A Cute Deus Ex Machina for a Light-Hearted Musical

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 19 June 2014.

Will enters the tunnels intending to shoot Farthington

Somehow I blanked on the idea of Will shooting Steffi!

Okay, here are some brainstorms. I'm not attached to any:

1. Maybe Steffi is also a foil to Will. Maybe she was in the record industry, clawing her way to the top, and she and Will had an affair that resulted in the destruction of one of Arthur's albums and a total betrayal of Arthur.  Years later, she surfaces in the cult (seems typical for Hollywood types) and claws her way to the top of that.
2. Maybe Will enters the tunnels intending to shoot Farthington, but while he is pointing the gun at him, Farthington is shot in the back and falls, revealing Steffi, and Will shoots her.
3. Maybe it's ambiguous who gets shot. Maybe in the present day, we find that Steffi is unharmed but that Farthington is a prisoner in her home.  He's on life support, but the machinery could just as well be sucking life out of him and feeding it to her. There would be a parallel here with Farthington and Arthur.
4. Maybe Steffi isn't such a siren when Will and Steffi have the original affair. Maybe she tries to advance Arthur's career through the cult in a way that parallels what Will tried to do for him through the Detroit scene and subsequent move to L.A. Maybe when Will shoots Farthington, he has no idea that she is standing behind him, and he shoots both of them with one bullet. If she is the woman behind the sea devil's mask, she is bent on destroying Will.

At any rate, when Will shuts down the Lazarus/White project, he does so in part to protect himself. He needs to go off the grid and can only do that if he pulls Arthur off the grid. Also, he's just resigned to the idea that Arthur cannot be made a star.

Will's gone from being a hard-working son of an immigrant who finds hope in the American dream to a monster. Also, one of his big hesitations about supporting Arthur's comeback in the present day is that some cult members might reemerge and come after him or expose him. When he finally goes for it, his is proven right: Farthington (or whoever is behind the sea devil's mask) reemerges.

I really don't know where that story line goes!

I think I had a vision at one point about Will thinking he had killed Farthington, going to trial for it, and then several other victims of Farthington who thought that they had killed him coming forward. We find out that Farthington's M.O. is to make people think that he died, then he comes back with a new name and re-runs the scam with newly-named cults. If he goes to jail, he has to sign back all the rights to everything.

That seems kind of stupid right now, though, and Steffi nullifies that ending, anyway.  It's a cute deus et machina for a light-hearted musical, which I think was the original context.

Who knows! Originally, Will was the closest thing the story had to a major villain. Then it was Farthington. Now it's Steffi. So we have three major villains; really more like 2 and 1/2, since Will is a tragic hero ready to repent and seek redemption in his old age, and an honorable son working hard to help his brother in his early life. Farthington has always been a vacuum, a black hole.  Steffi could change over time as in Scenario #4, or she could just be the siren of Scenario #1.

Speaking of Campbellian ways of viewing women...