rebelcheese

I'll give you my reasoning . . . without spoilers.

Essentially, to bridge the gap between the two distinctively different halves of the story (you can also think of episodes one and two as microcosms of the first and second halves' tones, respectively) I wanted to do something fast, with a lot of action and violence and death. Something that isn't entirely devoid of humor but at the same time tries to go for a generally more serious, horrifying mood.

Why I dropped that:

1. What was initially meant to be a one-shot turned into a three-episode arc. An unwieldly arc that dragged on and on and on, and ultimately didn't do much to enhance the characterizations of the cast or advance the overall plotline.

2. Just the concept of werewolves in a story like TOTT, whose fantasy concepts are closer to Last Exile and A Song of Ice and Fire. Werewolves are something more contemporary, something you expect to lurch out of a Rocky Mountain wood, not in TOTT. I do keep mention of werewolves, but they are exactly that, mentions. You're not going to see one anywhere in the story (besides, I have the Phantoms for those who like man-against-monster stuff).

3. The slow realization that Maya would never do anything to put her crew at risk of getting infected (she was intended to rescue Alex & company). No, Maya's the type who needs to be bribed first, and she'd never do something to recklessly endanger her crew. Farah would, though, but then again, that's Farah.

There's other reasons, but I think you get the idea. It just didn't fit well at all and had some OOC moments, namely involving Karsae and Maya. So I changed the storyline. However, changing that ultimately resulted in TOTT's ending being changed, which is something I was kinda surprised to see. I'm not revealing what kind of ending it is, but it is completely different from what I intended.

And besides, in the replacement episodes, Farah gets to freeze people, Keyes has to babysit Bethany, and I got to do some extra setup for something huge that happens in episode seventeen. I'll take the replacement episodes, thank you very much.

And that's enough babbling from me.