Episode 4 Format

Tonight, I am thrilled to present the first legal drama we've ever staged, although, admittedly, not the first we've ever been involved in. Our experience has taught us that legal proceedings are a lot like Survivor, or at least, like a two-Tribed version of Survivor. (Did you know that sometimes Survivor has a twist where only two Tribes compete? It was a surprise to me when we looked it up last night. But thankfully we also read about something called a Tribe Swap.)

And so we're going to begin this new Episode by reorganising all of our cast members into

two new Tribes!

We've done this based on the numbers you all picked in the Fun thread! Every number was put into a list and then ordered neatly, like so:

After removing the players just voted out, every second number was then assigned to The Prosecution, and every other number was assigned to The Defence.




It will take us a few minutes to adjust permissions. But as of now, you can send Private Missives to everyone who is a member of your Legal Team. Yes yes, congratulations, but do hold your applause until the end of all the announcements please. Sending any PM to the other Side would be a breach of professional ethics and severely compromise our case, so do not do it. And don't applaud that either, please.



Before we go any further, I do have one parish notice. Unfortunately, there has been an error with the technical drawings for the Courtroom set. While the dimensions were written in inches, they were interpreted by the builders in centimetres. So, that does mean the premises are a little snug, but we still want to give everyone a vote because democracy is democracy even in plays - nay, especially in plays! So instead of giving every one of some Twelve Angry Actors an equal vote on an oversized jury like in a regular two-Tribed Survivor season Trial, we've decided to improvise.

And so we're going to be co-opting a whole series of tiny Voting Rooms, just like all of our industry has adjusted to shrunken writers' rooms these past few years. Each tiny Voting Room can only fit about three voters at a time... perhaps four, if you all pull a McConaughey and lose an unhealthy amount of weight in preparation for the role.



In any case, this round will have two Phases.

Your Research Phase will consist of 40 hours, up until 6:30pm GMT Thursday night (which is 1:30pm EST, and also 5:30am Friday AEDT). During this time you'll be able to talk with your Legal Team Tribemates, familiarising yourselves with the specifics of the case, playing darts in the break room, enjoying the gold-plated washroom facilities, or whatever else the fancy lawyers seem to fancy these days.

You'll also need to make two Decisions: a Lawyer Ranking of your Tribemates from most favourite/helpful/lawyerly down to most undeserving of a rich man's toilet seat when the bowl is right there. And a selection between Properly Respectable Official Prosecutorial Setpieces, or Legal PROPS for short - which must be done in secret, with no discussion at all on the topic.



On Thursday night the Trial Phase will begin with you all divided into different Voting Rooms, based on your choice of PROPS. Each Tribe will send three Actors into their first Voting Room, another three Actors into their second Voting Room, and two Actors into a third Voting Room. The pair in this final Voting Room will join up with the equivalent pair from the other Tribe, creating a the fifth Voting Room with four players in it.

Once the Trial Phase begins, all PMs will need to stop. Instead you will be locked inside your little Voting Room, left there for creative deliberations among yourselves into the weekend until you are ready to Vote for one another. There are five Voting Rooms, so five players will be pronounced Guilty for receiving the most Votes in their room.



Of course, the BBC subscribes to the belief that most Guilty parties need not be punished, because they only want us to imprison two 'lawyers' at the end of this week. Something about criminal programming quotas So the Voting Rooms will have two opportunities to 'earn' safety and ensure that whoever they Vote to eliminate gets Jacked off scot-free.

The first is through Blatant Nepotism, a key feature of both our Entertainment industry and our democratic Legal Institutions. We're sure those of you from the most privileged families sped through last round's Challenge, so the player on each new Tribe who finished that Challenge the fastest will be granted the ability to protect a Voting Room of their choice, once the players in each room are decided. With one small proviso - they will not be allowed to protect their own room (we wouldn't want the appearance of bias to detract from anyone's opinions of Just Us Justice).

The other way to keep your Voting Room safe is to pack it with the very best Lawyers, which of course is decided not based on your achievements or experience, but by how much your colleagues like you and/or bribe you . So once the Challenge winners have granted their protection, we will calculate the average Legal Rankings for the players in the remaining Voting Rooms. The two rooms with the lowest average Ranking will be the ones to actually see their Votes send somebody out of the Game.


Of course, the lengthy bureaucracy of processing times means that nobody will be told whether their Voting Room is vulnerable in this way; the Voting Rooms with higher average Rankings, or with the protection of the Challenge winners, will still Vote. Only after all five rooms have finished Voting will we we announce whether the players they found Guilty are actually going to be knocked out of The Goes Wrong ORG. But if you do think that your room is safe, we highly recommend that you try to collect votes upon yourself, just for fun



Oh! And there's also a new Challenge to complete by the Thursday deadline, which will keep us all organised and well ahead of schedule for everything for Episode Five. Once again we won't tell you the details of what you're playing for until later (our files have been hacked and held for ransom, but I promise we're on top of it!) but it will be a matter of life and death and legal fees, so please take your obligation to pay play very seriously.


In summary, we are sure that Your Honours agree this is the simplest way to get around the problems with the set. Sex Designer promises to do better next time, or at least until we coerce his deputy out of her Witness Protection program. He's also been punished by having to take and read back the Minutes from today's rehearsal meeting:




If you have any questions, good luck. But try your luck here in this thread.

Now please enjoy A Trial to Watch!

[They kiss, roll credits.]