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13. INT. MAKATI MEDICAL CENTER – ROOM 630 – AN HOUR LATER

Joanna opens the door, sees Luis (bizarrely still in his Habagat costume, minus the chest icon, cape, bracers, and boots) being attended to by a DOCTOR and a NURSE.

Luis looks very ill, deathly pale.

She hears the doctor say, “Sorry, but there’s nothing more we can do.”

Joanna’s heart lurches.

“Luis!” she calls out.

All heads turn to her, Luis breaking out into a smile, the doctor and nurse looking wide-eyed and frankly uncertain what to do next.

There is a very audible sigh from the corner of the room.

“CUT!”

It’s only then that Joanna notices the camera and the lights, right before IAN AGUSTIN, thirty-six, UCLA Film School-educated, lumbers into view.

“Thank you, Joanna, for spoiling what might have been an exquisite take.”

“Huh? What’s going on?”

Ian sighs again, his shoulders visibly slumping. “Take ten.”

BOYET THE CAMERAMAN nods, switches off the lights, then exits the room, followed by the doctor and nurse (who Joanna belatedly realizes, are extras).

Luis looks excited now, like a juvenile Habagat who can’t wait to get out of bed, and Joanna can see the make-up on his face, to simulate the unhealthy pallor of the sick.

“In the ambulance, sabi ko kay Direk, we could turn this into a storyline na lang.”

“What?!”

“We were doing the goodbye scene between Habagat and Lillian. Yung before he flies off into outer space to fight the intergalactic war against the evil aliens of Planet Z, tapos I collapsed, so when I regained consciousness, I thought, let’s do this storyline na lang. Anyway, sabi ninyo wala naman talagang proper budget para sa outer space story, e.

“So Habagat gets criptonatz poisoning, and he’s dying, and no one knows who poisoned him.” Luis smiles proudly, a 3rd grader having just written Noli Me Tangere.

“Mmm,” Direk Ian concurs. “A whodunit. Lynch exploited the story structure of the mystery well in Twin Peaks, which was then parodied on The Simpsons. They’re doing it now on Desperate Housewives and Veronica Mars, which by the way, sounds like the name of a stripper. It was the engine that drove Reunion too, though sadly, that was cancelled.

“But of course, the modern serialized TV whodunit can be traced back to `Who Shot J.R. Ewing?’”

Luis nods eagerly, though Joanna sincerely doubts he knows who J.R. Ewing is.

“Direk says I get story credit! Pang-resume, Jo!”

“And the scriptwriters are willing to go along with this?” Joanna asks Ian.

“They’re excited about the sudden curveball. And besides, it’s not like they haven’t done this before.[1] They’re already looking at possible suspects and motives--“

“May ideas din ako for that!” Luis announces proudly, to which Ian nods like an indulgent father, resuming his sentence as if there had been no interruption whatsoever.

“-- for the crime. Of course, yet again, Suspiria is the prime suspect, but it won’t be him. Too obvious.”

“Lillian,” Joanna mutters, having meant to say another name.

“Yeah, actually yun rin yung idea ko, para no one will suspect, diba? Yung first love ni Habagat!”

“Things you should discuss with the writers, Luis,” Ian says, to which the young man nods gravely.

“And you think be-benta yung story sa audience?” This from Joanna, to Ian again.

“Much of the X-Files mythology stemmed from the `Scully gets abducted’ plotline hatched when Gillian Anderson got pregnant,” Ian muses. “Here, as with that storyline, we get to continue the show, while Luis gets a little rest time to recuperate from all this fatigue.

“His scenes for the duration of the storyline will have to be acted from a bed in the studio, the budget being prohibitive, as it always is. You’d think if we couldn’t afford outer space, we could at least afford a room at Makati Med.”

Ian looks sternly at Luis. “Superheroes aren’t supposed to faint at the drop of a hat.” (Or the touch of a woman’s lips, Joanna thinks.)

Luis grins, gives Ian a mock salute. “Opo, Direk!”

“But what did the doctor say? The real doctor?”

Ian turns to look Joanna in the eye. “They’re waiting on the test results, but it does really just look like fatigue. The shooting schedule gets to all of us. And since someone in this room refuses to have a stunt double for his fight scenes…”

Luis straightens up in bed, his grin wide, as he raises his right eyebrow, flexes a bicep, and points to it with a finger.

“… this is the contingency we have cooked up, my star and I.”

They both look expectantly at Joanna now, and she feels like the mother/wife figure here, her husband and offspring waiting for her pronouncement on some goofball idea they’ve come up with.

Joanna sighs heavily.

“Sige,” she says, noticing the relief on both their faces (on Luis, overt; on Ian, subtle), “but the second ratings dip, and provided you’re healthy enough,” grasping Luis’ hand, which she squeezes, relieved herself, and which he squeezes back, “ Habagat flies out of that bed and starts beating up some bad guys.”

She looks at Ian, including him in this agreement.

“Deal?”

And, as one, the three nod, and say:

“Deal.”

----- * 0 * -----

1 Direk Ian is referring to the “Who Killed Kid Habagat?” storyline.

Kid Habagat was a character played by BRENT CASTANEDA; apparently a teen-ager gifted with superhuman powers, who became a sidekick of sorts to Habagat for a number of adventures.

The character turned out to be short-lived though, as, a little over a month after he started appearing as Kid Habagat, Brent was arrested for drug possession.

In an emergency meeting attended by Luis and Joanna, it was decided by the Habagat producers that drugs were not the kind of thing that should be associated with the fantaserye (or any of its stars), given the vast number of under-aged viewers of the show.

In a sudden plot curveball, Kid Habagat apparently died, and the whodunit subplot unfolded over the next week, Suspiria naturally being the number one suspect.

Ultimately though, it was revealed that there was no murderer as there had been no murder in the first place: it turned out that Kid Habagat had been the wish fulfillment of a young, preternaturally gifted boy in a coma, given physical form. When the boy awoke from his coma, Kid Habagat “died.”

At the moment, Brent Castaneda’s career is in limbo, the young actor reportedly still in rehab. [back]

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