Infection - Whatever Happened To Mr. Garibaldi?

[vacantlook]

In light of having just watched "Infection" again and knowing the discussion between Sheridan and Lorien in "Whatever Happened To Mr. Garibaldi?", I find the connection between the two episodes to be interesting. Lorien told Sheridan it was easy to find something worth dying for and asked him if he had anything worth living for. In "Infection," Garibaldi very near exactly makes the same comment to Sinclair. I know "Infection" was the first episode (not counting "The Gathering") filmed, so at that point I assume jms was still thinking that Sinclair would be in the entire five seasons. So, was Garibaldi's comment a reflection on jms having planned at that point in the show's production to have Sinclair be the person who went to Z'ha'dum and find Lorien?

 

[WorkingClassHero]

It's possible, but I think it's more likely that he just happened to express the same idea with two different characters.

 

[grumbler]

It just goes to show that unspoken assumptions are not shared. I have always assumed (and thought pretty much everyone else did as well) that Sinclair was going to go to Zha'h'dum in the original storyline. The evidence is there - JMS has Catherine Sakai doing a job that seemed almost designed to get her captured by Shadows while prospecting on the Rim.

I know JMS has stated that this isn't true, and that he meant to have another charactor come in and take leadership in the Shadow War, but I am not sure how much of this was a result of the decision to recast the "Sinclair" charactor and how much was a precurser to that decision.

I have always found the most compelling argument that Sinclair's original role was taken on by Sheridan to be Straczinski's commentary on the season 1 disks where he notes that he discovered he had written Sinclair's charactor in such a way that he was already at the end of the journey that JMS had intended the lead charactor to take over the course of the series. Thus, in a sense, it was Michael O'Hare's gravitas that cost him his part as the lead in B5 - because B5 was going to be, in part, about the pain and loss that would cause the main charactor to develop such gravitas.

If I am right, then the events of WWE were originally supposed to take place at the end of the series.

 

[Bester]

I agree with grumbler. I am sure that jms's original plan was to have Sinclair as the only "The One" - the hero of the story who would "die" at Z'ha'Dum, then be reborn in order to rid the galaxy of the First Ones and rid Earth of a tyrannical government.

Sinclair would then travel back in time and become the Minbari leader Valen at the end of the series. The series would end with our hero having to save the galaxy all over again.

Afterall, the overall theme of the series was laid out quite clearly in The Gathering as "the power of one person to change the world around him" (the Zen stone garden).

 

[Mike G]

Its really just a matter of the show having recuring themes through out the entire story arc. JMS throws that idea out there early on and goes back to it later, like he does with many of his concepts.

 

[grumbler]

Mike G, you are correct in that nothing JMS planned for Sheridan was not forshadowed by Sinclair - the theme was the same. I just think vacantlook's comment is interesting in light of what JMS himself has said - he had to build up the main charactor before he became what Sinclair was from the get-go, and from that I read that JMS realized early on he had introduced the "late series" main charactor far too early, and that he had to hit the "reset button" to make the charactor work. Hence, what Garibaldi said in an earlier episode to Sinclairsimply wouldn't have worked for Sheridan until he had "been through the wringer" a bit.

And that, I find, is an interesting concept.

 

[vacantlook]

JMS has Catherine Sakai doing a job that seemed almost designed to get her captured by Shadows while prospecting on the Rim.

And Catherine can even be seen as a replacement for Caroline who also did some long-distance traveling with her own ship. From reading some of the old GEnie posts made by jms before the show began, it seems as if his very original intentions was for Caroline to be around for a while. So, with Caroline not coming back after the pilot, it seems to me that Catherine was a way of allocating Caroline's part to another character. When the decision to replace Sinclair with Sheridan came along, Catherine would no longer be important to impact Sinclair the way the original plan seems to have been. So, it would have then made since to redistribute that part of the arc to Anna for Sheridan's character.