Babylon 5: why did Sinclair leave so suddenly if they knew it was gonna happen in the middle of s1?

I just started Season 2. I knew when I started the show that the commander was gonna be replaced, but I decided to keep myself unspoiled on the exact circumstances until I got there. So when I started 2x01 and saw that it was just an offscreen departure, I decided to probe further about the behind-the-scenes details.

What I found out is that Michael O'Hare had to leave because he had some very serious mental health issues (like full-blown hallucinations). That didn't help me understand why his character dropped off so suddenly, because it appears that the first season was only halfway done when that all started to be a problem and they decided that he would only continue through the end of the season. And yet, the way they change commanders in the season premiere is like when a castmember unexpectedly quits or dies in between seasons, and they have to scramble to fill the hole.

Can anyone explain why they didn't do more to lay the groundwork for Sinclair leaving? Why it seemed like O'Hare being off the show was so sudden and unexpected, when they actually had half the season to prepare?

 

Perhaps it being unexpected and sudden to the characters of the show was also part of the point?

 

Maybe a bit of hope that his situation would change and he'd be able to continue on to season two?

 

But there's a difference between it being sudden to the characters, and behaving in much the same way as if it was sudden to the production team. For instance (not saying this is necessarily the best way, but just as an example), they could've cast the season 2 commander earlier, and then have him and his ship appear in a season 1 episode. They could've easily reworked Captain Pierce from A Voice in the Wilderness: Part 2 to be the future commander (he could still be at odds with Sinclair but maybe in a more reasonable way), and then when he comes back in season 2, there's an established history with the character and some sense of how he's different from Sinclair, not just "generic commanding officer v2."

Of course, you could say that having him appear previously would be small universe syndrome, and that's somewhat fair (unless his previous appearance was directly relevant to why he was given command). But again, I didn't say that was the best option. You could've also shown the Minbari talking about making Sinclair an ambassador, have someone mention Sheridan in passing at some point (since, according to dialogue in the season 2 premiere, his destruction of the Minbari flagship was basically the only win they ever got in that whole war, so he should be a pretty highly-regarded war hero), or just anything to plan ahead for when Michael O'Hare would need to move on. Maybe they were hoping he'd recover and wouldn't have to leave, but there's still plenty of room for, "hope for the best, prepare for the worst." It just didn't seem like they prepared for it at all.

 

The suddenness of the departure was part of the story.

 

Even if that's true, there's no reason that the story needs to be told by starting five days after Sinclair has departed and just have the characters find out he's not coming back. You could make the suddenness of the departure part of the story by showing the moment when he's ordered to depart, his own surprise and confusion at it, etc. There's a lot of good drama that could've been mined from "I thought my life was going one way, and now it's going off in a completely different direction."

 

1) For years, the only people who knew why O'Hare left the series were O'Hare himself and J. Michael Straszinski, who kept that information secret - at O'Hare's behest - until after O'Hare's death

2) As a result of promising to keep the circumstances of O'Hare's departure private and secret, JMS couldn't "telegraph" it narratively

3) It makes for much more organic storytelling to have Sinclair's departure be as shocking and jarring to the characters as it is for the audience

 

That would have been anticlimactic, wouldn't it? Earth Force One destroyed, Delenn in a chrysalis, Garibaldi near death. And then...a two minute argument about being reassigned.

 

The first season finale was actually filmed around halfway through production of the season, because it was going to require a lot of post-production, so it probably was shot (and certainly was written) before it became clear O'Hare would have to leave the show. It's become more common nowadays to film pick-ups and associated scenes for episodes out of sequence (for instance, the flashbacks in Battlestar Galactica's episode "Unfinished Business" were written and filmed at the beginning of the season with the thought that they could end up scattered through the rest of the year, though they ended up deciding to have just one big flashback-focused episode), but my understanding is that, especially in the early '90s, it was prohibitively difficult logistically to do that kind of episode-splitting while filming. JMS also tends to write very tight scripts.

I'd assume that it was a combination of factors; it would be too much trouble to reshoot part of the episode to include Sinclair's reassignment, and they might not have had the runtime to accommodate it in a way that wasn't pointlessly perfunctory. If the episode had actually been filmed last, Sinclair's reassignment could've been worked into the structure of the episode, but they probably decided anything they could insert to set it up would feel weird and tacked-on (again, something that's become common nowadays with post-credits scenes teasing the next installment, but not something that would've worked at the time).

 

Now that makes a lot more sense. It's a shame they couldn't have just filmed one or two quick scenes of Sinclair for use in the season 2 premiere. Even if it had been something as awkwardly tacked-on as Lassiter's scene in the first Psych movie (also due to severe medical problems), I think it would've still given a better sense of transition.

 

It works well the way it is. Think of real life where an American president has been assassinated or removed from office. While there is disruption, the new President usually moves people around snd appoints new people to the various posts, or recalls ambassadors from one country back home without warning.

 

Well, that's very subjective. It didn't work well to me.

Sure, but there's no reason that couldn't have been dramatized on the show instead of just being alluded to retroactively.

 

Both Sinclair and Sheridan, as Commanders of Babylon 5, were the Governor’s of Babylon 5. Their position was as political as it was military. And remember, Sinclair was only a Commander, not a Captain, and it was only because of the Minbari pulling political strings when B5 was built, that he was assigned, while there were plenty of other well deserving officers who were passed up.

 

Far too often in stories, major events are "telegraphed" when there is absolutely zero narrative reason for the storytellers to have done so.

Sinclair's departure being sprung on both the audience and characters makes Babylon 5 a much more "true-to-life" narrative than it would have otherwise been.

 

One of the characters that Sinclair's departure would've been sprung on is Sinclair himself. I would've liked to see his reaction.

 

I think Sinclair's departure from his own point of view was told in the first few issues of the monthly DC tie-in comics series.

 

Your best bet would be to get a copy of "To Dream in the City of Sorrows", which goes into Sinclair's experiences. May not be easy to find though.

 

There is a reference in a cut scene in The Gathering to Sinclair filling in while the Earth Ambassador was ill. It didn't make the screen, and the station commander representing Earth became assumed.

Having authority split between the station CO and an Ambassador could have been interesting; presumably they would argue it out and then present a united front behind their decision, whoever won the argument. But more likely now than then (even though two people arguing in an office is both cheap and good drama).

 

Kind of an Adama/Roslin dynamic, come to think of it.

Spoiler: Season 5

The Babylon 5 digitial guidebook CD-ROM that came out between season 4 and 5 mentioned an ambassador from the Earth Alliance on the station, but we never saw her. The issue of who represented Earth in the IA council was glossed over, though what little we got indicated that, amazingly, it was still Sheridan's job (he sat behind the "Earth Alliance" nameplate at the council meetings, and he dealt directly with the EA President when proposing they and the Minbari collaborate on building new ships for the IA).

 

They recycled that plot thread into the Political Officer in Voices of Authority. Of course, once the video evidence against Clark was released, that Officer was recalled pretty quickly.