replotting had seen several new arcs develop to get things back on track. With Sofia’s defection to the Cabal, whose own Evil Plan wasn’t as well-defined as it needed to be, then we went round in circles a bit until we finally got our heads round what we were doing in the last third.
Season Four thinned the herd again, with a bio-engineered virus the major threat alongside a new Anti-Slayer, and two more strongly characterised villains to unite the ailing Academy against. We always suffered a bit from weak villains, I think, because as well as being very difficult characters to nail anyway, we often found ourselves using them in quite repetitive situations (like Braeden’s gang hunting down stray Slayers). The key issue was that the Academy was a static location, and while it had its defences it would get raided by force at least once a season, leading to an annual ‘Academy gets trashed/aftermath’ two-parter around the two-thirds mark each year. There’s only so many ways you can play that, which is why ‘Finger In The Dam’ this year turned that on its head and actually had the Slayers driven out for once.
I stand by Season Four as full of some good, strong character work, and the reveal of the Slayers’ existence for Season Five was a great turning point too. Season Five then took an extra year to get started for one reason or another, which was frustrating, but once underway it thundered along at a good speed throughout. We’d finally got the focus back where it belonged, plots and characters were closed off neatly week after week, and by the last few episodes we had a small crowd of players on both sides, which is the way it always should have been.
So I wrote the finale with a feeling of accomplishment, that we’d taken these girls on an incredible journey, told lots of great stories, learned a lot as writers from the experience and managed to seal the show’s five years off with an emotionally satisfying, relevant and fan-pleasing finale. That leaves me feeling good about it - much like Faith, I could easily write for these characters again (and I will, with Ragnarok airing hopefully at the end of the year), but right now I don’t have to. That’s the liberating thing, I think - I’ve done my work with them, it was fun, and now I can leave them be and move on. I’ll be exactly the same when SiB ends - it’ll have been amazing to write for the guys all this time, but when their stories are done you have to let yourself draw a line under it, say ‘that’s it, now - done’ and move on. Even if you later cheat and do a follow-up story - the main show itself is finished the way you wanted it. And that’s all you, as the writer, can ask for.
So I hope you guys enjoyed the five (technically six) years of Slayer Academy as much as we enjoyed writing it. There were bits we loved that you loved too, bits we didn’t like that you weren’t keen on either, and bits we screwed up that you rightly hated. Overall I firmly believe we did a hell of a lot more right than wrong, and so Slayer Academy is an achievement everyone who worked on it past and present can be proud of.
And speaking of that, let’s just have a final roll call to everyone involved with the show, in no particular order:
Alden C. Caele, Chris Haigh, Tom East, Li Robb, Daniel Loach, Aaron Driscol, Brian Lamkin, Lewis Payne, Rob Kenneth, Chris Kelly and Paul Robinson, plus every single one of you out there who took the time to read even a single episode of the show.
