And we round out the team.

From the script:

Raleigh Porter is in his mid-to-late 40s. He’s a severe-looking black man with droopy, Baldwin-esque eyes and a full beard. He has short, messy hair, and is wearing a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a plain crooked tie. Like the others, he’s wearing a headset and latex gloves (despite not being at the crime scene…).

Raleigh is one of those names I just have a weird thing for, haha. I’ve never met anyone with that name (unless it’s Leigh Walton’s full name?). If it’s a dude, it’s kind of a classy rugged name to me. If it’s a girl, it’s…also kind of rugged? Like, I bet she works with horses and has freckles.

Porter just sounds detective-y to me. Like, that’d be a British TV show. (Or am I thinking of Luther? Certainly not Cracker.)

(Raleigh’s kind of interesting in that I wrote him way before I saw any of The Wire, and it turns out he’s basically as-close-as-can-accidentally-be-gotten to a weird crime comic version of Lester Freamon. Of course, I saw Treme first, so the amazing Clarke Peters is Chief to me first…)

From the script:

Jackie is a short, freckled girl in her early 20s, with bleached blonde hair. No makeup except some heavy dark brown eye-shadow.  She wears a black zipped hoodie. Dark blue jeans and scuffed work boots finish the look.

Jackie Laika’s a name I came up with for a wholly unrelated project whose title I can’t remember (something King. It was basically about a beat ‘em up character who moved away from Not Metro City, then came back and saw how Players 2-4 changed).

The name Jackie’s from a girl I went to grade school with; her dad was a cop, I think? So, the name Jackie has cop/law associations in the back of my brain. And since I pretty much only encounter cops when it comes to speeding tickets and action movies, Jackie seemed a solid protagonist name to me.

Laika comes from the dog the Russians shot into space. Fatally, as it turns out.

(Do you know what psychometry is? Probably my favorite ESP BS. Touch things, and see their history. I like it because I occasionally wonder what the stuff I own has seen, and also because it’s not as invasive as someone being able to poke through your head. Or my head, for that matter.)

So, having met the team, they break down like so: Charlie is the point man, Jeff is the comedy (or the wild card), Jackie is the prodigy, Porter is the genius glue.

Next week: we sort of begin to start seeing what we’re up against.