Why annotate a second pilot
Catalyst is a CIA spec pilot about two estranged half-sisters — a disgraced field operative and the Internal Affairs lawyer who put her away — forced to work together against a Russian sleeper cell neither of them knew existed. It's a different genre and a different structural problem than the gaslamp fantasy of Reign of Blood, which is exactly why it's useful here: a technique that only shows up once starts to look like a fluke. A technique that shows up again, in an unrelated script, with a different genre and a different cast, starts to look like a method.
Below are the pilot's first five pages, unedited, with numbered notes tying specific lines to specific pages in this reference library.
INT. SUSAN’S OFFICE – CIA HEADQUARTERS – NIGHT
No windows. File cabinets along the walls. A simple table stacked with paperwork, all of it marked, “TOP SECRET”.
SUSAN REED, thirties, sits at the table. Sensible haircut, unruly. Dark pant suit, wrinkled. It’s been a long day.
Susan redacts official documents with a black Sharpie. It’s monotonous work and she can’t help but glance at the wall clock. The second hand sweeps it’s way to six. Quittin’ time.
Susan caps her Sharpie, lays it on the doc. Done for the day.1
INT. LOBBY – CIA HEADQUARTERS – LANGLEY, VA – NIGHT
Susan leaves with the day shift. Dozens of Intel Officers walking across the noble CIA insignia on the marble floor. As Susan goes to the exit, she passes a quotation chiseled in stone on the white marble wall: “And ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free. — John 8:32”
EXT. BLACK SITE – ISLA CLARION – SUNSET
A sign in English and Spanish, “WARNING. RESTRICTED AREA. USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED.” Barbed wire fence. Searchlights. Buildings in the distance include an Aircraft Hanger. SUPER: “ELDORADO GREEN, CIA BLACK SITE, ISLA CLARION, PACIFIC OCEAN”
INT. AIRCRAFT HANGER – BLACK SITE – CONTINUOUS
Paramilitary Guards watch a non-descript Private Jet ease to a stop under the bright lights and high ceiling. The engines ease, the door opens, and a group of armed men disembark.
ELI PRESCOTT, thirties, athletic, no gun. Followed by CARLO DRAEGER, fifties, athletic, yes gun. Behind them are four tough looking Mercenaries in balaclavas. The Hanger Guards have no time to react as Carlo and the masked men SHOOT them.
Eli uses an access card to unlock the main door of the facility. Carlo tosses him a pistol, and they enter with two of the Mercs, leaving two behind to guard the plane.
In the hanger rafters, a WOMAN climbs from an air vent. FRANKIE BRASHER, thirties, athletic, breathing hard. Her orange inmate jumpsuit is dirty and sweat stained. Escaping from a CIA Black Site is hard.2
Frankie climbs onto a crossbeam, notes the Mercs below and the jet’s location across the hanger. She steels her courage and leaps from ceiling beam to beam, more bold than graceful.
Frankie slips and hangs-on, dangling above the Mercs below. She drags herself back on to the beam and resumes her dash.
Frankie drops to the jet’s roof and swings down into the cabin, undetected by the armed Mercs. After a beat, the Pilot is tossed onto the hanger floor and the cabin door sealed.
Eli and Carlo re-enter the hanger as the jet ENGINES ROAR.
INT. COCKPIT – JET – ON THE MOVE – CONTINUOUS
Frankie at the controls, expertly prepping for takeoff as fast as she can. She sees Eli and his team advancing toward her, guns up. She flips a switch, advances the throttles.
INT. AIRCRAFT HANGER – BLACK SITE – CONTINUOUS
Eli and his team are pushed back as the jet’s thrust reversers deploy, sending gale force winds at them. The jet eases back out of the hanger, ENGINES SCREAMING.
INT. COCKPIT – PRIVATE JET – ON THE MOVE – CONTINUOUS
Frankie pivots the moving plane, angles for the runway.
EXT. AIRCRAFT HANGER – BLACK SITE – CONTINUOUS
Eli and his team exit the hanger and FIRE their GUNS at the moving jet, bullets sparking as they impact the fuselage.
INT. COCKPIT – JET – ON THE MOVE – CONTINUOUS
Frankie ducks as bullets pierce the aft cabin. Through a side window she sees one of the engines take a hit. ALARMS BLARE, but Frankie ignores this and lines up for takeoff.
EXT. RUNWAY – BLACK SITE – CONTINUOUS
Eli and his team keep firing as the jet hurtles down the runway, streaming smoke from the damaged engine. The jet rises, banks into the sky, trailing smoke across the sunset.
INT. COCKPIT – JET – FLYING – CONTINUOUS
Frankie at the controls, emotional, laughing. She looks down at her GPS navigation system to a map of the United States.3
EXT. WASHINGTON DC – ESTABLISHING SHOT – NIGHT
The illuminated monuments, memorials, and capital dome.
EXT. GOLDEN YEARS NURSING HOME – WASHINGTON, DC. – NIGHT
Four stories. A few lights on. Empty parking lot. SUPER: “GOLDEN YEARS NURSING HOME, WASHINGTON, DC.”
INT. SECURE FLOOR – GOLDEN YEARS NURSING HOME – NIGHT
A security checkpoint like you’d find at an airport. Behind a desk, a guard, GREG, watches a TV REPORT about an upcoming summit between President Campbell and the Chinese Ambassador to discuss tension in Africa. DING.
Susan exits the ELEVATOR, grocery bag under her arm.
SUSAN
Hey, Greg.
GREG
Susan. I thought you’d be working late with all this China action.
Susan places the bag on the conveyer, scans her ID on a tablet pad — yup, CIA. The GATE UNLOCKS and she enters.
SUSAN
The only action in my office is when a Sharpie runs out of ink.
GREG
Is President Campbell taking us to war over cell phones? What’s the cafeteria buzz?
SUSAN
I wouldn’t know. The cool kids don’t let me sit at their table.
Susan starts down the hallway, someone plays “Winds of Change” by The Scorpions on ACOUSTIC GUITAR. The SONG comes from a room at the end of the hall. That’s where Susan is headed, before she gets there, she stops at the other rooms.
INT. THE ENGINEER’S ROOM – NURSING HOME – NIGHT
Dim. Chalkboards on the wall filled with scrawled equations. Shelves lined with scale models of military aircraft. All of them meticulously made from toothpicks.
At a desk, THE ENGINEER, seventies, in a vintage spacesuit. He assembles a toothpick model of a Lunar Lander, muttering —
THE ENGINEER
Aluminum honeycomb sandwich. Bonded between aluminum alloy.
Susan delivers new glue and toothpicks to a nearby table.
THE ENGINEER (CONT’D)
We needed more time. I warned them.
SUSAN
I’m sorry they didn’t listen.
Susan exits, leaving him to place his Lunar Lander on a little tv studio diorama between toothpick video cameras.
INT. THE STORYTELLERS’ ROOM – NURSING HOME – NIGHT
Susan enters a dark bedroom lined with well stocked book shelves. A writing desk with a electric typewriter. Beside a drawing table. This room has two elderly residents.
A woman, THE ARTIST, seventies, sleeps in bed. A man, THE WRITER, seventies, awake in an adjacent bed, petting a cat.
Susan delivers fresh cat food tins to a table. The Writer smiles and whispers —
THE WRITER
Did you figure out five down?
SUSAN
Isopoda.
THE WRITER
Filter Feeder. Should’ve had that.
The Artist snores. Susan and The Writer stifle laughter.
INT. HALLWAY – SECURE FLOOR – NURSING HOME – NIGHT
Susan tries a door, it’s locked, looks around nervously.
INT. THE ASSASSIN’S ROOM – NURSING HOME – NIGHT
An exercise bike. A punching bag. Organized racks of weapons on the walls. Guns of many types. Blades. But all of them are cardboard, handmade. The twin bed is empty.
A magazine slides into the room under the door. A vintage copy of THE UNASHAMED, adult entertainment for women.
Under the bed, a woman lies atop a Kilim rug, THE ASSASSIN is in her seventies, dressed in a gray sweat suit. One arm as a pillow, the other arm across her chest, holding a cardboard pistol. She smiles at the sound of the magazine delivery.4
INT. HALLWAY – SECURE FLOOR – NURSING HOME – NIGHT
Susan walks toward the room where the GUITAR MUSIC emanates.
INT. ANATOLY’S ROOM – SECURE FLOOR – NURSING HOME – NIGHT
ANATOLY KARPOV, seventies, sits on the edge of his bed, playing acoustic guitar. On the wall is a framed photo of him, younger, receiving a medal from then President Reagan.
ANATOLY
(sings)
Follow the Moskva. Down to Gorky Park. Listening to the winds of change.
One side of the room features a dozen television sets of various vintage stacked atop each other. All of them display current news reports from various global sources, sound off.
ANATOLY (CONT’D)
An August summer night. Soldiers passing by.
Susan enters, places a bottle of Vodka on a table for two, sits. Anatoly stops singing and sits across from her.
SUSAN
I love that song.
ANATOLY
You know it?
SUSAN
Winds of Change.
ANATOLY
I wrote it.
SUSAN
(playing along)
You were in the Scorpions?
Susan fills two shot glasses with Vodka.
ANATOLY
They only made it famous. I wrote it for the Agency’s Psychological Warfare group. The Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse. The seventh floor wanted to pour gas on the fire. So they reached out to my team, Catalyst.5
// Where the setup pays off
PAGE 59 — fifty-three pages later“Susan finds The Engineer standing beside the Lander. […] THE ENGINEER: ‘If they would’ve listened. We could’ve done it for real.’” The toothpick model was a rehearsal. The full-size Lunar Lander is sitting in a warehouse at an abandoned Army depot, next to a complete, dust-covered NASA soundstage.
PAGE 60ANATOLY: “Some people are born into a family of Doctors, or Construction Workers, or Teachers. Like it or not, we’re a family of spies.” Anatoly is Susan and Frankie’s grandfather. The nursing home is Catalyst’s headquarters. Every resident on this page — the Engineer, the Writer, the Artist, the Assassin — is still operational.
- 1
Susan’s entire world in four lines: a windowless office, a Sharpie that redacts other people’s work, a clock she watches. No adjective does this — the objects do it. It’s the drabbest possible image to open a spy pilot on, which is exactly the point about to be made by cutting away from it.
First Five Pages - 2
Two protagonists, introduced back to back, defined by contrast rather than description: Susan capping a pen at quitting time, Frankie climbing out of an air vent mid-jailbreak. Neither gets a backstory paragraph. The cut between them is the character work.
First Five Pages - 3
Eight scene headers in under a page, most of them one or two lines long, alternating cockpit / hanger / cockpit / runway as the jet fights its way out. Nothing here is establishing or transitioning — every single header is revealing (the damage), complicating (the pursuit), or triggering (the takeoff) something. That’s the whole method: cut the moment a beat stops earning its place.
Short Attention Spans - 4
A nursing home wing that turns out to be four separate worlds in four consecutive rooms — a man building toothpick spacecraft, two writers keeping each other company, a woman asleep under a bed surrounded by handmade cardboard weapons and a saucy magazine slid under the door like contraband. None of it is explained. It doesn’t need to be yet — it just needs to be specific enough that the reader believes there’s a real history here, off the page, before the plot ever asks about it.
Haecceity - 5
Anatoly doesn’t explain who he is — he performs a small piece of showmanship (“I wrote it”), lets Susan play along, then drops a specific enough answer (Psychological Warfare, “my team, Catalyst”) that it reads as true rather than a bit. One character, one exchange, a distinct comic rhythm that’s doing double duty as the title drop.
Distinct Character Voice
What this excerpt doesn’t show
Five pages of a cold open can’t demonstrate the “shopping list” mystery-box sequence that comes later in the same pilot, or the gunpoint reunion between the two sisters that closes it out — those are built as their own excerpts rather than compressed into this one. What this page shows is narrower and, hopefully, more useful in isolation: four techniques, doing real work, in a continuous stretch of unedited pages.
Read the whole thing
This excerpt is the opening of a 60-page pilot. The full logline, genre, and comps are on the original post — Spec TV Pilot: “Catalyst” →
Related pages
- How to Write the First Five Pages of a Screenplay — the checklist notes 1 and 2 are drawn from.
- How to Write for Short Attention Spans Without Flattening the Story — the “every scene earns the next” discipline behind note 3.
- What Is Haecceity? — the specificity discipline behind note 4.
- How to Create a Distinct Character Voice — the framework behind note 5.
About the author
Jesse Alexander is a screenwriter, showrunner, and narrative designer whose work spans film, television, games, and transmedia storytelling. Scribbler’s Toolbox collects practical frameworks developed from professional story development and production.