And JMS has a good enough eye for character nuance - it really is one of his strengths
His discussion of Vir taking over from Londo as the character to assassinate Cartagia was one of the first times I had encountered an author talking about that part of the process, where a character has evolved to the point that they no longer fit into their originally slotted role. That record scratch may be the one place where the singularity of the flashforward screwed the show structurally, because the narrative is locked into that future of Londo and G'Kar and it isn't a vision on the slant, it is exactly and literally per the accuracy of Centauri death-dreams and the nature of time travel in the B5-verse what will happen, and JMS had not built himself an out from it because it was such a tentpole in every version from the start. That said, I am also now wondering a little if it was a problem of darlings that should have been killed. If this summary is accurate, he had already had to jettison his beloved, however ill-advised time-jump and future-son. Maybe he just couldn't bear to lose this other, oldest, still mostly intact piece of story.
But I think Londo and the people who loved him laid the groundwork for a less tragic ending, and I am really enjoying thinking of ways to give them something better.
Everything that leads to Londo accepting the Keeper for the sake of Centauri Prime still follows organically for me: JMS let his characters splinter themselves on their own faults and merits there. The fifteen years no-contact requires a team effort of idiot ball.
I have another halfway written post in my head due to rewatching some of the early episodes for vid purposes, about how much of the groundwork I can see that the show was laying for characters and relationships that fell off a cliff (Sinclair and Delenn, Sinclair and Garibaldi, Talia and Ivanova) and while I can see how satisfying it might have been if those had come off - because the Londo & G'Kar, and Londo & Delenn groundwork DOES come off, and it IS satisfying), it also has a beautifully organic feel, because ... sometimes things don't work out, sometimes you love people and they go away and you never see them again and whatever you could have been doesn't matter.
I look forward to that post, because yes. The loose ends—whatever my personal objections to some of them—are so much of what makes the show feel real. It would be more neatly packaged television if JMS had known not to kill off Marcus because he was about to lose Ivanova, but Ivanova leaving the station in the wake of Marcus' death because she can't deal with it and needs to get her head together is exactly the sort of decision a person in her shocky, nonconsensually not dead state would make.
(Still would have loved to see Talia and Ivanova go somewhere. Still glad that Sinclair and Delenn didn't.)
(Ayup.)
and instead we just get one that actually comes off as more-or-less planned (Londo and G'Kar) against a backdrop of people being messy and things going in 20 different directions at once
Another testament to the benefits of improvisation, because that unswerving quality is part of what makes their characters feel like the spine of the series, but the rest is the actors' chemistry blooming in the unplanned extra time of their storyline.
It's just completely unlike anything I've seen before, in the best way, and if the tonal and subgenre changes are at least partly a result of network meddling and other factors, that's okay - it's gloriously itself, and it really does work.
I don't think there is anything like it. The conditions that produced it are irreproducible. I'm just glad it exists.
[edit: meant to comment on this part earlier] In any case, what was always the true ending of the saga in every single plan, the fall of the drakhs/shadows, the liberation of Centauri Prime and Londo/Gkar’s death wouldn’t have been in crusade/rangers, it was put in the “legion of fire” novel trilogy.
Pace the just-passed Peter David, I did not particularly like or accept much of that trilogy, but once I imagine it undergoing the same process of contact-with-reality reinvention as the series itself, it becomes a lot more interesting to wonder about.
no subject
His discussion of Vir taking over from Londo as the character to assassinate Cartagia was one of the first times I had encountered an author talking about that part of the process, where a character has evolved to the point that they no longer fit into their originally slotted role. That record scratch may be the one place where the singularity of the flashforward screwed the show structurally, because the narrative is locked into that future of Londo and G'Kar and it isn't a vision on the slant, it is exactly and literally per the accuracy of Centauri death-dreams and the nature of time travel in the B5-verse what will happen, and JMS had not built himself an out from it because it was such a tentpole in every version from the start. That said, I am also now wondering a little if it was a problem of darlings that should have been killed. If this summary is accurate, he had already had to jettison his beloved, however ill-advised time-jump and future-son. Maybe he just couldn't bear to lose this other, oldest, still mostly intact piece of story.
But I think Londo and the people who loved him laid the groundwork for a less tragic ending, and I am really enjoying thinking of ways to give them something better.
Everything that leads to Londo accepting the Keeper for the sake of Centauri Prime still follows organically for me: JMS let his characters splinter themselves on their own faults and merits there. The fifteen years no-contact requires a team effort of idiot ball.
I have another halfway written post in my head due to rewatching some of the early episodes for vid purposes, about how much of the groundwork I can see that the show was laying for characters and relationships that fell off a cliff (Sinclair and Delenn, Sinclair and Garibaldi, Talia and Ivanova) and while I can see how satisfying it might have been if those had come off - because the Londo & G'Kar, and Londo & Delenn groundwork DOES come off, and it IS satisfying), it also has a beautifully organic feel, because ... sometimes things don't work out, sometimes you love people and they go away and you never see them again and whatever you could have been doesn't matter.
I look forward to that post, because yes. The loose ends—whatever my personal objections to some of them—are so much of what makes the show feel real. It would be more neatly packaged television if JMS had known not to kill off Marcus because he was about to lose Ivanova, but Ivanova leaving the station in the wake of Marcus' death because she can't deal with it and needs to get her head together is exactly the sort of decision a person in her shocky, nonconsensually not dead state would make.
(Still would have loved to see Talia and Ivanova go somewhere. Still glad that Sinclair and Delenn didn't.)
(Ayup.)
and instead we just get one that actually comes off as more-or-less planned (Londo and G'Kar) against a backdrop of people being messy and things going in 20 different directions at once
Another testament to the benefits of improvisation, because that unswerving quality is part of what makes their characters feel like the spine of the series, but the rest is the actors' chemistry blooming in the unplanned extra time of their storyline.
It's just completely unlike anything I've seen before, in the best way, and if the tonal and subgenre changes are at least partly a result of network meddling and other factors, that's okay - it's gloriously itself, and it really does work.
I don't think there is anything like it. The conditions that produced it are irreproducible. I'm just glad it exists.
[edit: meant to comment on this part earlier] In any case, what was always the true ending of the saga in every single plan, the fall of the drakhs/shadows, the liberation of Centauri Prime and Londo/Gkar’s death wouldn’t have been in crusade/rangers, it was put in the “legion of fire” novel trilogy.
Pace the just-passed Peter David, I did not particularly like or accept much of that trilogy, but once I imagine it undergoing the same process of contact-with-reality reinvention as the series itself, it becomes a lot more interesting to wonder about.