Babylon 5 - What might have been *Possible Spoilers*

[JoeD80]

^Just sounds like season two with Sinclair instead of Sheridan, and Catherine in place of Anna.

Which was a trifle obvious even when watching the show - that Anna was filling the Sakai role (originally the Caroline role, of course)

As for "Sakai = Anna", that's not 100% accurate

Sure it is. JMS just tweaked the story, and obviously decided the comparison would be less obvious if Sheridan's wife was already dead rather then establish yet a third character who fit the bill of Sakai and her predecessor. She'd still have wound up serving basically the same purpose.

The Shadows were already there in season 1 before Sakai had done anything. It wouldn't fit the story logically, and Joe has even said "It's a good theory: wrong." Sakai was never going to have Anna's arc, and certainly didn't fill that role in the outline in volume 15.

Basically, it sounds like the changes made when they switched from Sinclair to Sheridan were a lot LOT more radical than previously thought. It was basically a completely new arc.

Not really. He didn't really change a lot of it: Londo, G'Kar, and Garibaldi's arcs remained almost exactly the same, and Sheridan's arc is close to that of David Sinclair in the outline (forms a Great Alliance, defeats the Shadows, becomes a religious symbol to the people).

Looking at the slower arc progression in the memo, it does seem like the rest of the seasons were originally going to be more like Season 1, many standalones with the arc woven in rather than the almost-serialized fashion of S3 and S4.

I believe the initial idea was of having 50% arc and 50% stand-alone each season.

 

[Kegg]

The Shadows were already there in season 1 before Sakai had done anything. It wouldn't fit the story logically, and Joe has even said "It's a good theory: wrong." Sakai was never going to have Anna's arc, and certainly didn't fill that role in the outline in volume 15.

Joe_Washington's post outlining a season two arc (showing JMS's intent prior to letting Sinclair go) basically gives Sakai an arc that is clearly resembling the one given Anna. The differences can be ascribed understandably to JMS significantly reworking the concept, but it's a stretch to say they arose completely independently of each other.

 

[JoeD80]

Keep in mind, Joe [Straczynski] also said "Sinclair wasn't ever going to go to Z'ha'dum" so there would be even less reason for Catherine to fill the Anna role. The outline in volume 15 outlines Sakai's fate as surviving in to season 3 and being mind-raped, with Sinclair being given the choice to mind-rape her again to restore her memory, and he can't do it. Delenn moves in on Sinclair's vulnerable emotions at this point. Not the same story, except the result of getting Delenn together with Sheridan/Sinclair. Sakai couldn't have been involved in the Shadow arc except to discover that the Earth Corporations had Shadow technology; but the Shadows awakening couldn't have had anything to do with her because of timing. Joe also stated Caroline (the one from the pilot) was to get in to trouble with Earth Corporations and find that they weren't too altruisitic. It's likely that Max Eilerson has some of Catherine's arc.

 

[chrisspringob]

The Shadows were already there in season 1 before Sakai had done anything. It wouldn't fit the story logically, and Joe has even said "It's a good theory: wrong." Sakai was never going to have Anna's arc, and certainly didn't fill that role in the outline in volume 15.

Joe_Washington's post outlining a season two arc (showing JMS's intent prior to letting Sinclair go)

Eh....I don't think Joe_Washington's post shows anything about JMS's intent. He just posted his own idea (that is, Joe_Washington's own idea) on what the alt-Season 2 might have looked like. It isn't based on anything that Joe *Straczynski* ever said, unless I'm misinterpreting.

 

[Kegg]

My mistake.

Still, Sheridan's wife, like Sinclair's lover, is a woman who was on a ship that ran into the Shadows. Coincidence? There's definitely something amiss there.

 

[chrisspringob]

The very phrase "original arc" is misleading. JMS came up with this rough idea in 1986, and it kept evolving along the way, right through production. The arc in Script Book Vol. 15 is just what the arc looked like after "The Gathering" but before Season 1 was produced. There were other iterations before that and others after that. Which one is "original"?

I think it's pretty telling that the Season 1 in the memo matches the aired Season 1 very very closely and immediately goes off in a different direction in Season 2.

Basically, it sounds like the changes made when they switched from Sinclair to Sheridan were a lot LOT more radical than previously thought. It was basically a completely new arc.

I think a lot of the changes had nothing to do with the change from Sinclair to Sheridan....though they might have been made around the same time.

The two biggest differences between the outline in Vol. 15 and the show we got are:

- The Shadow War was intended to take a different form, and mostly not even take place until the spinoff series, Babylon Prime.

- In the Vol. 15 arc, there was no mention of Earth turning into an Orwellian police state, and the "B5 breaks away from Earth" storyline isn't really there in the same form. It's kind of there, but takes place in Babylon Prime.

It's unclear when JMS made those changes to his own mental outline of the show. It might have been at the end of Season 1, when O'Hare left. Or it might have been mid-Season 1 or mid-Season 2. We don't really know.

 

[Hyperspace05]

It's unclear when JMS made those changes to his own mental outline of the show. It might have been at the end of Season 1, when O'Hare left. Or it might have been mid-Season 1 or mid-Season 2. We don't really know.

Or even before Season 1. We can speculate about this all we want - but ultimately it comes down to whether or not you take JMS at his word or not. (He has been asked many times about the Sakai/Anna stuff)

 

[JoeD80]

There's no need to speculate on when he came up with the rise of a police state: in his earliest known notes (about a page where he sketched out the rough ideas of the show, released in the Babylon 5 magazine), he wrote (emphasis mine):

Hook into real-life politics: assassination, betrayals, corruption, show rise of fascist government, how it happens.

The fact that Sheridan quotes Lincoln in the very first episode that he shows up in points to the decision already having been made to involve a civil war by the 2nd season, but also in these early notes Joe mentions influences that should be similar in tone to the show (emphasis again mine):

Casablanca, Dune, Lord of the Rings, Prisoner, Gone with the Wind, Civil War, Kennedy Assassination, Foundation, Lensman

It seems apparent that he had the idea from the outset.

 

[chrisspringob]

There's no need to speculate on when he came up with the rise of a police state: in his earliest known notes (about a page where he sketched out the rough ideas of the show, released in the Babylon 5 magazine), he wrote (emphasis mine):

Hook into real-life politics: assassination, betrayals, corruption, show rise of fascist government, how it happens.

The fact that Sheridan quotes Lincoln in the very first episode that he shows up in points to the decision already having been made to involve a civil war by the 2nd season, but also in these early notes Joe mentions influences that should be similar in tone to the show (emphasis again mine):

Casablanca, Dune, Lord of the Rings, Prisoner, Gone with the Wind, Civil War, Kennedy Assassination, Foundation, Lensman

It seems apparent that he had the idea from the outset.

OK, but there really isn't anything about that in the Vol. 15 synopsis. I'm not sure it was originally intended to be such a prominent storyline.

 

[JoeD80]

The outline in Volume 15 appears to have been written for Larry DiTillio (and possibly WB) to give him a general sense of the show without spoiling every detail:

Just recently, btw, I gave Larry DiTillio a printout with just a little of the coming 5 year arc...if he's going to story edit, he needs to know what lines not to cross, and I can't ride herd on that all the time. He took it home, read it. Called me. Didn't even say hello. Began the conversation with, "You are out of your f'ing mind."

No one has seen the entire series outline. Three people have seen a ten-page synopsis of the full five-year story, and are sworn to absolute secrecy about it. Larry, as I mentioned earlier, read it, and his first reaction was, "You're out of your f*****g mind." [Michael O'Hare] began crying at the end of it. (Honest to god, I'm not making this up.) The synopsis contains only the broad strokes; not the details, and there's a LOT of odd stuff in the details.

 

[Sharr Khan]

I think he sort of understood the allure and power of 'the pre-planned arc'

And now every new Science Fiction tv show is lambasted (BSG) if it does not conform to the meme JMS created and yet in the final outcome pretty much didn't follow along himself with.

Sharr

 

[Kegg]

I think he sort of understood the allure and power of 'the pre-planned arc'

And now every new Science Fiction tv show is lambasted (BSG) if it does not conform to the meme JMS created and yet in the final outcome pretty much didn't follow along himself with.

Sharr

Farscape and DS9 also didn't have preplanned arcs per se and it's not a criticism that's levelled pretty heavily. How BSG's arcs pan out is generally the thrust of the JMS comparison - that they could have been benefited had they been planned out in advance. I think in BSG's case this is more true of the mytharc - who the twelve Cylons are, the role of God. etc. - than character and political arcs.

The myth, the background info about shady secrets, is stuff you'd usually want the writers to know, I'd affirm. The audience may not know who the Vorlons are, but JMS had better do so.

 

[Jan]

Many people in the past have misunderstood how much (or little) detail was planned for. From what JMS explained in the script books (and online though I can't locate a particular post right this minute) is that there were certain beats that needed to happen in each year but that there was room in the arc to explore things differently if it happened that it would make the story better. Londo and G'Kar's arcs would be a case in point. When it turned out that they were such strong characters, their stories were expanded. Drall and Na'Toth would be examples the other way, where for different reasons, their arc had to be dropped or moved over to other characters.

It wouldn't have been nearly as good a series if he'd allowed himself to be handcuffed to an 'original' plan. That doesn't mean that he didn't adhere to what he'd pre-planned whenever possible.

Jan

 

[JoeD80]

Expanding on what Jan said, Joe never said "I have written exactly what will happen and will follow this point-for-point without making any changes whatsoever."

In fact, what he said was that he had sketched out a 5-year story that would allow for real-world changes, with trap-doors in case actors left, and often stated "writing is *fluid*, I have to adapt the story, I'm thinking of new and better ways to do my story."

Now that being said, Garibaldi's story was the same as in the Volume 15 outline; Londo's story was the same as in the outline (just not going quite as insane); G'Kar's story was the same as in the outline; Delenn's story was farily close to what was in the outline, except the ending of the Minbari civil war comes much sooner; Sheridan and Delenn have a child, and in the outline Sinclair & Delenn have a child. You can see the major threads of seasons 1, 2, and 3 in the outline, as well as parts of season 4 and parts of season 5 in the outline of Babylon Prime. [Yes true as mentioned above there's nothing about the civil war, and there are threads that weren't used in the show, but you can pick out a lot of what was used from there]

Now there were a lot of layers added on top of the story as Joe adapted, and he moved the pieces around in different ways, but the fundamental character arcs were there and followed fairly closely.