Finally, what are your thoughts on The Departure?
The Departure is an episode that I’m really happy with.
I’ve never written an episode quite like The Departure before. We, the writers of the show, had so carefully planned out this four episode arc starting with Alex’s death through to The Departure, so specifically that when I was sitting down to write the script I literally knew every scene.
You always do an outline, but then you get it and you start to write the script and you realise "Oh, let me do it this way". But with that episode, everything was connected to things that had happened before, which was great.
What I really loved about that episode was that we were able to deal with the question of "What if they could go home?" We had never really dealt with that before in a big way. So what I tried to do was, while keeping the plot moving along, to keep a lot of story time to deal with that idea. That was what was emotional to me, that was what was meaningful to me.
[There] was the idea of all of them having to say goodbye, forever, to this planet, and to people who they have come to love there, Max saying goodbye to Liz, and Michael to Maria, Isabel to her human parents. That's an aspect of the show I’m particularly drawn to and I was very excited to deal with that question.
