Going through the scenes and grounding them deeply has meant thinking through some of the minor secondary characters. These guys have been mere redshirts standing around, usually in one mass. Even just trying to get them separated into real human beings--albeit shallowly delineated ones--has changed a key scene and the direction of the scenes that follow.

I'm tired of dealing with so many characters, though. It's tempting to have an meteor crash into the story and kill half of them off.