Lesson 6

[Lloyd Shellenberger]

Lloyd Shellenberger Episode Descriptions Mod 2 Lesson 6: Opening Summary that sells the season.

Working hard every day to become the best writer I can be and as a result I do become the best

writer in Hollywood.

What I learned from this assignment is how to assemble a bible that is interesting and binge worthy.

Season one Summary The Puzzle Works formally known as Benjamin Greene.

Season one of the Puzzle Works starts out with Col. Greene being forcefully recruited into the Puzzle Works. The Puzzle Works is a top secret Pentagon agency that makes sure embarrassing revelations never make the press or the light of day. From the very beginning we see how the Puzzle Works and Col. Benjamin Greene are perfectly suited for each other. They are both brutal and merciless. The season opens up with Col. Greene drinking himself into oblivion in a bar after the death of his wife months ago. A husband is abusing his wife and Col. Greene steps in. Why? He stepped in because the loud mouthed bumpkin was disturbing his drinking time not because he was abusing his wife. Throughout the whole series we see Col. Greene do the right thing for all the wrong reasons and this right up his alley. Col. Greene beats the man so badly the bartender must draw down on him to stop him.

Col. Greene leaves with the wife and go to his Ft. Bragg quarters only to be greeted by Puzzle Works agents. They kill the women and warn him “Thou hast no Gods before me”. This ominous meaning takes on new meaning when we discover Col. Greene was a former CIA assassin who left the agency for his wife. Col. is told a safe is now in his office Col. Greene defiantly ask what happens if he doesn’t? Do you know where your son is Col? He is sent a video of his son in a club dancing with his girlfriend Sgt. Deidra Jones. The women he is with is murdered and removed while Greene is told to go to his office the next morning. “You should never drink and drive Col., we need your command, remember that”. Col. Greene calls his son after the agents leave and asks him where he is at. He is at a club with Jones. The Black suits were there!

The next morning Col. Greene, Lt. Greene, First Sergeant Desmoines arrive at the office and find a safe in a corner where there was no safe before. and and the combination in the envelope reads “Tic Toc, Bakers clock, on your neighbors block, these are the villains you must chop” and you have until tomorrow afternoon to retrieve your orders and begin your mission. Col. Greene solves the riddle, which is 12-13-14 and retrieves a set of orders with no name on them and two bags of cash called the Black Bags. One bag contains Afghanistan currency while the second one contains American Dollars.

The first episode sets up the entire season as the crew goes to Afghanistan kills the growers. Unfortunately, while in Afghanistan Col. Greene and his crew are ambushed in Afghanistan but they survive. Col Greene wakes up from a coma and realizes who set him up. The head of the Ft. Bragg cartel is none other than his former colleague and friend Major General Edwin Mosley whom he serve in Afghanistan with. After Col Greene disposes General Mosley and his crew he cooks up a plan for revenge. He poses as a drug lord, while becoming an informant and dealer for the DEA and the Local PD. They agree to work with him and his crew.

Despite all this activity, several high profile cases pass through the Pentagon that need Col. Greene’s expertise. The pentagon would prefer they disappear go away forever with no hope of resurrection.

Each time these cases are assigned through orders found in Col Greene’s office. we never really see or meet the Puzzle Works agents and large amounts of Black Bag money are always involved. At first they do not believe this to be real until they have competed their first mission, when they are put on a C-150 and their targets are painted for them. This suddenly becomes very real and believable.

Over the course of the season Col. Greene and his crew become the targets of local drug lords and a ruthless FBI agent name Darren Stockton. The season culminates in the attempted murder of Lt. Greene and First Sergeant Desmoines. The survived, but will the drug lords survive the wrath of a father scorned?

[CJ Lyons]

CJ’s show summary:

What I learned from this assignment… that details are less important than evoking emotion in the reader.

PATIENT X:

When a nun who’s been shot is rushed to her ER, Dr. Angela Rossi breaks all the rules, cracking the nun’s chest before the surgeons arrive. As she holds the flatlined nun’s heart in her hand, Rossi suddenly freezes, time slowing to a stop as the dead nun commands her to “Find the girl, save the girl.”

Time resumes with no one noticing Rossi’s momentary insanity, and she can’t revive the nun whose memories now haunt her. Driven to find the truth, she follows the nun’s memories into the labyrinth of Cold War era tunnels beneath the city where she stumbles across a serial killer’s lair. Did the killer take the girl?

Rossi’s been suffering strange symptoms for awhile but this event has terrified her—something is very, very wrong not just with her body, but clearly also her mind. She finally seeks help and is given the worst diagnosis possible: Fatal Insomnia, a rare inherited prion disease that causes catatonia and dementia before death. Rossi’s one love, medicine, is now forbidden to her.

Rossi vows to at least save one more life before it’s too late: the girl.

Driven to find the killer, she partners with the girl’s former gangleader father, Devon, clashing with the detective investigating the nun’s murder, Ryder. Together they brave the dangers of the tunnels but fail to find the girl, instead Rossi’s new powers lead her to a group of children locked away in the tunnels—all suffering from Fatal Insomnia.

Which is impossible—the prion disease is inherited and even though Rossi is adopted and didn’t know her parents, none of the children’s families have the gene and they aren’t related to Rossi—and some of the children have strange new psychic powers similar to Rossi’s.

Someone has created an artificial form of Fatal Insomnia and is spreading it among children. Is it the killer? Why? Where’s the girl? Is there a cure?

Rossi may be dying, but if she’s Patient X in a man-made epidemic targeting innocent children, she won’t stop at anything until she has the answers—even if it means breaking every oath she took as a physician, every law, even, in the end, using violence.

The one thing she never expected: to fall in love with Ryder. It’s a bittersweet irony that can only end in tragedy. But when she confronts the murderer and strips his memories before killing him, she learns something even more horrifying: the person who has been infecting children with Fatal Insomnia, who has engineered this outbreak and used Rossi as Patient X to create the prions, is Rossi’s own biological mother.

Making Rossi the one person who might be able to stop a man-made apocalypse before it’s too late for the rest of the human race.

[hilton Garrett]

Hilton Garrett, Show Summary

What I learned – The importance of framing the story – and a little more about writing to touch a feeling in the reader. And that that skill still needs work.

Summary

Two children, one white and one black, who witnessed deadly family tragedies in South Georgia in the 1950’s return to the scene of the crime 20 years later to uncover the long-buried truth and exact retribution on the guilty.

A white journalist who has never gotten over his guilt of not saving his mother from drowning when the family car plunged off a bridge is driven to learn the truth, and perhaps finally start living his own life.

It’s 1974 in Atlanta, Georgia. Well-known investigative reporter Will Calhoun has a life filled with problems. He got passed over at work. The nightmare images of his mother’s death when Will was twelve years old have come back stronger than before. He can’t sleep. He needs help but his wife Becca wife is fed up with his refusal to become a father, and is now talking divorce. And she may be cheating.

With a near super-human effort he channels this swirling mayhem into his work, so that on the surface he looks like a successful prize-winning reporter tirelessly working to expose corruption, particularly in Georgia politics. His favorite target is Byron Rountree, long-time state senator and the owner of the bank in Will’s small South Georgia hometown, the bank that took Will’s family home.

Will never hesitates to follow a story, every story, down to the bedrock. But the one story he never pursued at all is the one about the wreck that killed his mother and father. He had always considered it to be an accident which required no further inquiry.

Then one day Martaan, a mysterious man from the Islands, sends a cryptic note that throws Will’s life into a tailspin. They meet and Martaan explains.

It was murder.

Angry and incredulous at first, Will threatens Martaan, but nevertheless can no longer pretend his mother’s death was simply an unfortunate accident. Now he must confront this most painful of stories. Was his mother really murdered? Who would want to kill his mother? Why would do they that? Why is his parents’ death such a touchy topic 20 years later? Questions rise up like a covey of flushed quail.

For the first time since his parents died Will makes the drive from Atlanta to his childhood home of Elam County in rural South Georgia, the scene of the crash, and also Rountree’s home base. While investigating Rountree’s background now that he is a candidate for governor, Will not only dredges up obscure fragments of Rountree’s early dealings, he also unearths long-held secrets of the county he left behind as a boy. The kind of secrets not talked about much by the folks in the county. Secrets that seem to support Martaan’s assertion. But is all this coincidence? Or is there a connection?

As he digs deeper he threatens to expose a conspiracy between Rountree and a New Jersey crime family which, under Rountree’s political cover, seems to be expanding its drug operation into the fertile grounds of Atlanta and South Georgia. So many noses to fill.

This story, more than any he’s covered before, unleashes powerful forces that want him silenced.

Can he survive the investigation long enough to learn the real truth?

And can he trust Martaan?

______________________________

[Brian Bull]

BRIAN BULL – Show Summary

“What I learned from doing this assignment is…
I have to learn to keep going even if I know the answers aren’t quite right. The more layers I think of the more complex the story gets and I have notes everywhere – it’s like putting the puzzle together but sometimes the pieces seem to belong to a different puzzle – I will think I have had a break through but then it brings up all kinds of different issues.

ASSIGNMENT

Pilot as Inciting Incident

FORESIGHT

A lonely optometrist, Jim Brown, goes through his normal day of making glasses to perfection. He and his office Manager, Delores, banter regarding their horoscopes as Delores is a believer in the Psychic Realm and Jim is not. Jim will often visit his widowed mother, JoAnn, at Fairhaven Assisted Living where Jim knows she is well taken care of and safe.

Jim hasn’t dated in years because of lack of time but the truth is his heart was broken when his fiancee’ was a “no-show” at the wedding.

Zelda, a psychic next door to Jim’s Optical store tries to give her crystal ball to Jim after she “saw” her devilish sister in a reading. Zelda but suffers a heart attack dropping the crystal ball, splitting it in two. Zelda goes to the hospital. Jim takes the two halves, determines the crystal ball is irreparable and is intrigue by the clarity of the glass, then he creates a pair of glasses which he finds out will enable him to see the future!

With the “psychic” glasses Jim “sees” his future wife, Gloria. He also “sees” Jezebel, Zelda’s sister, attempt to murder Zelda at the hospital!

How can Jim stop Jezebel from killing Zelda and how can Jim convince his “future” wife, Gloria, to marry him when she has no interest at the present time?