Announcer: Here we are with Kathris, the creator of Zeitgeist: Symphony Of Dreams, and Zeitgeist: Renaissance. He’s here to tell us about the third spin-off to Zeitgeist, and where the franchise is going with series number three.

Q: What can you tell us about the concept?

A: Well, this time I started thinking about where I haven’t touched on, and we had already done a demon fighting facility and a starship show, so I happened to be watching Farscape, and I got some inspiration. I didn’t want to copy them directly, but I did borrow the idea for a prison show.

Q: A prison show?

A: Yes. I knew I wanted to assign Darren as the lead character, because even when he had been briefly assigned as a regular cast member in the first show before that got changed, he was always intended to helm a series of his own. When the first show was revised, his role was also retroactively revised, and Darren got a new character history, serving in Foxhound, a secretive Alliance agency that reports only to themselves. Though the point of the show wasn’t entirely about the fact that it was a prison, it had other leads.

Q: Such as?

A: The first part of that was the Kai’Rin, I had planned to do a more significant story with them and almost make this a what if story about if the Kai’Rin had been good instead of evil like the last time, while Darren would be trying to direct them in that way. The second part was that I had gotten ZigZag cast as herself on the show, which was for a recurring guest role at first, but I knew by late season 1 I wanted her as a regular.

Q: ZigZag? THE ZigZag? How’d you manage that? And weren’t there any problems with her being a porn actress?

A: ZigZag – I’ll field that one. When I was approached with the role, I was skeptical at first, but after I looked at the sketches for season 1 episodes, I was thrilled to join in. I had a lot of fun playing the first couple of episodes against Reika and the other cast members. It turned out to be a great opportunity. As for me being a porn actress, no, there weren’t really any problems. Everyone pretty much already knew what I shoot when I’m not on the show, so it wasn’t like it was a surprise. If anything, I think it increased the show’s ratings.

Q: What about the rest of the cast?

A: We had Ensign Marla Cheney, which we brought over from the second show. She went from being one of the little people on Skylar’s show to being the Records And Information Officer on this show. I wanted to see what she could do as a regular, and it also helped a few crossovers later on to have Marla on the show. It served to provide a couple of hooks for other stories, and worked out later in the show, but I don’t want to spoil too much just yet.

We also had Father Caine, from the first show. Again, with him, I wanted to see what he could do as a regular, and since he already knew a few of the other cast members, he knew what we would expect of him. I also thought it would be interesting to have a priest assigned to the prison.

Next we were looking at Ryan Drake, who had guested on the original show. Now we saw him separated from Adair and Pascal, and now married to Idania, which he had started seeing in the later parts of the first show. This was an older Ryan, who had since gone up in the ranks of the Alliance after having signed on with Kathris, and we already knew he was a very loyal officer. I thought he would be the perfect first officer/security chief for Darren, not to mention he had a physically imposing presence, which I wanted.

Reika was fun to cast. I wanted a vixen that would be one of the three regular prisoners on the show, and I knew that she was going to be the hook to get ZigZag involved in the series. I gave the two of them a history, and Reika also ended up having a deeper season 1 storyline that helped get the show started. We were looking for a vixen with short hair and one that had a little stunt experience. Reika was the perfect audition.

Nikolai was the only racial decision we had to make. We wanted a tiger/skunk crossbreed to have a counterpoint to ZigZag. He was the closest thing to her species we had, even though he was ½ and ½ compared to her ¾ and ¼. He was going to be the only prisoner that didn’t really belong there, partially inspired by the Hurricane, Ruben Carter. Even though he had nothing historically related, I wanted someone who was unjustly incarcerated because of his race, or rather his state as a hybrid. He was also going to be researching the Kai’Rin, which is what gets him involved more deeply with Darren.

Tafka was hard to cast. I ended up going with a lion actor because I wanted someone that could play feral. Since he wouldn’t really have a speaking role until season two, I needed an actor that could pull off his role mostly through nonverbal communication. I also needed a muscle bound guy to pull off the atavist role.

Hannah was Kathris’s daughter, and I added her as the engineer because I wanted a familial connection with the first two shows. Kathris and his wife were on the first, Tigerfox was on the second, and Hannah would be on the third. Though I knew that it would be a lot fewer crossovers than on the second show. As a matter of fact, Kathris and Hali didn’t guest on the third show at all. It also gave me a chance to explore her character after her brief introduction on the second show.

Calais was an experiment in a couple of ways. I wanted a mouse as the doctor, something small and feminine. I knew that I also wanted to try starting her out as a cadet still in training, and her becoming a full doctor would be a storyline that we’d explore later.

Q: What have you got planned for season 1?

A: So far, we’ve got the commandos, which have a link to a past storyline that’ll become evident later, and generally exploring the characters and how they interact. We’ll see some setup for later storylines, and a couple of stand alone stories in season one. We also start a B story where ZigZag attempts to get Darren to let her film porn in the prison, and we see the Wanderers from the second show pop up on this one.

Q: Are there any familiar faces we are likely to see?

A: Not so much in season 1, that doesn’t really come into play until season 2 and later.

Q: Any traditions you’re keeping up?

A: Two, actually. One, the series lead this time is male, and the next one will be female, as is the tradition so far, with each new show, changing the gender of the showrunner. We’re also continuing the tradition of having someone from the last show in the pilot of the next one, when Kathris gave Skylar her orders, Skylar will drop Marla off to serve with Darren in her new assignment.

Q: Anything else you want to mention?

A: Not until the recap at the end of season 1.

S: Thanks for your time.