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

Overview

As Earth reacts to the Drakh plague, the Excalibur sets out on its mission to find a cure.

Production number: 108
Original air date: June 9, 1999

Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Janet Greek

Plot Points

• Earth has been quarantined since the Drakh plague was released.
• The Excalibur has captured the first Drakh prisoner of war.
• Galen saved Gideon's life nine years ago, during the technomages' exodus from known space ("The Geometry of Shadows").

Unanswered Questions

• Why was Gideon's ship destroyed nine years ago?
• What are the new rules regarding telepaths? Clearly they aren't exactly the same as the old Psi Corps rules; Matheson, for example, wasn't wearing gloves. Who enforces the rules now?

Analysis

• How strong a telepath is Matheson? Would he have been of any use in the interrogation of the Drakh commander? Or is such probing forbidden by the new rules governing telepaths?
• Gideon referred to the Excalibur as the most advanced warship ever built by humans. Is he aware of the Minbari involvement in the ship's construction?
• The Drakh commander referred to himself as a councilman. Is there a Drakh government distinct from the military? What is the relationship between the two apparently different species who make up the Drakh?

Notes

• Assuming the technomages all departed at once and weren't in transit for a very long time, this episode takes place in 2268. The technomages departed B5 in 2259 ("The Geometry of Shadows") and Gideon said he'd been rescued nine years earlier.
• Explorer-class ships such as the one commanded by Gideon before he was assigned to the Excalibur were first introduced in "A Distant Star." Their missions typically take them far beyond known space for extended periods of time, mapping out new systems and making contact with alien civilizations.
• The question of whether life ever existed on Mars is still unresolved in 2268.
• Effects oddity: the fire burning in front of the crashed Drakh ship is symmetrical.

jms speaks

• Just for the record: I think the first one -- the only one written directly at TNT's behest -- is probably the weakest one, certainly the one I find least interesting. It's lumbered with buckets of exposition, explaining things that don't need explaining, too many fights, too many explosions, too much swaggering around, all stuff the net wanted.

  Then we go back to the show we wanted to make...Path of Sorrows is terrific, Well of Forever is a solid character story, The Long Road is just pure fun (that's pretty much reverse broadcast order, btw)... there's one or two in the bunch that are a bit slower than I'd like, but those are the exception rather than the rule.

  Just to get my own feelings on this out there.

• My take on #1 is that this is the weakest of the bunch, because this is the only one written at the behest of TNT; it's exposition heavy, too much swaggering macho stuff, no real depth, just stuff blowing up. The ones that follow are much better.

• All that exposition is what TNT wanted...and one of the reasons was that they weren't going to rerun ACtA before it...then they were, which made it all unnecessary...then they ran ACtA AFTER the ep...which makes NO kind of sense.

• "The mutiny was clumsy, but I like Gideon, Galen, Dureena and Trace. (And from the way it opened, my first thought was, "this must be some of the extra violence TNT wanted. Ugh.")

  Ding.

  "Will we find out why Gideon wouldn't have his exec scan the Drakh?"

  The rules about unauthorized scans still apply. Matheson has to operate even under stricter rules re: privacy now than before. You'll see more on this later.

  "The only really weak spots, to me were the " Earth in a panic" scenes, which looked an awful lot like newsreel footage"

  TNT note: we need to SEE Earth in turmoil, if we just hear about it nobody's going to get it. They had us insert that.

• "The opening scene cracked me up. Look there's a fight, as close to wrestling as you can get on a starship."

  Yep. That's one of the mandates they put on the first ep...they wanted to start with a fist-fight.

• Were any of the riot scenes staged?
  It was all real footage.

  As for the exposition...one reason they asked for so much was because they said it was going to air months after ACTA, and nobody'd remember, and it wouldn't get rerun...then after we shot WZ they decided they *would* rerun ACTA before WZ...then a few weeks ago they decided to run ACTA -- which has all the info needed for WZ -- AFTER WZ.

  Now perhaps you get a small sense of what we've been up against.

• "I admit, I'm one of the folks who didn't particularly warm to the [riot] footage. It seemed not to fit."

  It didn't. Moreover, the order for that stuff came in about two days before we were supposed to begin shooting, so we had to hurriedly redesign the set to include the wall monitor, and change other aspects of the filming, then hurriedly find some footage that would work (sorta).

  "I suppose there were few options."

  None. What you have to understand is that we were at this point, in the writing of this episode, on hiatus...awaiting the okay to go back into filming. And though it was never said overtly, there was always the undercurrent of "If TNT doesn't get this one script the way they want it, they may not give the OK. So give them what they want just this one time."

  I did what I could with what they demanded, and tried to fight as much as I could. For instance, in one scene, where Gideon tells the others to meet him in the conference room, the TNT note was, "How does Gideon know where the conference room is? We should have a scene where he's shown the conference room."

  My reply: "He knows where the conference room is because when he's escorted to the bridge by Matheson, *HE CAN SEE IT FROM HIS CHAIR*."

  (It was one of those bang-your-head-against-the-wall moments.)

  The overall problem, which many folks don't understand, is that in a script you have a finite number of minutes and pages. Let's say 42 pages. Now, the script is written the way you want, kinda, with some nice character moments and stuff. Then they want more exposition. You can't just append it to the page count, you have to stay at 42 pages. So you have to cut stuff *out* to make room for the stuff they want put *in*. The first thing out the door is character, followed quickly by humor.

  There was, for instance, a nice clash with the senator and the intelligence guy over Gideon's background, why he's the wrong person for the job, why Sheridan picked him specifically for the job...which had to go in order to put in more exposition (and lengthen the opening fight scene in the teaser by about a third, another TNT request).

  For me, a lot of what makes an episode fun are the character moments, but there was no longer room for them...they had to go out to make room for dry expositional stuff or stuff blowing up.

  Which is why I picked "The Long Road" as the one to follow in the broadcast order...it's one big character piece, with a fair amount of humor, and just fun. A little expository in the second act, but nothing unreasonable.

  Stil, I'm proud of what we did with "War Zone," because it was a little like someone handing you an inner tube and a tree branch and telling you to make a radio telescope out of it. It ain't pretty, but it does the job we had put in front of us.

  (One aside...some folks on the net picked up my comments about War Zone made here earlier and said I was apologizing after the fact for the episode, once the reactions came in...but the date stamp on the message, here and on the nets, clearly indicate that I made those statements BEFORE the episode aired. I know *exactly* where the faults are in the eps, where they work and where they don't work, and have always tried to be the first one on record about them because that seems right to me. This is, after all, about the process of educating people about how TV works, the decisions that get made and how you deal with them.)

• Why did the scene with the senator and the intelligence guy have to be cut?
  Because something had to go time-wise to make room for other stuff. If we'd kept *that*, then something ELSE of similar time would have to go, such as Dureena's scene in the cell with Gideon, or the like. The amount of air time we have per episode does not change.

  Also...they said the senator scene was too long (which it *wasn't* before the big montage/video/the senator explains it all for you sequence was added in), and to cut stuff out of that scene and add it to the fight in the beginning.

• Why did Sheridan pick Gideon?
  Sheridan picked him for the qualities that made him exactly the *wrong* person from their point of view...obstinate, difficult, independent, not prone to following orders from home, not politically astute...but he'll get the job done.

• "Somehow I get the feeling that the reason the Detroit Free Press reviewer said that Crusade looked "like it came from the planet Cheez-Whiz" can be summed up in 3 letters.... TNT. Unfortunately, if the first episode were all I had to go by I'd have to agree with him."

  And I would as well.

  That's the thing about all this...in the negative comments about War Zone -- and actually there have been far fewer than I'd anticipated -- there ain't much that I'd disagree with. If anything, they've tickled me because they reflect EXACTLY what I'd said when these things were asked for. It's been a massive validation.

• "Did they at least give you a blindfold and a cigarette? "

  Not orally, no.

• "And the differences were SO transparent (the fist fight, the earth scenes, the posturing, etc.) I sure wish I could have seen a JMS script as opposed to a "JMS with TNT" script."

  The other 12 fit the bill.

• "And yet I don't recall a scene in which you fragged the head of ITN or any other network."

  No, but there were occasional little hidden messages in the episode, as when a character says, "We've had to make some compromises to get this show on the road." No one noticed that one, despite being rather literal.

• "In the scenes with the Senator on Mars I wasn't sure Cole was in the same room with the other two during the dialogue. Too many cuts back and forth and his eyes seemed to move around oddly. Was this scene editted back together from separate filmings?"

  At one point in editing we needed some close-ups, and there weren't any in that part, so we kind of borrowed some from earlier in the sequence. We do this a lot, when there isn't coverage of some parts of scenes, rarely does anyone notice the eyeline difference.

• Why does Dureena give the impression she's never seen the Excalibur before?
  Actually, she never gives that impression; her reaction to the others seeing the ship and being impressed is to shrug and say, "It'll do." She's not impressed because she's already been there.

Last update: June 22, 1999