This was a scene that I truncated drastically to get to the chase. The original idea was to show Hiura’s crew of rogues making their way through the station and then running into Azarek’s gang. But it was more expedient to just cut to them in the middle of the fight. Also, with it being the end of the story, I wanted to have the three cliffhangers (including Grissom working with police and Roka’s crew deciding to break out Hamron) in rapid succession. I didn’t want two cliffhangers and then a long action scene before the last cliffhanger. That pacing would have felt off. So I tried to shorten it where I could while still showcasing enough of Hiura’s crew in action.

With scenes like these, I sometimes have a hard time deciding what kind of word balloons to use. Every balloon being an exclamation feels excessive, but it also captures the feel of characters shouting over the din of a loud firefight. I think the standard oval balloons would be less “noisy” visually, but would then make the dialogue feel more conversational, which is not the intent.

For the last three balloons, I really couldn’t decide if they should be yelling balloons or standard conversational oval balloons, which is probably why I split the difference and used periods instead of exclamation marks, which now seems super weird. So I guess I should change that to either exclamation marks in yelling balloons or periods in oval balloons.