Contents: Overview - Backplot - Questions - Analysis - Notes - JMS

Overview

Garibaldi's past catches up to him, with some disastrous consequences. He's blamed by some for an accident aboard B5, which leads to hitting the bottle again after a prolonged abstinence. Elaine Thomas as Lianna Kemmer. Tom Donaldson as Cutter.

Sub-genre: Intrigue
P5 Rating: 7.65

Production number:  111
Original air date:  May 4, 1994

Written by Mark Scott Zicree
Directed by Jim Johnston

Backplot

• Garibaldi was a shuttle pilot on Mars before coming to Babylon 5.

Unanswered Questions

• Who was the assassin working for? Who wants Santiago dead?

Analysis

• Ivanova's reluctance to stop the countdown is suspicious. Perhaps she had some reason to want the launch to take place; perhaps she even knew what was going to happen if it did.
• Everyone from his past considers Garibaldi a no-good drunk. Why did Sinclair give him a second chance? (Addressed in comic series, "Shadows Past and Present.")

Notes

jms speaks

• "For scripts that are given to other writers do you find you do much if any mental picturing of the episode? If so, how does that affect the writing process between you and the other writer?"

  No, you only get into that part of it when you're going to sit down and actually WRITE the sucker. It's a matter of bringing in the freelancer and (assuming s/he hasn't come up with a story independent of me, which happened about 4-5 times in toto) saying, "Okay, in this episode the giant blue penguins of Rigel 4 steal Ivanova's shoes," or handing the person a few paragraphs to several pages with detailed story notes. Then the person goes away.

  The first "mental picture" I have of it is when the writer brings back an outline based on those notes. This is always hard for me, as is the first draft script, because the characters rarely talk like our characters talk. They don't sound right, don't always behave consistently, there's bits of backstory that contradict what's been established, and that has to get fixed. So it's like seeing a distorted picture, and your job is to bring it closer into focus.

  (This is an inevitable aspect of freelancing. There simply isn't time to learn all there is to know about a show before you begin writing; you have to come in, do it fast, and then move on to the next assignment if you're going to make a living at this. That's the Freelance Life. I hate the Freelance Life. I like to stay around, get to know the characters, rummage around inside their heads and find what's there. Freelance scripts almost always tend to be about the guest star character; if you look at mine, most of them don't really tend to have a big guest character, with some notable exceptions. I find our regular characters more than sufficiently interesting.)

  What's most ironic about the freelance situation is that you often have people who say, "Straczynski oughta use more freelance writers, they bring in perspectives he doesn't have." They cite the "moment of perfect beauty" in Peter's script ["There All the Honor Lies"], Londo's "my shoes are too tight, and I have forgotten how to dance," ["The War Prayer"] the alien abductor courtroom scene in Grail, Deathwalker's comments about how she plans to create her monument...all of which are scenes or sections I wrote and inserted into scripts by other people. (One of my best lines for G'Kar is one I'm not credited for, in Zicree's script, "The universe runs on the complex interweaving of three elements: energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest." I actually saw some messages noting that jms never seems to be able to write something that succinct. Well, actually...I did.)

• We're already doing it, and have done it. We've already begun integrating "virtual sets" in with real ones. As an example...in the next-to-last shot in "Survivors," someone is entering a ship in the docking bay. The only real object in that room, aside from the actor, is a ladder. Everything else is CGI...but you can't tell.

• In "Survivors," we attempted a cgi/composite shot out the window, which looks pretty spiffy, actually. It's in the teaser. We may do this in future.

• The *reason* we had Garibaldi go through all the hoops he went through before finally falling into the bottle is because simply having Liana show up and depress Garibaldi isn't, frankly, sufficient motivation. I don't buy it. We wanted to strip away everything he had, and leave him with only *himself*. So we took away his job, his reputation, his money, his home, neutralized his friends wherever possible...it was deliberate and systematic to peel him down to the bare essentials, to just Garibaldi. Take him all the way down before taking him back up again. Because it's more dramatically interesting. It's more logical that it would take something this major to drive him back into the bottle after staying sober all this time. I'm sorry, I don't accept your suggestion that Liana's "anger and accusations" would "drive him over the edge as he deals with his guilt." He's BEEN dealing with his guilt, and her showing up wouldn't be enough to drive him back into the bottle again. I'm sorry, but as a producer or a story editor, I wouldn't buy that from a writer as being sufficient motivation. Particularly not a character who's as strong and as bull-headed as Garibaldi.

• What do I know about alcoholics, to portray them? Well, aside from a degree in clinical psychology, and some internship work in the area, I come from a family with alcoholism going back at least four generations, and I'm talking *heavy duty*. I am, in fact, the first male Straczynski in my branch of this particular stunted tree NOT to have this problem.

  I have had far, far, far more experience with this area than I care to recite...and from that perspective, I have no problem with Garibaldi's portrayal.

• Cutter went after Garibaldi only because that's who the dying worker named as being responsible for the bomb. (He didn't know he was dying, and wanted to throw blame; and even if he did know, what better than to nail the guy who'd hassled him before?) Cutter only took advantage of the situation.

  Luis Santiago is playing it both ways, allowing more trade and certain kinds of immigration, while preserving earth *culture*; this isn't the same thing as a trade embargo.

• The name of General Netter was stuck in as a tweak to Doug, it's a tuckerism (for those who know the term). We've done it a bit here and there; I kinda started shutting the process down after a while, since it was getting carried away. I don't want it to be obtrusive.

• I think Kemmer's name was inspired by the actor's name from the Space Patrol series....

• The Drazi are a very violent, ill-tempered species; they were the ones who first showed up in "Deathwalker" in a Sunhawk to threaten the station; they beat up the guy in "The War Prayer;" they show up here in "Survivors;" there's an episode about a form of martial arts among the aliens that has a Drazi going at it...if there's a fight around, you can often find a Drazi at the center of it or at least nearby.

• I think you're taking what I said to the extreme; I didn't say [the Drazi] were bloodthirsty savages, only that they had a predilection toward violence, and were generally very cranky. And not all great thinkers have to sit around in elizabethan garb, delicate flowers watching the skies rotate. Aggressive people can be good thinkers; it needn't be one or the other.

• ...the end of "Survivors," where Kemmer enters her ship...in reality there is only a ladder there. The ship, the walls, the door she enters, all that is CGI/virtual set.

Last update: May 13, 1996