Thank you, Dave. I really appreciate the read. THIS is the critique I was looking for, because I think that you understand this material quite well, and just about every one of your points is insightful, and something I felt in my gut when writing this. I'm not married to these characters' back stories, and when this was a short film and a play, most of the action was with MARY / ALBERT, with the family existing for exposition.

I do agree that the family needs to be more nuanced. And I was up the middle about my treatment of Bianca. I wrote her as Asperger's, and brainwashed by her father, and literally having a "man in the sky" view of Heaven, so now, she thinks her dad can see all and hear all, and that drives her nuts in a way.

It's an interesting idea to make Albert a more formidable foe. He was every Christian I've ever had an argument with and then at some point said "but the Bible says"... which as you know, leads nowhere. I viewed he and Anna as wild college kids who got in deep with drugs or whatever their vices were, started to have kids, got "born again" (If you've ever seen Joel Osteen - he asks you to pray a prayer with him at the end of the service and then says "friends if you say that prayer with us, we believe you got born again".... this is what I was going for), and then said "hey, why don't we create an Empire Megachurch?"

And I wanted to madden him further by also making Mary clueless as to the secrets of the Universe... she knows who created ALBERT, but she doesn't know who created HER. She is a scientist, and has theories... which for me most closely align with Tipler's work, I think I mention the title of the book in the script. I'll have to really take this under the hood and see if making Albert a more studious man outside of religious dogma is an idea that can work.

Great stuff, thank you so much for your detailed notes!

AJR