Synopsis
A comprehensive episode-by-episode guide to the fourth thrilling season of Babylon 5! Filled with stunning revelations and explosive plot twists and turns,
Babylon 5: No Surrender, No Retreat sums up the spellbinding fourth season. Culminating in some of the most dramatic events in television history, Captain Sheridan is pronounced missing and presumed dead on Z'ha'dum, while Delenn feverishly rallies support for an all-out offensive against the invading Shadow forces. Internal strife on Centauri erupts in a shocking and violent betrayal. Garibaldi resigns as Security Chief and turns to treachery, plotting against his comrades. And Earth launches a war against Babylon 5.
From "The Hour of the Wolf" through the shattering finale of "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars," B5 expert Jane Killick's episode-by-episode summaries and analyses capture all the action and intrigue of Babylon 5 circa 2261--"the year everything changed."
Veteran viewers or first-time fans, relive the adventure--or find out what you've been missing--with the complete companion volumes to
Babylon 5!
Extrait
Before an actor can step in front of the camera, there must be a story to
tell. There must be words for him to speak, a costume for him to wear, a
set for him to stand in, and a camera crew to film him. All this takes a
great deal of planning and coordination, from putting the first words of a
script down on paper through designing and making costumes, sets, and
alien makeups and organizing the filming schedule. An episode may last
only forty-four minutes, but it is the result of many hundreds of
man-hours.
But before there are individual episodes, there is an overall plan. This
started in the late 1980s as a five-year story plan that has been added to
and changed as the series has developed. The man who created the story
arc, J. Michael Straczynski, keeps his notes in a "hodgepodge" form, which
he refers back to as soon as he knows there will be a new season to plan
for. From there, he develops a set of notes outlining all twenty-two
stories for the season. These are little more than a few sentences
describing the main thrust of an episode, such as "Sheridan returns from
Z'ha'dum and has to deal with reforming the alliance," and occasionally
the major scenes, such as "Sheridan on the bridge talking to people," from
Season Four's "The Summoning." These may sound rather sketchy, but they
are there only as guides. A more detailed plan is locked away in Joe
Straczynski's head. "This is the Scheherazade complex," he says. "They
have to keep you alive because if all of my notes were written down in
clear and concrete form, I would be almost expendable at this point. Those
aren't meant for anyone else. If you picked it up, all you would get would
be the very, very broad strokes of where things are going to go. You
wouldn't know the details--nor should you, because if it should fall into
anybody's hands, it would be all over the computer nets in twenty-four
hours."
From that, he writes an outline for the producer, John Copeland, to
forewarn him and the heads of the main departments of what is to come.
Also at the beginning of the season, they all sit down for what John
describes as a "postmortem" of the previous year. "When we have these
roundtable discussions, we are harsher on ourselves than any critic has
been in print anywhere," he says. "We can be pretty scathing at times, and
that can be good because I think that kind of honesty really has helped us
to excel from season to season."
Work can then really begin on the individual episodes, but before anything
else can swing into action, there has to be a script. Sometimes, Joe
Straczynski has passed on his story ideas to other writers. This happened
particularly in Seasons One and Two where he would write a short outline,
allowing the writer to build on those ideas and, with a certain amount of
consultation, embellish them into a script. On rare occasions, writers
have come up with their own ideas, as D. C. Fontana did for "Legacies" in
the first season, Laurence G. DiTillio did several times in the first two
years, and Neil Gaiman and Harlan Ellison have done for the fifth year.
Most of the time, however, it is executive producer Joe Straczynski who
writes the scripts.
Sometimes Joe will sit down at the word processor and produce a script
within three days. The current record is one day to write Season Five's "A
View from the Gallery." The result, however, represents much more than a
day's work, as he will have been thinking about it long before his fingers
ever touched the keyboard. "It's like a dog chewing through a bone," he
says. "The writing process is hardly ever clean and precise. I have a
concept or a story in which X has to happen, but the shape of it is
unclear. It's like looking through a glass of the wrong prescription. If
it's not quite there, then, over the next week, few days, months, whatever
time I have, I'll chew through that subconsciously. Every once in a while
I'll be watching a movie or watching television or half asleep in bed, and
all of a sudden the back of my brain will go ka-ching [like a cash
register] and something will pop up. It can be very disconcerting when
Kathryn [his wife] and I are sitting having a conversation, and in the
middle of a sentence, I'll stop, go into fugue state, reach over, grab a
piece of paper, write something down, then go back to the sentence where
I'd left it off. But it means I suddenly have a piece of dialogue worked
out."
These notes are essential reminders to unlock the ideas in his head. Some
writers carry a notebook with them and diligently jot down any ideas they
have in a neat and orderly fashion. Joe is more of a back-of-an-envelope
kind of guy. "Yeah, unfortunately, I'm not terribly well organized in that
respect," he admits. "My office is covered in Post-it notes and scraps of
paper and crap which you look at and think, 'This guy's office is very
messy,' but all those pages contain a fragment of dialogue or a
description of a scene or a character note and I know where they all are,
I know what every one of them means. I may pick it up, and it'll have just
three words on it which are designed to remind me of an entire long
speech, but I only need those three words. The same way that you only need
to have a few words from the speeches of Shakespeare, and you know the
rest of it automatically."
From there, Joe Straczynski will occasionally write an outline that
consists of no more than a page listing the beats of the episode and
placing them within the six-part structure of an American television
episode--the teaser, four acts, and a tag. This is generally the case with
a more complex episode that has several story threads. With the episode
all set out on one page, it is easier to see that, perhaps, some material
has to be taken out of act 3 and put into act 2. This is the usual format
for writing for television, especially when scripts have to be approved by
producers further up the line. The story will be discussed at outline
stage, then a treatment will be written that breaks it down scene by
scene, and once that has been discussed and approved, the script merely
fills in the details.
Joe rarely works that way, even when writing for people on other shows
because he feels it stifles originality. Instead, he moves from outline to
script--if he bothers to outline at all--preferring to keep the writing
process a journey of discovery. "The saying is, 'The writer must surprise
himself if he has any chance of surprising the audience.' And so I go into
each episode with the notion that no outline ever survives contact with
the enemy--which is the writing of the script. In some cases, the less I
have outlined, the better the script has been, because you leave yourself
open to the characters coming in and making suggestions and taking the
show off in different directions (or that part of your brain that becomes
that character for the purposes of that conversation). In many cases, I'll
sit down with no notes. I'll know this is an interim episode and sometimes
even when it is an arc episode, if it's an important episode in the arc, I
will have gone through it in my head so many times leading up to it that
the actual writing of it happens in five minutes. There were several
episodes this past season [Season Four] where I wrote the script in three
days without any notes or outlines because I'd been thinking about it for
four years."
The result is the writer's draft. "I'll take about a day to look at it,
and I'll think, Can I clarify this? Tighten that? I just go through and
clarify a little bit here and there and tighten all the screws, make sure
the bolts are on straight, and then when it's published as the first-draft
script, that is it. The only things that happen after that are production
changes. My feeling is I wrote it right the first time, and nothing much
is going to be gained by going back and tinkering with it, unless someone
finds a massive logic flaw, which is pretty rare."
The first person to see the script after that is producer John Copeland.
He will occasionally make comments about its creative content, but his
primary role is to cast a production eye over the material and point out
anything that he thinks will be a problem from the production point of
view. "We're a little bit like a Chinese menu," John explains. "We can
take one from column A, one from column B, one from column C, or we can do
two from column A, two from B, or we can do one from A and B and two from
C. We can deal with guest cast and stunts and sets or we can deal with
guest cast, extras, and sets, but we can't deal with all of those four
elements together. That can become very difficult for us because of the
economics. If we've got lots of sets that are moving around, it's hard to
have three hundred extras, because the extras fill the hallways when
they're in between shots. Also, if we've just had an episode that's got a
lot of visual effects in it, it makes it very difficult to have the next
episode be a visual-effects bone crusher because we've only got so many
resources."
If there are any alterations to be made, they will be included in the
first draft that is then handed out to a select number of people: the
department heads, director, and production manager. If there are any new
characters, costumes, and prosthetics, the design process will get
rolling, as will the production design department if there are any new
sets. All this takes place with reference to Joe Straczynski who is kept
informed and is consulted throughout. It is all part of what he terms "the
utility of one voice," which he tries to maintain by being involved with
every aspect of the production, from the writing to the final edit and the
music.
"If you look at the show and you see a Narn and you hear about the Narn
culture and, eventually, you see the Narn homeworld, the homeworld matches
what you imagine it would look like because I have sat down with everyone
and made sure that the climate matches the clothing they tend to wear,
which matches the skin they would happen to have, which matches the
language they would happen to develop in that place. If you went to the
Narn homeworld, for instance, and it looked like Minbar, your brain would
say that doesn't fit, this doesn't belong with that. If you had diverse
hands working on things without any kind of supervision, you would have
that kind of possibility arising. My job is to work with all the
departments to make sure it's consistent throughout. I try, though, not to
let that go too far and be micromanaging people because nothing is won by
that except to cause frustration."
The various departments work in different ways when preparing an episode.
For Ann Bruice-Aling, who is the costume designer and in charge of
wardrobe, a meeting with Joe is the first step. "I always make a list of
questions based on each episode I read," she says. "Some of them are
purely logistic, like, How many of these guys do you think we're going to
need? Then the ones that are new characters, we'll talk about what he sees
about the character, if there's any input he wants to give me before I
attack. Then I go off and do research from a bunch of sources, period
stuff and different things that I have stashed away. Like with the Drakh
emissary [in Season Four's "Lines of Communication"], that was totally
new, something that we hadn't done. We'd never seen that before, and so I
did a lot of research and compiled that, then I went back and talked to
him about the approach. Then I do a pencil drawing, and sometimes I paint
them."
John Vulich, who designs the prosthetic makeup for the alien characters,
approaches his side of things in a similar way. Like Ann, he starts with
the script. "We try and glean whatever we can from the description of the
character to try and work out what kind of style or demeanor for the
creature or alien would work for this type of scene in the script. On
another level, we try and gauge its longterm position in the script or
within the arc, and that involves meeting with Joe. 'What do you have in
store for this character somewhere down the line?'--it's something we
always have to ask him. It quite frequently happens that Joe will
introduce a character and he will have either a benevolent or an evil
demeanor, and it's very often with his style of writing that by the time
you're done with that character it's always the exact opposite of what you
think he is. Deathwalker in the first season is the prime example of that,
and they were very particular about the design because they wanted a
design that was capable of going in either direction. So it's all kind of
figuring out what kind of design is suitable to this and how it fits into
the context dramatically, because, ultimately, what we're doing is
building something that will support the story and the drama of it all.
And the show's quite tricky in that way, which makes it fun, actually,
because it's challenging when you do those kind of designs. It's easy to
do a monster, but it's harder to do something that could be perceived as a
monster, but later on you realize he's really your friend."
It is much the same with set and prop design, which is part of the art
department, and headed by production designer John Iacovelli. "Usually Joe
is so specific in his descriptions in the script that I don't usually talk
to him first," he says. "Although we usually show him and John either the
concept sketch or the white models before we show them to the director.
Joe has a very open-door policy, and we run every prop by him and every
set decorating spec. He's very involved with the show. It's more rare than
it's frequent that he'll object or change something."
While all the designing is going on, the production manager is working out
the filming schedule. Scenes have to be grouped together to form the most
efficient and practical arrangement possible. "I sit and juggle them
around," explains Skip Beaudine, who joined as production manager in
Season Three. "I'll go through and get all the scenes that are shot in a
particular set and put them together, and then I move those around to fill
out a day. I'll take, say, all of the Observation Dome and all of
Sheridan's office scenes, and I'll put them together and that will make a
day's work. Then I've got to determine what cast are in those scenes, and
if I'm starting any guest cast, I'll try to keep all their work within a
couple of days, because once they start, you pay them daily until they are
finished even if they don't work." That becomes the rough draft for the
schedule, which is likely to change when the director comes on board. He
or she may, for example, want to spend more time on one scene than the
production manager had envisaged, or cast an actor who is available only
for certain days in the week.
The director, having had the script for several weeks, comes in seven days
before filming is due to start for his or her official preparation period.
The first job is usually casting. For a typical episode with a couple of
extra characters, this will take only two or three hours, but it could
ta...
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