Well, sleep deprivation certainly helps, and there's no shortage of sleep deprivation when you write for television. And this one really was a simple story, in essence: Scarran messes with Crichton's mind; Crichton kills Scarran. All else was ornamentation.

The hard part wasn't coming up with the weird stuff and the jokes; that was pure fun. The challenge was to make it all make sense, to devise a framework that allowed it all to mean something... and finding the un-funny moments that balanced out the gags, the bits that hurt Crichton, even though he knows they aren't real.

(By the way, if you watched the episode on the BBC and you were confused, it might possibly be because the Beeb censors trimmed out about two full minutes. Check out the DVD...)

How'd the actors react to the script? Ben thanked me; he loved the script and worked exceptionally hard with, to my mind, superlative results. Watch how beautifully and cleanly his emotional state tracks through the episode - and then remember that, like nearly all television shows, this episode was shot completely out of sequence, so he'd be filming a wacky scene in the morning, a heart-wrenching scene after lunch, and then perhaps an earlier scene with Kent McCord to finish the shooting day. It's a tribute to Ben - and director Rowan Woods – that his performance is so seamless.

The rest of our fearless cast were equally enthused; remember, they'd just done Crackers Don't Matter and Out of Their Minds a few episodes earlier, so by this time they were used to getting curveballs thrown at them. And everyone got into the spirit of the thing, actually adding insanity to what I'd written - the Aeryn/Chiana/Zhaan smooches, for instance, weren't scripted, nor were Aeryn's ginormous hair rollers.

I'd never worked with Carmen Duncan before, so I had no idea just how good she was as well. The bar scene between her and Ben still leaves me breathless every time I watch it. I'm delighted they got to play more scenes together in Kansas and I'm envious of Justin Monjo for getting to write that episode. (Not that I didn't have just as much fun writing the episode that followed Kansas.)