Guide Page: "The Long Dark" (original) (raw)

A couple of thoughts on Sheridan, btw...triggered by messages I've seen or had alluded to in which he's gigged for smiling too much, unlike Sinclair...just checked back in some of my archives, and for the first four or five episodes, the number one complaint about Sinclair was that he either smiled or smirked too much....

Meanwhile, just a little something for the folks on-line to contemplate...remember the first rule of Babylon 5: nobody is what they appear. Not entirely, anyway. There's always something going on, something that somebody's not telling. Some folks are making the error of looking at Sheridan -- as they looked at Sinclair, or Londo, or Vir, or G'Kar -- and thinking "this is all that he is." Except, of course, that they weren't and he's not. I would not create a character that is just what you're seeing.

Aside from that, and this is a separate issue...there are really two ways to deepen a character and give him a dark side. One is to do something to him *before* you meet him, which he's still recovering from (Sinclair). The other is to meet him, and THEN drop him down a well. In a way, Londo is illustrative of the latter; you get to know him, and he's funny, colorful...and then you start to move him.

So suffice to say that Sheridan is going to end up getting more and more conflicts, and getting booted to the head, and as someone noted above, caught in the conflict between being a good officer and being a patriot...which can sometimes be the same, and sometimes VERY different things.