Good grief. Long damn chapter. That’s going to become normal, I think. Sorry about that. I’m really not sure what’s going on or how that’s happened. Anyway, I’ve decided to post this one early this week because I have a sneaking suspicion I won’t be at my desk much tomorrow. So rather than be late two weeks in a row, I decided to head it off at the pass instead this week.
This is one of those chapters that’s slow and languid, and focused on the characters. There isn’t a lot of action happening, but instead all of the forward motion is taking place internally. We get a little bit of that from Greg right at the start, in the form of his insecurities about his glasses and how Alex perceives his reaction to them. Greg as this character who hides his insecurities behind vanity speaks something to me, so him seeing having to wear glasses as a sign of ageing or weakness felt like a natural extension of that. I liked the idea that he actually would have started wearing them much earlier than we saw in reality, but resisted for as long as possible. There are probably about three people in the world at this stage who even know he needs them, and I suppose that list of people changes depending on whether or not Alex counts as a person.
Mark arrives to this whole mess first, because of course he does. He knows how this goes, and he wants to see the whole thing play out from the very start. He’s not here to play the game either. He has two goals in mind, and he achieves them both in short order: 1. see that his friend is doing as well as he claims to be, and 2. become a pain in the ass for said friend at earliest possible convenience. The fact that Greg has allowed Mark to come spend ten weeks pissing around with Alex in the first place more or less achieves point #1, as hinted in the previous chapter. Mark arrives fully prepared to launch into point #2 and become a Problem as soon as he’s able. Of course, Alex is also a Problem, so they pretty quickly settle into a routine with one another, chatting shit as though nothing at all unusual is unfolding around them.
The other guests, on the other hand, are a totally different story. Now keep in mind that so far aside from Ed (and by extension Nish), none of these people are in the entertainment industry in this fic. So when Aisling shows up nervous as all fuck, those nerves are from the perspective of a young woman who has answered an advert promising a lot of money, and now she’s at a house where a creepy man is literally role playing the opening act of Clue (or Murder by Death) with a bunch of strangers. She should be nervous. She should be running for the fucking hills. But £1,000,000 is a lot of money, and people will do some stupid crazy things for that kind of cash.
When Mark reveals himself to be here for the third time, this is me slightly changing the rules a little bit. Obviously, there can’t be a Champion of Champions. It doesn’t quite work that way now. But Mark has done Taskmaster three times, because he did it at Edinburgh twice. Same with Key. So here, I’m going for something a little bit different. Rather than only getting one go at it, with only winners being allowed back, I’m taking a different approach. Anyone can come back, but the odds of being allowed back are very slim, bordering on next to non-existent. Unless you’re Alex’s nosey mates, in which case Greg both recognises it’s easier to let them come round and see for themselves that Alex is perfectly fine, but also having them round gives Greg the opportunity to bully them for ten weeks. And if he throws a bit of cash at them at the end, they’ll put up with it and let him and Alex get on with their lives for a while longer. So they alternate who comes up to check on Alex, making sure he’s still around, and getting the snot kicked out of them by Greg, and then split the cash between them most likely.
No one is innocent or morally clean in this situation, basically.
And then we get to Nish, who I have been looking forward to for so long. The first thing he does in this fic is shout the roof down, and that should be an indication of how his time will be spent. I mean, you’re here. You’ve seen series 5. I’ve said so many times that my favourite genre of contestant are the ones that seem like they were kidnapped halfway through placing an order at McDonalds, and Nish is the perfect embodiment of that trope. In fact, I don’t know whether I’ll be able to work that in properly, but that’s basically what happened to this guy.
Once they get to dinner, Mark really decides to become a Problem, almost to the point of looking like some kind of plant. If Alex hadn’t already planned on making his stay hell, he probably would have come up with something terrible for him just off the heels of this bullshit right here.
The flashback bit is one I had a lot of fun with. We’ve got Greg either trying to get to know Alex as a person, or he’s trying to size him up. I think he does like Alex, and he does want to get to know him better, but at the same time he has definitely noticed that the guy is socially isolated and it doesn’t seem like a single human being would actually notice if he vanished from the face of the planet, and part of him does want to verify that somehow. Except it really throws him for a loop to actually get that confirmed. One of my favourite banter bits is from s04e06, when Alex rambles on with some implication that his mother abandoned him after leaving behind nothing but a letter. Pair this with the recent live task where Greg claimed Alex was found as an infant, and what the hell was this man’s upbringing actually like?? But it makes perfect sense for this weirdo character. I love it. The only people he has in his life are his two strange mates who refuse to let him go, and if Greg wants to keep Alex, he’s going to have to deal with Mark and Tim. He just doesn’t know it yet. But all through this whole conversation, Alex finds himself compelled to respond in ways that he thinks might please Greg, even if it’s a conversation he doesn’t want to have. He says things that he doesn’t want to say, and winds up having to defend himself. And then when Greg gives him another strange order he has frankly no business giving him, Alex obeys without question, to the letter. He makes sure he is absolutely not seen at all the following day by leaving at the ass-crack of dawn, and going to visit Mark and Tim. And because he doesn’t know what to do with himself, he cleans their flat and gets bullied. Tim immediately assumes the worst in everything Alex says, and he’s frankly right to, but at this point nobody really fully grasps the true extent of the situation. All Tim knows is that his friend doesn’t have much of a support network outside of him and Mark, and even if they aren’t exactly healthy or functional in their own right, Tim is determined to make sure Alex doesn’t get into a situation he can’t get out of.
Back to the present, I’ve shuffled things up a bit again. I’ve decided to move the interviews to the beginning of the process, for a couple of reasons. They feel like a good thing to have as a consistent warm-up task, and also as a way for Alex to gauge how everyone will respond to tasks and the environment. Having the interviews actually serve a purpose felt like a good way to use them as part of the greater process. Annoyingly, series 5 is one of the only series where interviews do not seem to exist anywhere online, so I had to make it up. Because of course the ones I actually needed would be missing. At the same time, I’m kind of glad, because I’m going to be doing a lot of remixing and transcribing as it is, and boy do I hate doing that. I’ve already had to do it once in this chapter already, for Mark’s text message task, which is very subtly different. And there will be a lot of that. Quite a lot of this series has been re-ordered to fit the narrative better, because it doesn’t work for location tasks to be randomly spread out like they are in reality. Also, some of the tasks worked out better to be rearranged to tell a slightly different character story, so that’s what I did. There’s also the part where I wanted the whole thing to take place over ten weeks, for consistency and continuity, so I had to stretch an eight week series into ten weeks, while also removing all of the prize, live, and most of the solo tasks because they didn’t work either. But I think doing all of that will make the tasks themselves a little more interesting than just wholesale revisiting them exactly as they are. Mark’s text message task, for instance, while a simple one, is now a little bit more stressful for him. Even though he has ten fewer texts to send overall, he has to send two per day to make up for it.
As for the intake bit itself, I really wanted to play up just how fucking terrible that house actually is. The lab really is a room that looks like somewhere you go to get murdered. Again, Aisling absolutely reacts as she ought to, weighing her safety against the promise of a life-changing amount of money. At the same time, Alex isn’t really a terrible person. He’s here just doing a job. He recognises that she’s uncomfortable, and why she’s uncomfortable, and he doesn’t want to make that worse. But he’s also awkward and weird just by nature, so there’s not a lot he can do about it. But Alex will give as good as he gets, and that cuts both ways. If he doesn’t have a reason to be passive aggressive and sarky with someone, he won’t be that way. He can be kind and patient when he needs to be, because he doesn’t want to go through ten weeks of hell any more than these people do. Especially since his hell has the potential to be amplified by several orders of magnitude.
And then with Mark, it’s a different story entirely. He falls right back into antagonising him, because Mark can and will take it and dish it right back out. And because this is not only Mark’s third time being here, but everyone’s aware he’s Alex’s weird mate at this point, the rules are different from the start. He’s not dropped off properly. Alex doesn’t show him around properly. Instead, Alex just follows him around, letting him act like he knows what he’s doing while he throws insults around. At no point through any of it does Mark begin to take it seriously. He knows he’ll come out of this with some amount of money, and he’s going to get to spend the next ten weeks pissing about with Alex when he’s not holed up somewhere on this estate. It’s almost worth getting bullied by Greg every week.