Hey!
This is 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) Calling Card, check it out here!
On to the blog post!
I mentioned in the previous blog post that originally Roy Kaplan: Out of Sight was planned for a 10 episodes instead of 12, so later on we added two more episodes to the lineup. The first of those two episodes was Sleep Well, My Darling, and the second one is this episode, Calling Card. When I was coming up with ideas for two more episodes to fill out the season, I wanted one high-stakes episode and one low-stakes episode to maintain the overall tone of the season. Sleep Well, My Darling was the former, so Calling Card is the latter.
Calling Card is the episode where we learn a little bit more about Roy’s prolific burglary career. While we already got a little bit from Foul Spirits, now we get to see Roy’s former notoriety in a bit more detail. Roy doesn’t care for fame, but he’s got a lot of pride in his work and his skills and having some copycat go around and make him look bad is something that really annoys him. And as we know, when Roy’s annoyed, he’s liable to get petty revenge.
This was another episode I had to turn around a bit to figure out the right scenario. I knew I wanted it to be about a copycat thief, but I had to think of why someone would want to conspicuously copy a famous thief–whether to try and piggyback on that fame or get their attention or to capture them somehow. I was thinking maybe someone wanted to get the Phantom’s attention because of their legendary lock-breaking skills, so they could try and get the Phantom to break into some specific place. Or maybe someone was trying to get revenge on the Phantom and trap them somehow. I eventually settled on someone in law enforcement who was creating the copycat case to try and lure out the actual thief and arrest them in a bid for promotion because it seemed like the most solvable situation–because deliberately trying to lure out the Phantom means somehow communicating a time and place they should show up, and so a way for Roy to actually catch this copycat thief.
This episode isn’t too plot-heavy. From an investigation standpoint, there’s hardly any–all the actual investigation has already been done by gardaí before the episode started and obviously Roy already knows it isn’t a real phantom thief, which is why like 70% of the episode takes place in the garda headquarters. I originally had some other ideas for how the investigation would go, like Roy breaking into the garda station after hours, or breaking into Weiss’s home and finding incriminating evidence there, but I found it unnecessarily convoluted (and pushing over my word limit) and so I chose to not do it. The biggest sticking point was how Roy could conceivably figure out where the next burglary would take place–like maybe he could deduce it from some kind of pattern, but I couldn’t think of a way to do it that would make sense. So instead, I had to make it so the copycat burglar is straight-up trying to get the Phantom to a specific place and time, which is a lot more straightforward.
Just like Foul Spirits, the low plot density in this episode means that there’s more time that can be dedicated to other things, namely Roy being extremely annoying to law enforcement. It should be fairly obvious by this point in the season that Roy’s got a working relationship with Inspector Fletcher, for good or for ill. His relationship with her is not great by any means, but there’s some mutual (if begrudging) respect. For sure, one of the only reasons Fletcher deals with Roy is because he does actually know what he’s talking about. Even with that, perhaps Fletcher wishes she wouldn’t get involved with Roy, especially when he goes out of his way to be a pain in the ass. We certainly see how Roy’s irreverence goes over even worse with other gardaí.
This is a fun episode. I think it’s important for a story like Roy Kaplan to have some levity in between the horrific crimes against humanity that people commit in the cyberpunk future, and to have episodes where Roy can get through a job without getting kidnapped or his kneecaps busted. And honestly, it’s just fun to write stories where Roy causes problems on purpose. It’s not necessary for him to rustle up a costume and pretend to be a ghost to scare the living daylights out of a copycat thief, but what would be the fun in just turning them in the normal way?