Inside the Gray Area: "Unfound Door"

Writer and showrunner Edward Champion continues the deep drive with the fourth “Paths” installment. He discusses why the “Paths” songs deliberately match the chord progressions of Top 40 hits, Janis Joplin, overlapping cliffhangers inspired by Doctor Who, the mediocrity of Chris Chibnall, Dark Shadows, how imagination can make up for a meager production budget, the influence of the Doctor Who serial “Inferno,” why Liz Shaw was an underrated companion, where the name Greg Sutton comes from, creating a creature character, defying the cliches of how people react to strange creatures, acknowledging the feelings of animals, Father Knows Best, dorky American nostalgia, breaking the rules of time travel narratives by acknowledging human truths, attempts to understand why “Little Yellow Different” keeps coming up in the scripts, blogs from the 90s and early 2000s, how to get characters to buy into parallel universes, the importance of extraordinary situations in storytelling, how characters expressing doubt creates verisimilitude, Doppelgangers, The Good Place, how he helped Katrina Clairvoyant to recite Prometheus Unbound, the influence of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound on the “Paths Not Taken” story structure, the myth of Prometheus, the connection between fire and Bonfire, Aeschylus, Demogorgon and the underworld, tyranny and the liberation of human society, when other people perceive you to be the devil, the likable character debate, Melissa Etheridge, setting up story elements to create narrative points to resolve later, the Damon Lindelof problem, why it's important to have multiple characters react differently to a situation, fleshing out the Receptionist's character, how Monty Python and the Meaning of Life influenced a joke about the universes, Back to the Future, relationships as a ticking clock, being true to lesbian subculture, hookup culture, and being self-critical. (Running time: 19 minutes, 25 seconds)