What was it like writing for an established character like Faith?
Oh god. Faith is a force of nature as is Eliza who plays Faith and so I was very excited about doing a Faith episode.
The problem I found when it came time to approach writing that script, Of course, we break all the stories together, and we broke this story with Joss. [It's the second half of] a two parter, which was Five by Five and Sanctuary, and in Five by Five you get Faith with the crossbow, hired by Wolfram and Hart to kill Angel.
So in the first part of the Faith two-parter, Faith was as she’d been established, kind of this bad ass, but she has a breakdown at the end of Five by Five. So the thing that I had to come into was a Faith who was trying to find her way back to some kind of redemption, who’d had a breakdown and was in a vegetative state for the first part of the episode.
So that was very difficult. [Previously] Faith had been written so specifically that you could really capture that voice, but this was a new voice for her.
Also, Buffy was going to appear in this episode, and I found myself feeling very intimidated because I knew that half way through the story Buffy would appear. I would have to write this iconic important character that I’d never written before and I was already writing one iconic important character, Faith. So when I got to the Buffy/Angel scenes I approached Joss and said "Maybe you could take a crack a these scenes because I’m feeling a little overwhelmed here" and he graciously did.
After that, I asked him if he would share a screen credit with me on the episode, which he did, and it was almost more exciting to see my name with Joss’s on an episode even then writing the episode itself. I liked that episode a lot.
