Or to put it another way, it gave him the image he needed for the writing until an actor was hired. It was never intended to be the final name for the character. The name Sheridan was decided after Bruce was hired and was based on his interest in the Civil War. Jan
Well originally the traitor was Takashima so it might have come to a head much earlier (she would have been the one who shot Garibaldi at the end of season one) but the actress wasn't available to renew the role. She was quite wooden in the pilot (although I think it was the way the director encouraged her to deliver her lines rather than the fault of the actress - I read somewhere that they were thinking of asking her to re-dub her dialogue but I don't know if they ever did).
She did re-dub her dialogue - to make it "softer" to satisfy a network note. The original way she did the lines is in the Special Edition, and the re-dub is in the original version of the pilot (which can be seen on hulu I think).
Sorry for the double post, but this isn't related to the above and is instead related back to the Michael O'Hare subject; I had been searching through my notes for this for awhile so hadn't said anything about this yet. I think I might have posted this once before but since this thread was asking, I thought I would add what O'Hare himself said about the subject when asked at the time of season four:
Michael York for Sheridan? Never heard that one before. I'm definitely glad they went with Boxleiter, he was great in the role.
It's been a while since I saw the episode; does it make sense if we assume Hedronn is an alias so Coplann could travel incognito, maybe so the Tragati captain wouldn't realize he'd been found?
I thought that Sheridan being named as a civil war general was a reference to the Earth Civil War, not Boxleitner.
Might have been both but JMS said this in Volume 3 of the script books: [/LEFT] There are several examples throughout the show where JMS uses bits of the actors to inform their characters and performances. Delenn berating the Grey Council for not getting involved in 'the afairs of others' harkened back to Mira Furlan's experiences in the former Yugoslavia, for example. Jan
It'd make sense, yes and I think that's exactly the assumption put forth in the official chronology, I'm just not sure if there's any basis for that beyond deductive reasoning. By that I mean I've never managed to find any reference to the apparent disparity by JMS one way or the other. It could be that was precisely the intent when 'Points of Departure' was written or on the other hand it could just be a mistake brought on by the same actor hired to play two different but very similar characters and someone later forgetting that they weren't one and the same. I'd like to clear it up, but I can't seem to find anything concrete. I think there was another Delenn line in season one that might have been a reference to that in 'Midnight on the Firing Line': "You kill them, take their land, they kill you and take the land back." Though I know it's wasn't a JMS script, wasn't there also something about Richard Biggs's relationship with his father that influenced some scenes from 'GROPOS'? There are probably other examples but that and the one with Mira are the only ones that spring to mind.