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.
Yes, I agree - the betrayal-of-sorts on B5, the lead-up and Londo making his final sacrifice are all beautiful and devastating and completely in keeping with the characters' virtues and flaws. It's one of my favorite parts of the season, as emotionally wrenching as it is. And it gives us some moments of transcendental beauty and connection as well.
... And then the next fifteen years happens. And everyone comes SO CLOSE to realizing it - they all recognize something is wrong with him (even Sheridan, who doesn't know him as well as Delenn and G'Kar), Delenn even glimpses the Keeper for a moment - and no one follows up on it. No wonder he sounds so disappointed and perhaps even a little surprised with the "So you do not know" in the flash-forward! He tried to do everything except taking out a billboard in the Zocalo reading I AM BEING CONTROLLED BY AN ALIEN NECK PARASITE, TRUST NOTHING I SAY.
(Fixits will continue for the foreseeable future.)
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.
Yes! Whatever else was going on, JMS knows his characters inside and out, and is very good at writing grounded emotional states for them. Including letting them make terrible or self-destructive decisions, and be messy and completely fucked in the head.
I don't think there is anything like it. The conditions that produced it are irreproducible. I'm just glad it exists.
Same. And I am delighted that I finally got to experience the entire thing, and loved it just as much as I always hoped I would!
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.
I could easily see it being much more organic, naturally developed and in-character if it had been realized onscreen. I would have liked to see Vir in that, especially. (I do love how even the brief glimpses we get of Emperor Vir show how much he's grown up and yet still remains the same person - he has so much more gravitas, but he still thinks to offer his sincere condolences to the Ranger who brought the notice of Sheridan's wake, and his soft-spoken shyness at their group dinner is Vir to the core.)
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Yes, I agree - the betrayal-of-sorts on B5, the lead-up and Londo making his final sacrifice are all beautiful and devastating and completely in keeping with the characters' virtues and flaws. It's one of my favorite parts of the season, as emotionally wrenching as it is. And it gives us some moments of transcendental beauty and connection as well.
... And then the next fifteen years happens. And everyone comes SO CLOSE to realizing it - they all recognize something is wrong with him (even Sheridan, who doesn't know him as well as Delenn and G'Kar), Delenn even glimpses the Keeper for a moment - and no one follows up on it. No wonder he sounds so disappointed and perhaps even a little surprised with the "So you do not know" in the flash-forward! He tried to do everything except taking out a billboard in the Zocalo reading I AM BEING CONTROLLED BY AN ALIEN NECK PARASITE, TRUST NOTHING I SAY.
(Fixits will continue for the foreseeable future.)
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.
Yes! Whatever else was going on, JMS knows his characters inside and out, and is very good at writing grounded emotional states for them. Including letting them make terrible or self-destructive decisions, and be messy and completely fucked in the head.
I don't think there is anything like it. The conditions that produced it are irreproducible. I'm just glad it exists.
Same. And I am delighted that I finally got to experience the entire thing, and loved it just as much as I always hoped I would!
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.
I could easily see it being much more organic, naturally developed and in-character if it had been realized onscreen. I would have liked to see Vir in that, especially. (I do love how even the brief glimpses we get of Emperor Vir show how much he's grown up and yet still remains the same person - he has so much more gravitas, but he still thinks to offer his sincere condolences to the Ranger who brought the notice of Sheridan's wake, and his soft-spoken shyness at their group dinner is Vir to the core.)