I have to ask: Was the shark on a string, or was it a radio controlled blimp?
It's a helium filled, radio conrolled air swimmer. We originally planned to also paint it in UV paint, but we ran out of time, and we originally also had a second one (a clownsfish) but that one developed a leak between the rehearsal and the final show.
The narrations between the scenes encouraged me to read up on the history of the islands. (Oddly enough, when the British pulled basically the same trick as the Americans, we had the rare decency to give them back as soon as London heard of it. 
) I also liked the heath-robbinson scene in the alleyway. Certainly two very creative deaths. On the other paw though... That felt less like comedy and more like divine intervention. So these two people try to save a dolphin, and then a day later the Hawaiin gods of volcanoes and luck help them out?
Well, you're right. We had two alternatives: Either a direct confrontation and a fight, or they could have just shaken their followers off. Both Makani and Savannah were unarmed at this point, so they wouldn't have stood a chance. The other option would have been plain boring
So we decided to pull the old
Surrounded by Idiots /
Too Dumb To Live tropes, and filled a scene with physical humor, to provide a bit of relief from the otherwise heavy plot
That's one of the moments where you have to realize, it is "just" an amateur puppet show. Sometimes I wish I had another year to re-write the script and iron out all the kinks - but as we only have a couple of weekend sessions to get this written, we often have to cut certain corners to get stuff finished. And this year's show was hard to write, with the other main source of hawaiian drama (the volcanoes) having been covered last year already
You lost me a little at that point. Elsewhere you covered a lot of topics, and not in a lot of depth. For me it wasn't just the ending that felt a little vague and open ended. (Why did everyone ignore the protagonist for so long? Why was the professor evil again? Why was the oil company acting so foolish? Wait, what was that last part about copyrights and patents?) As an engineer, some of the radio extracts had me gritting my teeth (The bad science! It hurts!) but that's an accurate reflection of how such things go in real life. And the seaweed fuel was clearly not inherently evil. So.
Yeah, about "evil" and "not evil", you're always caught between a rock and a hard place as a writer. Make something inherently evil, and people will criticise the stereotypes, and the plot will become very predictable. But if you aim too high, you'll lose your audience, and end up needing too much exposition to explain it. I think we could have done worse, but a lot of character background that we had in the draft didn't make it into the dialogue - it was just too much.
That left especially a lot of bailey's motivation in the dark. He's really NOT the bad guy - but rather the DESPERATE guy about to lose the result of his life's work. That's what makes him a killer in the end. But it didn't really come out the way I wanted, with only one scene to explain it. Similar with Monica. The main reason she agreed to work with Peak Oil is a personal one: She was fed up being the uncredited assistant to Dr. Bailey. Her turning point comes when she realizes she put her friend in danger, which then becomes her new priority.
Savannah is an idealist, who gets disappointed - and sticks with her friends, although she knows Monica is with the bad guys. Loyalty to her friend is more important to her in the end, than her idealism.
Makani was supposed to be the link to the native Hawaiian side, but 99% of his character ended up on the cutting room floor, so he ended up being just the sidekick.
Yeah, so we tried to avoid stereotypes, but that's really hard to explain if all you have is 10 scenes
On the third paw (Haha! Four legs good! Two legs bad!) maybe it's good that a story featuring biotechnology raised and didn't answer so many questions. This is one of those few fields of science where that might be the bet possible approach.
A lot of the bullshit science is intentional - you have to simplify reality if you want to tell a story, and it was already overloaded. (I mean, monica explains the seaweed in a 5 minute monologue. My editors and my composer wanted to kill me for that alone. And that's already the dumbed down TV-sci-fi-version of the explanation.) I tried to have some connection points to the real science, but I wanted to focus on the characters, not the technology.
(By the way, all the hawaiian references are authentic - except for one or two geographical details that I didn't care about. The SOEST exists, so does the Kilo Moana (although it's more an open sea research vessel), the meteological circumstances are correct, and the real life equivalent of Makani's Bar at Ala Moana is actually a fishing supply store.)
