“Backlight” - The Final Year, Part 3
So things didn’t go exactly as Detective Bennett planned, did they? Tamara somehow knew Paul was wearing a wire, and Bennett is not pleased about that! Will this setback in the plan derail a budding relationship between Paul and Bennett… is there even a relationship there? I think Paul wants there to be one for sure, given all the fantasies he’s having about kissing Bennett.
I am so thankful to my friend Emily for allowing us to use her place as Josephine’s home. When I was writing the very first draft of Season 4, I had continually put “undisclosed location” whenever anything was happening at Josephine’s place. Does she live in LA? I don’t know, but that’s kind of the beauty of creating soaps: there are some things we viewers are willing to forgive for a good story. Sometimes, time and distance are arbitrary and/or meaningless. You can get across town or across the country in mere moments. Working in the confines of six relatively short episodes, I simply had to accept that Josephine lived somewhere, and that somewhere is left to the viewer’s imagination. Maybe she’s in San Diego or Santa Barbara—neither are too far, and she could theoretically get to and from LA fairly easily.
Remember when I mentioned there are little nuggets of potential future storylines? Well, I feel like Stephanie’s future storyline is revealed, though Paul continues to be solely focused on his own life to even for a second ask what’s going on in hers. There is a brief moment when Paul manages to shift focus off his life for a split second to ask what’s going on in his best friend’s life, but by then it’s too big a revelation for Stephanie to tell over the phone. But we, the audience, see what’s happening as the camera pans down and we see Stephanie cradling her stomach the way an expecting mother would…
There were so many ways I thought about writing this particular story in the future. An early version of the season had a relationship forming between Stephanie and one of her dog-walking/motivational-speaking clients, who happened to be a detective. There’s another version I’m going to keep a secret because I think it would be a fun idea to play out should there ever be a future where this world continues. It is funny that I wrote this pregnancy into the script (even briefly) because a few weeks before we started filming Season 1, Stephanie called me with the news she was pregnant. She wasn’t showing when we filmed, but I still thought it would be fun to ‘hide’ the pregnancy behind large objects. The large PMS poster would serve that purpose and is why it exists. It’s a fun full-circle moment knowing that Stephanie’s pregnancy would eventually play out within the Misguided Universe.
Getting back to the topic of locations, this is also the first time we are inside Paul’s living room. In real life, I love a well-placed mirror. They open the room up and make it feel bigger than it actually is. However, when it comes to filming within this set, with mirrors aplenty, Scott, my director of photography, had his work cut out for him. In my brain, it’s just simply filming from different angles, but you also have to consider lights, shadows, reflections, and I’m sure other things I’m not considering… but Scott thought of them. Watching these scenes and knowing what a challenge those mirrors were to work with, I am in awe of Scott’s ability to make it work.
In this episode, it is also the first appearance this season of the one and only Susan Coochie. I look at the scenes with Susan Coochie, and since the beginning, I’ve wished I was a better makeup artist so that she didn’t look like such a trainwreck, but then I also think that’s kind of the beauty of her. She isn’t as polished, obviously, as her namesake. She’s a little more rough around the edges and has way more confidence than Paul… that’s for sure. What she lacks in makeup, though, she makes up for in wardrobe. In this particular episode, she’s wearing the same beaded caftan that Nikki Newman wore on The Young and the Restless when the character traveled to Nice, France. I won the ‘delicate & expensive’ wardrobe piece at a silent auction during Melissa Claire Egan’s fan event. After a few years off from filming, I thought it was time I updated the Susan Coochie hairstyle as well. I figured time had passed; she should have a new hairstyle. I did a test run of this outfit during the drag event at the camping event I go to each year. When I posted it on Instagram, I got a lovely seal of approval from the fabulous costume designer at The Young and the Restless. I hope if she sees the episode, she knows I’ve treated the ‘expensive & delicate’ piece very carefully.
As we wrap up the episode, it takes a rather dark turn with Bennett hovering over Paul’s bed while he dreams about Susan Coochie. Bennett’s taking his security detail job very seriously now, and you’re going to want to tune in next week to see how far he’ll go to protect Paul.
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