... And as this relates to gaming...
It shows the wide remit of the setup and also how to narrow things down when moving towards a finale. Buffy would often follow that pattern, getting more focused as the Big Bad and the plan become apparent, and games often do this naturally, when the players figure out a major threat and stop jumping on all available adventure hooks.
Planting MacGuffins in advance in what appear to be standalone MOTW adventures is a time-honoured tradition, and this does it with some left over for next year.
And getting a bit spoilery:
It’s also a good example of building an escalating threat, from the hints of the Clairvoyant and the apparently unconnected Centipede and eye controller to Hydra and Deathlok and super-Garrett.
Deathlok is also a great example of adapting from source material and putting a spin on things to surprise the players. A new character who appears to already have one power set and origin is turned into a fairly close adaptation of an existing character in such a way as to catch the viewers off guard and keep their sympathies with him.
Ward’s heel turn reveal makes him a tricky character in a team-based game after the fact, better suited to a character-conflict type of game like Cortex+ Drama than the rest of the show. He effectively turned NPC, although there was still some doubt which way he’d turn in the finale... having the player of a now-villainous PC around makes it less of a foregone conclusion.
Now, how do you run a game where one of the central PCs is director of an international agency? Tricky, but doable. (Cutting the agency back to bare bones helps, of course.) It depends on a player who can take that role on well.
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