I watched pretty much the whole thing during its first run (except for the last year when it jumped to cable, but I caught up later)... and I've seen the whole thing many times since then.
I don't remember when I originally saw the quote from JMS. Before I made my post, I went to double-checked and found it referenced on Wikipedia. The source it listed was The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5 (
http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/misc/cc-leave.html), and that site says it's from 1997:
From JMS, August 14 1997
How can the story continue without one of the main characters?
One of the first things I had to do, in plotting out the storyline, was to set aside trap doors for *every single character*, because you never know when or how the real world is going to impinge upon you. An actor can quit, or get hit by a car, or slammed by a meteor...there's no way to control the characters the way you do in a novel. That's a given. But you can't bring X-million viewers along to a certain point, then say, "Well, all the stuff we were going to do we can't because X isn't here."
So in a way, the structure of the story is kind of like a computer game tree...pull out a piece along the way, and it goes down a different path, but ends up at exactly the same point at the end. It's the difference between different *results* and different ways of *getting* there.
You can do a story about a platoon in WW II, for instance, and some of the platoon may live, die, be injured, whatever...but the story of WWII is the story of WWII.
Beyond that, a challenge is just that: a call to see just how good you *really* are, kid. If you've ever seen GLORY, there's the scene in which one of the Massachusetts 54th is being taught to shoot. He does just fine, hits the target, reloads fine...when nobody's shooting at him. At which point the colonel starts firing a revolver right next to his head, teling him to try and do it NOW, and do it FAST, with ten thousand guns firing at him.
That's when the art comes in, that's when the skill comes in...in dealing with what you *don't* expect.
Like I said, it's hard to say which parts of the narrative were planned and which were on-the-fly, but the man himself said there were "trap doors" from the beginning, and I've got no reason to doubt him.
>shrug<I wish I'd been around those boards then, it must have been so much fun to be able to interact with the creator of the show as it came out!
(I also prefer Sinclair to Sheridan, but what
really curdled my spoo was Marcus and Ivanova...)
