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All Alone in the Night question

Raw Shark

Regular
Apologies if this has been covered before, if so, I missed it. And I don't have the script books.

All Alone in the Night has Sheridan wanting to be a hands-on fighter pilot and get off-station for a mission. He runs into the hostile Streib ship, his escorts are destroyed, and he is captured. He is tortured by the nefarious aliens, and has a vision in which he communicates with Kosh, telepathically, over great distance. And he has a mysterious vision, a la Twin Peaks.

Was this a story JMS planned for Sinclair, and reworked for Sheridan? And if so, were the Streib part of the original plan, or was it originally going to be another party, like the Wind Swords? JMS said around the time the series began (in Cinefantastique, I believe) that he wanted to stay away from what he called 'alien of the week' stories, the sort of thing Star Trek had been doing for so long. But this time he made an exception, and the Streib are not heard from again, apart from vague mentions that they work for the Shadows. The Wind Swords seemed fixated on Sinclair, and almost certainly wanted to get their hands on him and ask some pointed questions. Sadly, the Wind Swords are neither seen nor heard from after Deathwalker. I think JMS was going to go in some really interesting directions with them. But with the Narn-Centauri War, the Shadow War and all the trouble on Earth, the Minbari warrior stories got pushed aside, or to the back burner for later.

And while I'm on the topic of Minbari warrior clans, does anyone know the clan origins of Alit Kalain, and the crew of the Tragati? Asking for a friend... who may or may not be myself.

Raw Shark

"The question is its own purpose, Ambassador. What do you want?"
Mr. Morden
 
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Was this a story JMS planned for Sinclair, and reworked for Sheridan? And if so, were the Streib part of the original plan, or was it originally going to be another party, like the Wind Swords?

Here's a bit of what JMS said in the script book for this episode:

I could salve my conscience by saying that I needed to write a heavy
action story to blow out the creative pipes after something as intensely characte roriented
as “The Coming of Shadows,” but that would not only be self-serving,
it would be untrue. I wrote it because I knew that Warner Bros. would love it,

In the outline published in Volume 15, there was no mention of the Streib, but keep in mind that it covered ten years in less than (IIRC) ten pages. That said, when it came to the Wind Swords, the outline DID have B4 going to the future after B5 was destroyed in a rekindled war with the Minbari. That's a lot of what we saw in the first season but JMS changed things with the departure of O'Hare for health reasons.

I don't see any mention of a clan for Kalain, sorry.

Jan
 
Tried a few screen captures of the Streib and their ? cousins ? for comparison: 2-11 "All Alone in the Night", 3-14 "Ship of Tears", and 5-17 "Moments of Fire and Shadow". Plus 1-15 "Grail" to round things out.
 

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