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.Originally titled "A Knife in the Shadows"
Sub-genre: Intrigue P5 Rating: 7.65 Production number: 111 Original air date: May 4, 1994 DVD release date: November 5, 2002 Written by Mark Scott Zicree Directed by Jim Johnston
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.)
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.
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.