JMS on the Subtleties of the Arc |
"Very occasionally one catches a nuance that was missed on the first
go-round. But with the B5 reruns it's an entirely new experience, because one
doesn't catch a mere nuance, but entire leitmotifs that may have been
originally delineated, but are only fully visible in retrospect. The best of
TV or movies have a 3-dimensional feel from the depth of the characters moving
in an engrossing plot....B5 more and more feels like a flamin' tesseract! It
is truly amazing to sense the layers from later episodes blooming from
incidents and statements in early episodes like a Web-page with all of the
hyperlinks "active" simultaneously."
And lemme tell you something...this has been INCREDIBLY hard to pull
off. If I'd known just how hard, I don't know if I would've tried to tackle
it. The only reason this got done was that I didn't know it couldn't be done
until I'd already done it.
One of the hard things was putting this stuff in, and having a number of
folks at the beginning say, "Where's the story? Where's this so-called arc?
It's nothing." I knew it was there, and knew that they'd know it was
there...but like life, we don't see the patterns until afterward. That was a
real risk. But I always wanted to plan this story for the long-haul, timing
it and measuring it out with the knowledge that -- though it ran on a weird
schedule for each of its original years -- in the long run it would show every
day for years. So it had to serve two masters, the short term goal and the
long-term one.
It's what I promised when I talked about holographic storytelling 4
years ago...the more you see, the more you can see *through* the layers to the
patterns they form, one behind the next. It's not a form that's really been
done much before, so I kinda had to find ways to make it work on the fly. You
have to have a mind like a rabbit warren to keep all the pieces together,
running simultaneously, to write this stuff.
What's been rewarding is seeing so many people now coming forward to say
much the same thing as you just said. It means I did it right. I gambled on
the intelligence of viewers, and that gamble has paid off.
All of which is one big reason why I'm going to be glad to be finished
with B5, as much as I'm going to miss it. It's been a hideous struggle to get
all this down on paper, and to stay ahead of the Machine, the camera, which
chews through stories at the rate of 24 frames per second. In a way, now I
kinda know what John Henry felt like, going up against the steam engine. Just
a few more steps, and I'll have beaten the damned thing.
jms
12-Jan-98
(In reply to a posting by Rebecca Eschliman to Compuserve).
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