Fire Your Scientist

“I also wanted to make a sci-fi movie without scientists,” BenDavid Grabinski said about his film Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice. It’s a simple statement of purpose, yet it contains a vital lesson for anyone trying to build a story on a high-concept premise. The scientist, in this formulation, is not just a character in a lab coat. The scientist is any character whose primary function is to explain the rules. They are the designated officiant of exposition, the walking manual for the time machine, the magic system, or the corporate conspiracy. Grabinski’s decision was an act of narrative discipline: a refusal to let the machinery of the premise become the story itself. His characters’ decisions, needs, and fears would drive the movie, not lectures on temporal mechanics.

This is a rebellion against a specific kind of writerly fear. The fear is that the audience will not understand. That the concept is too complex. That if every parameter is not defined, the entire enterprise will collapse. So we invent the scientist, the mentor, the wizened elder, who sits the hero down and lays out the stakes. This character is a crutch. More often than not, they signal a lack of confidence in the story’s human element. An audience will grant a writer one big lie, be it time travel or a zombie apocalypse. They are far less willing to sit still for a PowerPoint presentation explaining the lie’s bylaws.

The procedural genre is built almost entirely on scientists. Detectives and profilers arrive, observe, and explain the world to the audience. It is a durable, satisfying formula. But what happens when you sideline the explanation? Erica Messer, showrunner for Criminal Minds: Evolution, made just such a move when her team decided to keep their antagonist, Elias Voit, around for another season. The choice, prompted by a potent performance from actor Zach Gilford, transformed the show’s engine. As Messer noted in an interview with Creative Screenwriting, Voit became the show's Hannibal Lecter. The focus shifted from the weekly discovery and explanation of a new killer to the ongoing psychological effect of one they cannot vanquish. The premise is no longer “How do they solve the case?” It is “How does this man’s existence corrode their lives?” The genre becomes a condition, not a formula.

This kind of storytelling is only possible if the characters are built to withstand the pressure. You cannot test a character’s foundation if they do not have one. This is where Courtney A. Kemp’s “layer cake” metaphor for character development becomes so useful. Speaking about her Netflix series Nemesis, she described a process of digging down past the universal, relatable top layers to find “the thing that makes you specifically tick.” Genre is the pressure cooker. A well-drawn character is the substance inside. The plot, whether it is a sci-fi conceit or a criminal enterprise, is merely the application of heat and pressure to see what the substance is made of. Kemp’s intention to spend more time with characters’ families is not a detour from the crime plot. It is the entire point. It is where the stakes are forged, where the bottom layer of the cake is revealed.

The principle extends beyond genre to structure itself. At a Sundance Film Festival panel, writer-director Alessandra Lacorazza explained the origin of her film In the Summers. The structure, which observes a father through the eyes of his daughters only during their summer visits, came directly from a real conversation about memory. The form was not imposed upon the story from a screenwriting manual. It grew organically from the emotional reality of the characters. The periodic, fragmented structure is the story’s soul. It is the cinematic equivalent of the lived experience of children of divorce, a relationship defined by charged arrivals and melancholy departures. The structure is the condition. It is sci-fi without scientists, applied to a family drama.

The work is not to abandon genre, premise, or structure. The work is to subordinate them. It is to trust that a compelling character reacting to an inexplicable situation is always more interesting than a mediocre character reacting to a situation that has been explained to death. The scientist promises clarity but delivers anesthesia. Firing them is an act of faith: faith in your characters, and faith that the audience is there for the human drama, not the operating instructions. So look at your story. Find the person whose job it is to explain the world. And fire them.