In this concluding half of Today is the Day we begin to say goodbye to John Baum as John Connor rights the wrongs of his recent passivity and forgoes his previous desire to just be normal. But what else was going on behind-the-scenes?
Today is the Day was not originally intended to be a two-parter. But once we shot the original episode, we realized there were still some things we needed and went back in the writers room to rebrake the story beats. Shortly after, Ash and Zack turned out the new pages, Josh concluded his revision, and we were back to shooting the rest — some for Part 1, some for Part 2. In order to avoid any production confusion, we temporarily dubbed this past week’s outing The Last Voyage of the Jimmy Carter, but eventually returned it to its correct title during the post production process. (Yes, that’s why FOX accidently leaked that title). Side fact: we had previously flirted with doing two-parter episodes a few times in the past (early in the room). Can you guess which episodes?
Jesse’s YMCA scenes were actually all shot inside the YMCA — in Glendale, California — back on February 9th (the week of our return to the air). That’s how quickly everything has been “turned around” as they say (edited, color corrected, scored, sound mixed) for the remaining few episodes.
For this episode, only one new role had to be cast (a first for us!) — that of the “lifeguard” that approaches Jesse at the YMCA. It was played by an actor named Bill Tangradi.
Though we didn’t tell the story of Jesse’s history with the reprogrammed machine captaining her sub until now, we did hint at the story all the way back in Alpine Fields. Jesse’s future/past and how it informed her “plan” to remove Cameron from young John Connor’s life was frequently discussed in the writers room, as early as August (before anything from the season even aired)! This character’s motives were discussed frequently as the season took its shape.
Casting Chad Coleman as Queeg was a cinch — not only are we big fans of The Wire, but Josh actually “accidently” met Chad outside of our offices when he was around, auditioning for another Warner Bros series a few months back. They even spoke briefly! When it came time to finding the right actor for the role, his name came up quickly…
Jim Lima and his visual FX crew really outdid themselves with this episode — specifically on the T-1001 on board the submarine. But could you tell that the establishing shots of the submarine were completely FX? No practical shots of a submarine in water were shot.
John and Derek’s first scene in the truck was not actually scripted to be in the car, it was written on a bench in the park. But when the city was hit with a freak rainstorm (let’s be honest, it doesn’t happen that frequently here), we were forced to think on our feet and we shifted the scene into the truck on the studio lot. Funny enough, since there was only one side of greenery (the other side is actually a WB building), we were forced to flip the truck around to shoot the other perspective.