Hello, friends!
We’re back once again with the blog series where I (the writer) write commentary on each episode of Roy Kaplan. These are all written with the assumption that you’ve listened to the episode (and the ones preceding), so if you haven’t listened to (or read the transcript for) Bait and Stitch, check it out here!
And off we go!
Bait and Stitch is most notable for being the first episode that directly addresses Roy’s past. We’ve gotten very small mentions of it in the last two episodes–that Roy used to be a burglar and that he ‘used to work security’, which it turns out in this episode is actually not, as some people might assume, a euphemism for being a career thief. But now we actually see some people from Roy’s past–Viola Locke, a coworker and ex-friend, and Notion, Roy’s tailor and friend who kick-started his burglary career. We learn that Roy gained the knowledge and skills for burglary over the course of his actual security job, until that fell through largely due to Locke’s actions. As the series goes on, we’ll learn a little more about Roy’s personal life, but this episode is the the biggest chunk of it we’ll see for a while.
When it comes to detective stories, there’s a very important decision you have to make about how important the protagonist’s backstory is. Especially for an episodic series where each episode is written to be able to stand on its own, the story just isn’t supposed to be about the detective–it’s about the case and what they do to solve it. To pull out Philip Marlowe as an example, the only information you learn about his past is a few off-hand mentions about how he used to be an investigator for the DA before getting fired for insubordination and that he went to college and played football at some point and had to get a sinus surgery because of it. His past is irrelevant and he has no important relations–no family or friends. For the purpose of a Philip Marlowe book, he may as well have sprung into existence twenty minutes before The Big Sleep with his powder-blue suit and socks with clocks down the ankles.
Roy is a little different. He’s not really an investigator at heart–he does what he does for personal reasons that we won’t learn for a while yet. As will become increasingly evident as the season goes on, Roy is, first and foremost, a burglar. The skills he uses to solve mysteries are inextricably linked to his past. I could definitely choose to never talk about Roy’s history and just have people take my word for it that he has these abilities, but there’s definitely an emphasis on Roy’s unique skills that opens up intrigue into how he got here. It’s one of my writing principles that if you make a big deal out of something in the narrative, you have an obligation as a writer to follow through, and I think that’s true in this case–Roy’s past is a story that the audience deserves to know, even if it’s only in drips and drabs over several episodes.
One thing that’s nice about this episode is that Roy’s psychic powers are barely present. Yeah, he’s the guy with the ability to magically open any lock, but he’s more than that–he’s a genuinely skilled burglar and he’s very quick to connect dots on his own merits. We already saw in Bomber Blackout that Roy’s no stranger to social engineering, but he brings it back again here to steal the target literally right in front of his mark. He’s clever, he’s brazen, and he’s got a drive to learn the truth–those traits, much more than his psychic powers or his ghost roommate, are why he succeeds.
The other notable thing about this episode is that it’s the first time we get a glimpse of another psychic (or technically, not even that). This is actually one of the reasons we decided to move this episode to be a little earlier in the season–the introduction of a little more overarching plot for Out of Sight. Even though Roy Kaplan is designed so that someone should be able to listen to any episode without context and still understand what’s going on, there’s continuity and knowledge from previous episodes can help inform what’s happening in future episodes. Even with the episodic format, it’s good to have a little bit of a running plot.
I actually spent a lot of time trying to decide if there should be other psychics besides Roy, because I didn’t want this series to become a story about saving the world and I didn’t want the focus of the series to be Roy and his psychic powers. I’ll spoil this right now, but Roy doesn’t ever gain new psychic abilities or really become appreciably more powerful–that’s not the point of Roy Kaplan. I wanted the series to start as a cyberpunk detective drama with paranormal elements and I want it to stay that way all the way to the end. Introducing more psychics inevitably runs the risk of shifting the focus away from what I want the series to be. But I also decided that it would be a waste of potential to tell people that psychics are a thing and then not have any other psychics besides Roy, so here we are. Other psychics with very different abilities from Roy. Stick around and you’ll see where that goes.