Spiral Dive: Episode Two

People always say you should write what you know.

The second installment of Spiral Dive contains a few of the typical elements found in any good sequel. Not to say the show is at all typical. But it is an epic, and it does use some typical devices found in other well-done epics.

Two easy-to-make comparisons come to mind: Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

Each epic has three big elements that make them so damn epic.

Still riding high off any success experienced in the first episode, the heroes experience a little bit more success early in the story. The audience is reminded why they care about the characters and become invested in them once again. Then all that hope and optimism gets thrown out the window. Our heroes dash into varying levels of peril. The story hits a low point. The audience is unsure where the story will lead.

In The Empire Strikes Back, we find Luke, Han and Leia on Hoth. The Empire discovers the location of their secret rebel base and is heading their way. They trio quickly gears up for a mini-battle and intense space chase. But without getting too close to a deadly situation, they all three escape off planet and our story begins. Success! The audience is invested in the characters again. Funny and sexy and heart warming things happen. Then Darth Vader captures them all, tortures Han, and cut’s off Luke’s hand. Lots of Despair.

At the beginning of The Two Towers, Frodo and Sam have successfully escaped from the Uruk-Hai. They’re doing their own thing in the sometimes-rocky wilderness approaching Mordor when they capture Gollum. I’m going to say that the real success that these two experience in this episode is two-fold. They’ve already captured Gollum and turned him into somewhat of an ally. Very nice considering he kind of looked like he could eat them. Then they’re captured by a group of men from Gondor who look like they’re going to take the ring for themselves. The big success is when Frodo and Sam convince the men to let them go. They don’t have to kill anyone and we’re reminded why we like them so much. But all of the sudden, Frodo is half-dead, captured and taken into Mordor and Sam is stuck outside the gates with the ring. Ultimate despair.

In Spiral Dive: Episode Two (finally I’m getting to the actual show I’m supposed to be talking about), Jack Harding is still in the middle of World War Two, stationed in Great Britain on a Canadian base just outside of London. He’s already shot down a few enemies, had a few victories. He’s found a pretty little Polish Jew living in London, too. I’d like to think of Jack’s Polish girlfriend as being just as important as Jack. Because, well – I like her. She’s feisty and exotic. They experience some success together. They make love and then make friends. And they don’t get killed during the bombing of London, or by her other boyfriend/keeper. The despair kicks in when Jack realizes how dangerous Europe is for his girl – and it’s not because of the Nazis. We find out how difficult is to get a Polish Jew out of England, across the Atlantic and into Canada. Suddenly, our happy little couple is thrust into even greater hardship then before because the future is just that much grimmer.

Secondly, sequels often have a great big battle that kills a few folks that we like – or almost kills them, anyway.

I already kind of covered this in regards to The Empire Strikes Back. Darth Vader and Luke have a pretty sweet lightsaber battle that takes them across a few awesome backgrounds. Then Luke gets his hand chopped off and Han is taken by the always-deadly and sometimes-silly Boba Fett. I summed it up pretty quickly, but that is thirty minutes of some of the best cinema story telling ever.

The battle that takes place near the end of the Two Towers at Helms’ Deep was the most anticipated movie sequence the year that it was released. It took months and months of night-shoots to get the entire battle on film. This time our heroes are Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas. They kill like a thousand Uruk-Hai each and survive a serious explosion. It starts looking like they’re going to lose when Gandalf shows up and finishes the whole thing. Kind of the definition of epic.

Spiral Dive is obviously a little different, but it runs along the same lines. The writer Ken Brown, the acting cast and the technical crew didn’t have months to create a fluid and glorious battle sequence. The actors brought the battle to life using nothing more than a little bit of scaffolding and some creative lighting. But it was still terrifying. And wondrous. And exhilarating. Jack really is a few thousand feet up in the air, stuck in a cockpit trying to bring down other flying machines faster than they bring him down. Relying more heavily on our own imaginations, it becomes that much greater a battle.

The last thing writers like to write into sequels is the anticipation of an even greater level of peril and doom to come – the real final battle.

In The Empire Strikes Back, this ends up being a little bit indirect. We don’t so much know that Luke is going to have a lightsaber duel with Vader on the new Death Star and that it’ll end up in rage-tears and then the Death Star will explode. But we do know that our heroes have got to get Han back. It’s going to be dangerous. More people may get hurt. But they’ve got to do it. We also know that Luke is going to have to face Vader. The whole “I am your father” thing really opened a can of worms and now Luke needs to face him and bring a little closure to the situation. Also, we know the Empire needs to go down.

In The Two Towers, it’s clear that Sauron is very close to getting the ring and that his army is getting bigger and stronger every day. All of our heroes are waiting for this world-ending event that’ll take place at Minis Tirith. But the big, epic, final battle doesn’t happen in the sequel, we just start to get nervous about it.

The reason the buildup to Spiral Dive’s epic, final battle is way more intense has to do with how much more real we know their battle will be. Because it actually happened. D-Day was the final battle that Jack and his flight-mates were gearing up for. It was the largest coordinated military maneuver of its kind and it single handedly changed the course of the war. That was the day Europe started moving back into the hands of the Allied forces and out of Hitler’s.

And that’s why I enjoyed Spiral Dive: Episode Two more than The Two Towers or The Empire Strikes Back – things got real. And I mean that in two ways.

The show was live and occurring in front of me as I watched.

And the events in the play have had a direct effect on the real world we live in.

In fact, that’s what I like about all three episodes of Spiral Dive. I can almost touch the story it’s so real.