I was reviewing my script and I realized how much importance is placed on characters’ names. Boy, of course, acquires two names in the course of his adventure, escaping the traps of being “No Name” and “Mule,” only after Black Stache asks him, “Appellation, please.” And Stache (who will soon lose that name) hears his own name shouted multiple times, at least once at his own prompting.
Lord Aster bears a rather transparent tag name (“star” in Latin). Sánchez can never get Stache to call him by his name. Prentiss uses an unflattering nickname for Ted. Much fun is made of the meaning of Molly’s name in whatever language is native to the polyglot Mollusks. For some odd reason, Stache calls Alf “Alfred.”
And so it is that I realized that, of the limited text that Captain Scott has, twice he tells us his full three-barreled name, just so we won’t forget who is doomed to an Antarctic grave. And thus I made the choice to make those self-namings really big, declaiming each piece to the three sections of the house, with a slight increase in pitch and dynamics: “Robert Falcon SCOTT.”