Also, even Star Wars recognizes that sci-fi audiences are not in it to fall in love with a beautiful, iconic location and then watch it blow up. We don't mind an Aldebaran or a Death Star, but we don't want to see the Millennium Falcon destroyed or Cloud City go up in smoke.
Agreed! I was just thinking in terms of flipping the narrative table, which only works if the underside of the table and the scattered pieces actually are cooler than the alternative. B5 destroyed is not cooler: it's an expected move and as you very rightly point out, the risk of unnecessarily losing the audience is high. Pulling a full le Carré and revealing that the great war against the forces of evil is really a Lovecraftian cold war in which the last of the elder races are fielding the proxy agents of the younger against one another—yet again more mature than the simpler twist of, say, just having the Vorlons turn out to be the bad guys instead—is much cooler! Legitimately a whammy to audience expectations and yet totally legible in hindsight! And once again possible because the show is successfully juggling so many different genres that playing by the rules of any one of them feels fair so long as it's been sufficiently introduced. All of these original outlines for Babylon 5 sound much more constrained by conventional sff tropes than the show ended up being. It's just fascinating to me how much it apparently stretched and grew, even when it tripped over the occasional Byron.
But this show doesn't ever do that. It's not a coming of age story. It's not even that it isn't about people learning who they are - because for many of them, it is! But they never start out not knowing who they are or what they want. They just might need to change their mind about what that actually is.
Yes! That is an excellent way of putting it. And ties in to your earlier point that all of these people are adults, even the younger characters like Vir or Lennier (who to be fair did get kind of shot out of a cannon in terms of his diplomatic placement: Vir got what everyone thought was a joke assignment, but Lennier went straight from contemplative statistics to witnessing a dude cheat at cards with his junk. I'm sorry, I will never be over the fact that I watched that scene on primetime TV). They are already on trajectories.
no subject
Agreed! I was just thinking in terms of flipping the narrative table, which only works if the underside of the table and the scattered pieces actually are cooler than the alternative. B5 destroyed is not cooler: it's an expected move and as you very rightly point out, the risk of unnecessarily losing the audience is high. Pulling a full le Carré and revealing that the great war against the forces of evil is really a Lovecraftian cold war in which the last of the elder races are fielding the proxy agents of the younger against one another—yet again more mature than the simpler twist of, say, just having the Vorlons turn out to be the bad guys instead—is much cooler! Legitimately a whammy to audience expectations and yet totally legible in hindsight! And once again possible because the show is successfully juggling so many different genres that playing by the rules of any one of them feels fair so long as it's been sufficiently introduced. All of these original outlines for Babylon 5 sound much more constrained by conventional sff tropes than the show ended up being. It's just fascinating to me how much it apparently stretched and grew, even when it tripped over the occasional Byron.
But this show doesn't ever do that. It's not a coming of age story. It's not even that it isn't about people learning who they are - because for many of them, it is! But they never start out not knowing who they are or what they want. They just might need to change their mind about what that actually is.
Yes! That is an excellent way of putting it. And ties in to your earlier point that all of these people are adults, even the younger characters like Vir or Lennier (who to be fair did get kind of shot out of a cannon in terms of his diplomatic placement: Vir got what everyone thought was a joke assignment, but Lennier went straight from contemplative statistics to witnessing a dude cheat at cards with his junk. I'm sorry, I will never be over the fact that I watched that scene on primetime TV). They are already on trajectories.