Happy New Year! Sorry for the delay in this update, but between the holidays and the sheer length of Episode 10, we fell behind in our editing. But we’re back to post the newly polished version of Episode 10: “Catch Her If You Can,” our longest episode to date! At over 100 pages and 40,000 words, this one was quite the undertaking, as we’ll discuss in this week’s blog, written by Rose! We’ll be back on Monday with the first part of our first brand new episode in over nine years, “Mr. Body Beautiful!”
I guess if we had to have an episode to go on hiatus after (real episode, I guess, if we’re not counting the Christmas one), then I think this was a solid one for that to happen with. This one was a lot. It had a huge amount of challenges, like coming up with the codes, the book quotes that lead the agents around the world, the things to steal. The amount of research on this one was insane!
That said, I really do love how it came up. This episode might’ve been a headache to write, but it’s a joy to read. It was worth the pain even if it did eventually cause the collaboration team to fall to pieces. This was also the first episode where the agents are actually truly global. Before this, the only missions outside of the US were in Canada. I do want more missions outside the US, but this is a good one to really bust out of that mold and show that, yes, HimTak really is a global agency.
Also, this is where we really start using Leo for all that he’s worth. The amount of references to his movies and the ways he’s similar to Nick… What’s not to love?
This is the first time we get to see Leo on a mission. Why did we depart from ‘90s boyband members in making Leonardo DiCaprio a character in this story, and what do you like about writing him?
Rose: Honesty cause we’ve all loved Leonardo DiCaprio since the 90s, and back in Titanic, you can’t deny he and Nick look similar. So we thought it’d be fun to throw him in and use their similarities to agitate Nick. ‘Cause in 00Carter, we love to drive him crazy since, you know, we can’t kill him. This actually leads to us throwing in other actors or characters from TV or movies in future episodes. ‘Cause there’s only so many boybands.
Julie: There is definitely an overlap between BSB fans and Leo fans, especially among those of us who were right at that prime teenybopper age in 1997, when BSB’s first U.S. album and Titanic came out. So I guess it does make sense in a way. I love Leo as a replacement for Shazam. He and Nick have the same sort of rivalry, but I enjoy writing Leo better because I like him a lot more than JC. This episode was especially fun because of the references to Leo movies we included: Catch Me If You Can, The Man in the Iron Mask, Titanic…
Dee: I think Leo is a perfect foil for Nick. There’s a similarity to them, but their execution is vastly different. The dynamic is really fun!
This is one of the few episodes that does not feature FANS. Why the new villain, Tanja Copenhagen?
Julie: We had a completely different idea for this episode originally. We were going to call it “On His Majesty K’s Secret Service,” and it was going to involve K working with MI6 on a mission in England so we could finally do a direct James Bond parody. But, as we’ve mentioned, none of us are big Bond fans, and when it came time to plan out the episode, we just weren’t feeling it. So we ended up coming up with the idea for “Catch Her If You Can” instead. The villainess, Tanja Copenhagen, is obviously a parody of Carmen Sandiego but is also based on a Danish girl named Tanja who notoriously plagiarized at least 68 stories from my site and Absolute Chaos. She would steal BSB fanfics, change the characters’ names to members of the British boyband Busted, and repost them on other sites and forums. The idea for 00Carter actually came about in a thread about Tanja’s plagiarism, which is how most of us got to know each other and became friends, so it only seemed fitting that we eventually make her a villain in the story. The lesson to be learned here: Never fuck with fanfic writers!
Rose: Oh Tanja. Without her. 00Carter wouldn’t exist. So you know, thanks for being a thief I guess? Lol.
Julie: Yes, thanks for bringing us together and giving us so much entertainment over the years!
Dee: I wish it was slightly less entertainment over the years. She gave herself up way too willingly in the story, lol. Feels weird to tell her thank you after all the shady business.
Julie: True. In real life, she would just disappear and start doing it somewhere else rather than admit to her crimes, let alone apologize. That is why we felt the need to shame her in a fanfic. LOL
As Rose mentioned, this episode required a ton of research because of the many locations and literature references it included. Let’s talk about our process for coming up with clues and piecing them together to send our characters on a treasure hunt around the world.
Rose: If I remember right, we chose the location first and then tried to look for famous books that’d point to that country. It felt like the easiest way, though I’d never describe this episode as easy.
Julie: I think we just aimed to use at least one location on every continent (except Antarctica, which we’d already featured in the story) to make it a truly global mission, so we looked for books we were at least somewhat familiar with that took place in countries around the world. It was definitely not easy piecing it all together!
Rose: The encoding was the roughest part cause none of us are cryptographers lol.
Julie: For real! Thankfully, we found a great website with different cipher tools, which became an invaluable resource! It made encoding the clues a lot easier. All we had to do was paste a passage of text into one of the cipher tools, and it would encode it for us. So that part actually wasn’t too bad. I think the hardest part was plotting out the entire mission, trying to come up with the clues and figure out where each one would lead, what order our characters would visit the various countries, and what events would happen in each location to keep things interesting.
Rose: This episode gave us a lot of great moments like Kevin and Lancy busting out Rockapella, or Diamond getting her shopping fantasy granted then ruined lol.
Julie: Yes! I loved the Carmen Sandiego parody aspect of it. I even wrote a parody version of the song for this episode that we tried to find someone to record because none of us felt confident in our own singing abilities, but that never happened. (But hey, if anyone reading this wants to give it a shot, let me know!) Nick trolling the feds (based on Tom Hanks’s character in Catch Me If You Can, of course) throughout the mission was also fun. The references to The Mummy in the scene at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo was a nice touch, too. And, of course, I thoroughly enjoyed writing the Harry Potter stuff in London!
Dee: I was on hiatus, but I can confirm that this one is a fun read! You definitely get sucked in by the mystery and hilarious parodies.
Julie: Thanks! That’s nice to hear. I think we’re all really proud of how this one turned out. It was worth the effort!
