"The Deconstruction of Falling Stars" (original) (raw)

• Why was Claudia Christian's name taken out of the credits but Jason Carter's left in?
  We had no choice. Contractually, when we moved "Sleeping in Light" into the fifth season, we had to move her credit from "Deconstruction" or incur an additional episode's payment. We didn't even realize this until WB called and put us on notice about this literally 3 days before the episode was uplinked. It wasn't a choice we had; they said that it had to be moved. We could leave Jason in the credits because he didn't appear in SiL.
• Any significance to the Agamemnon clip used to replace her credit?
  It seemed an appropriate placeholder when WB told us we had to omit Claudia's credit because she also appears in (the new) 522, "Sleeping in Light," to avoid incurring fees.
• Since this episode was numbered 422 rather than 501, will the production numbers of season 5 episodes be changed too?
  Yes, the S5 episodes will be renumbered prior to broadcast.
  More Soviet Revisionism in action....
• Do you ever get the urge to thumb your nose at people on the net who predict B5's demise?
  Nope...no intentions of doing that.
  I have something MUCH better in mind....
• It's discreet...but not obscure.
  And best of all...it's eternal...and the whackos who've bugged me for five years are not.
• A few people have interpreted the final card as "meanspirited" (when it's on one level a reaction *to* five years of constant carping and meanspiritedness from lots of sectors, from the nets to the press and elsewhere)...but what it is, is a statement of hope. That whenever you try something different, there are going to be naysayers, and people who say it can't be done, and certainly can't be done by *you*.
  It ain't just B5, it's any dream out there.
  And in the end, they are wrong.
  Faith manages.
  That's the message of the card.
  That, and the truth that in 10 years the naysayers will be forgotten, and made irrelevant...but the show, the *show*...goes on. And will be around long after they and I have gone to dust. And all people will know when they see that card, 50 years from now, was that some jerks said it couldn't be done, and they were wrong, because they are *always* wrong. If you have the dream, the ability and the passion, you can bring your dreams to life despite overwhelming opposition. That's the message.
  But for those on the other side, they will never see anything other than meanspiritedness because that's all they can *ever* see...because that's all they can bring to the table.
  There's an old saying about books, which I'll rephrase to include B5: Babylon 5 is like a book, and a book is like a mirror: if an ass peers in, you can't exactly expect an apostle to peer out.
• There will always be short-term setbacks, but as long as we climb back a few inches higher than we were before we fell down, we keep moving toward the goal of becoming a better people, and getting off the planet. Taking our place among the stars. While it's vaguely possible that I may *see* a Mars colony sometime within my lifetime, I know that I will never live there...but that ain't the point, it isn't a victory if *I* do it, and a failure if *I* don't, it's if *we* do it or not. Maybe we'll do it today, maybe we'll do it tomorrow, the point is to decide to DO it, and then by god DO IT.
  And yeah, that little closing card is going to remain on the show for its life...which will be long, long after its detractors (and admittedly myself) have gone to dust. On the one hand, it is a statement of hope to anyone else out there who has a dream, to follow it no matter who speaks against you, no matter the odds, no matter what they say to or about you, no matter what roadblocks they throw in your way. What matters is that you remain true to your vision.
  On the other hand, for the reviewers and the pundits and the critics and the net-stalkers who have done nothing but rag on this show for five years straight, it is also a giant middle finger composed of red neon fifty stories tall, that will burn forever in the night.
  In billiards, we call that a bank-shot.
• Does the Great Burn mean the B5 crew ultimately failed?
  It depends on your point of view.
  The fact, as I see it, is that no one and nothing will ever solve all of our problems at once, now and forever. People will always be people. You can't wave a magic wand and fix it all.
  Yes, there was another war...but had the Shadows not been stopped by our characters, there likely wouldn't have been a human race at ALL anymore.
  Yes, there was a war, and many died in it...as tends to happen in war...but the nominal right side in it came out on top, which would not have been the case but for Garibaldi's simulacra giving them a leg up on things.
  We have had, continue to have, and will always have wars, and grief, and struggle...we will climb up and fall down...but each time we climb a little higher, and in the end, we *do* build the world that our ancestors would have wanted for us...we *do* leave the cradle at last, and we take our place among the stars teaching those who follow us.
  For my money, that's as happy an ending as we or anyone can ever hope for.
• You spoiled the events of season five!
  As with anything else, B5 (in whatever incarnation) is about *process*. You saw Londo being strangled by G'Kar...but you didn't know how they got there. You know the result of the Earth/Minbari war...but I suspect there will be a lot of surprises in "In the Beginning."
  As with all things, the joy is in the going. We all know we're going to die, that as the poet said, "we are born astride the grave." But knowing that inevitable reality has never stopped human endeavor before....
  It's the journey and the doing that matters.
• Re: speechwriters and others hanging around after the fall...look at the remains of the Soviet Union. After the fall of the communist party, you'd think they would all have been run out of town on a rail. But many of them just shifted over and found similar positions, or kept the communist party going, after everything they'd done.
  The problem with most people is that they don't hold a grudge near long enough.
  I'd have to check, but yeah, I believe we stuck a ranger symbol on the encounter suit.
• About the 2362 sequence
  Stephen filmed that sequence by having all of the cast on the set at the same time, running multiple film cameras to get each version "live."
• From a discussion of a 1997 convention featuring Stephen Furst
  BTW, if you want to flip Stephen out, and you get this before leaving the con, give him the following message from me (I don't have the hotel info at hand). Tell him Joe says this:
  "Don't worry anymore about using mainly securecam style coverage in act 3, I've just come up with another approach where I can cover it in dialogue to let you do whatever you want with the camera, so you'll have all the flexibility there you want."
  Here's a use of a convention you haven't seen much before....
• The "Just Married" label was missing from the shuttle when it docked.
  The painted letters were on the *right* side of the shuttle as it went in. The CGI inside the bay showed the left side.
  We don't miss these things.
• How did Delenn get into the studio?
  Most TV studios that I've seen have back doors that open out onto the back lot or the outside for fire control reasons. You can get into any of the 3 B5 stages from the outside in, oh, about 5 seconds through any of a number of doors. (Note to anyone looking on: yes, those stage doors are secured, and there are guards, and unless you're a Minbari you're not getting in.) And most of the TV studios I've been in have been the same.
• It was mainly Earth that bore the burden of the great Burn, and yes, that was the one Garibaldi got into....
• Wouldn't the colonies offer Earth some help?
  Some probably would offer to help...but if technology is now suspect, some might not want that help...other colonies might be of the "screw 'em, they got what they deserved" perspective...often politics gets in the way of charity.
• "By any chance, is the post-apocalyptic religious order shown in "Deconstruction . ." a direct decendant of Brother Theo's order on Babylon 5?"
  It's altogether possible....
  And Theo is only awaiting a story worth bringing him in for.
• Interesting aside...for the last 6-8 months, I've been doing a fair amount of research into medieval England, especially the medieval church, for a play I'm writing (which may become a novel if I'm not careful). Dumped several hundred dollars on a massive order from Amazon.com back a few months ago to fill out what I needed. That was what tangentially led me into the post-Burn sequence in "Deconstruction." My brain has been full of monks for the last 8 months or so, and knowing the role they played in maintaining secular knowledge from about 500 AD and for some time thereafter, that seemed the perfect route to go that would also resonate with the look of the Rangers and the religious caste Minbari and the whole feel we were setting up.
  It was only when I was about halfway into the act that I thought, "Oh, crud, this is the same area Canticle explored." And for several days I set it aside and strongly considered dropping it, or changing the venue (at one point considered setting it in the ruins of a university, but I couldn't make that work realistically...who'd be supporting a university in the ruins of a major nuclear war? Who'd have the *resources* I needed? The church, or what would at least LOOK like the church. My sense of backstory here is that the Anla-shok moved in and started little "abbeys" all over the place, using the church as cover, but rarely actually a part of it, which was why they had not gotten their recognition, and would never get it. Rome probably didn't even know about them, or knew them only distantly.)
  Anyway...at the end of the day, I decided to leave it as it was, since I'd gotten there on an independent road, we'd already had a number of monks on B5, and there's been a LOT of theocratic science fiction written beyond Canticle...Gather Darkness, aspects of Foundation, others.
• The future wasn't being transmitted back; we were seeing the records of the past from the point of view of the final character, one million years hence, who has come to collect them prior to the final chapter in Earth's history.
• "My personal nit is that JMS has the sun going nova in only a million years. This seems several orders of magnitude too soon for me."
  Actually, the computer voice specifies that it is continuing to note atypical solar emissions...atypical meaning something unusual is going on.
• And what if you, say, interfered substantially with the mass of the sun by, say, causing a series of jump points to open up *inside* the sun across several days?
• You'd also substantially decrease the mass of Sol, which as I understand it, would result in the sun going nova.
• A lot of folks have found the eventual "going out" of Sol to be depressing...but as was stated 'way back in our VERY FIRST EPISODE, this is the one thing we can be sure WILL happen, sooner or later (probably later). Ed. note: "Infection" was indeed the first episode shot, but aired fourth.
  All the more reason to get off the planet, asap.
• Did the future humans leave the galaxy as the Vorlons did?
  No point in leaving the galaxy; stars go nova, it only affects the immediate vicinity (big as that is). By this point, they were in the position of the Vorlons, and now have to take their (our) place guiding the younger races, the next wave, while not getting in the way and remembering the lesson of the shadow/vorlon conflict.
• What about the other races?
  The Minbari eventually make it; the Narn and Centauri do not. They don't die out, they just don't hit a state of First One-ishness, which is darn close to immortality (barring violence).
• Was Sinclair prescient? Did you have the sun's destruction mapped out way back in season one?
  One needn't be prescient...it's *going* to happen one day.
  And to the second half...yeah, Deconstruction (or at least the events that would go into it) was mapped out back then.
• I think it's fair to say that Sinclair has been in large measure forgotten by Earth by the time of Deconstruction...but Valen lives on in the memories of the Minbari...a reasonable trade-off.
• They were speaking English a million years in the future?
  That's what you heard, that doesn't mean that's what it was; same as when you go to Minbar, they're not speaking English, that's just our hearing of it.
  Since when do news anchors quote the Bible?
  Ted Koppel.
  Why were Sheridan's childhood photos in black and white?
  Even now portraits are often done in black and white just for artistic merit.
  NYU is still around in the future?
  Trinity College is a working college in Ireland that dates back to the American Revolution. Ed. note: In fact, Trinity College is even older than that -- it was founded in 1592.
• Did Lise and Garibaldi get married?
  No, they're not yet married.