TV ZONE special #22 8/96

It begins with a letter. A letter addressed to Jeffrey Sinclair on Minbar. A letter that will take him back to Babylon 5, and then beyond. War Without End is an epic two-part adventure that brings a number of Babylon 5's continuing story strands to a conclusion, while simultaneously sending the show spinning off in new directions. It is also the most complex Babylon 5 production to date. Viewers already glimpsed some of the content of War Without End. Way back during the show's first season, the episode Babylon Squared found Babylon 4, a space station which mysteriously vanished years before. Jeffrey Sinclair, then the commander of B5, led his security chief Michael Garibaldi and a fleet of ships on a rescue mission to evacuate the crew before the station drifted off again in Time. Aboard they found a terrified station personnel and a perplexed Major Krantz ­ unable to explain how they had become unstuck in Time. Also aboard B4 was an alien creature, the enigmatic Zathras, who seemed to recognize Sinclair, and offered the information that the station was to be used as the base of operations in a great war. And watching from the shadows we saw an older version of Sinclair, his face marked by a scar, and an out of view woman who sounded like she just might have been Delenn...

Flipside

War Without End is the flipside of Babylon Squared. It provides the explanation for B4's journey, reveals the source of the power that has pulled it through Time, and explains the origins of Zathras, while showing tantalizing glimpses of a desolate future...

For J Michael Straczynski, who created the series, tying War Without End neatly into the previous story has been an interesting challenge. "In Babylon Squared you're seeing one side of the story," Straczynski explains. "To have those things make sense I had to sit down and write the other half as it were, and then cut in and out of the story. So when I sat down to write the two-parter, certainly a lot of it had been worked out already in the first season. The difficulty I discovered was that so much was going on it's a very, very hectic script. A lot of it is cutting back and forth. Usually I can write a script in three to five days, but this one took me three weeks for the two episodes because I had so much to cram in. In fact the first draft for Part Two was eight pages too long, so I had to bring in a hatchet and change things."

War Without End is a story that Straczynski had always intended to tell, but where it would eventually fall in the show's five year story arc was undetermined. He eventually settled on episodes 17 and 18 of Season Three. "I needed to get this thread out of the way to set up things that are going to happen at the end of the season which again will change the show," he continues. "Once the events that happen in [Shadow Dancing and Season Three's last episode] happen, then it will be very hard to go back and do the Babylon 4 story. It had to be done in the third season. It's a difficult episode to shoot the CGI on, so we had to bracket it between two low effects episodes at the front and two low effects episodes behind. Also we needed to have one director available for both episodes. It was a combination of artistic reasons and practical reasons."

Another major consideration was the availability of the guest stars who had already been established in Babylon Squared ­ Michael O'Hare as Commander Sinclair, Tim Chaote as Zathras and Kent Broadhurst as Major Krantz. Producer John Copeland had the task of organizing their booking. "As soon as I knew where Joe was going to have this fall in terms of dates, I had to alert casting," offers Copeland. "We had to make sure that we had those guys on board. The first part originally had John Schuck as Draal in it. However, just before our Christmas break he was offered [the chance] to replace an actor in the Broadway rendition of Hello Dolly for a lot of money. He would be going into rehearsals January 2nd. I had to tell Joe, and he was like, "Oh, F**k!" This was on Friday, and on Monday morning he walked in and dropped something on my desk ­ Part One rewritten without Draal. This is how fast Joe is."

Michael O'Hare claims that he had always known that he would return to Babylon 5. After leaving the series at the end of Season One, O'Hare made a brief appearance in Season Two's The Coming of the Shadows, but Sinclair's storyline had still to be concluded, and the fans were hungry to know more of the character's progress since he left the station to take up the role of Ranger One on Minbar. "I'm edified by the fact that Commander Sinclair is popular," enthuses O'Hare. "For some reason he struck a chord. I knew that because of the popularity of the character, and also from conversations with Joe of another direction he wanted to take the character in, that I would be coming back. I didn't know the details."

With filming dates confirmed, and the essential players on board, Straczysnki and Copeland looked at directors who available to helm the movie-length story. "Originally we considered Adam Nimoy (son of Leonard, and director of Season Three's Passing Through Gethsemene] for this, but he was just not available," Copeland offers. "We actually held the space open until December. Mike Vejar was directing the episode with Michael York [A Late Delivery from Avalon] at that point. I talked to Joe and said, 'What about Mike?', because we both like what he does a lot. His style of directing is moving the camera, he has a lot of movement going on within a scene, he is very good at composition. Last year he did Geometry of Shadows and Comes the Inquisitor, which I think are two that really stand out. "Mike takes you to the edge of the envelope every day. He goes to the limit of your production capabilities. He does it in such a way in that he is getting the best out of everybody, not only the actors but the entire crew. Every part rises to the occasion because he really does have a great vision. For a long time Mike was an editor, and editors sometimes make really good directors, and things just cut together very well, they're very visually exciting."

Amazement

As Straczynski's script was distributed among the cast and crew, the reaction was uniformly one of amazement. "This story is pivotal to the arc," enthuses Bruce Boxleitner, who plays Captain Sheridan. "It's blowing our minds. This is one of the most complex episodes I've encountered. The fans will be there with their VCR machines running back and forth going 'What did he say? What did he mean by that?' trying to decipher what all of this means. We've been having a great time."

"I think that this double whammy is quite splendid," beams Jason Carter. who plays Ranger Marcus Cole and joins the mission to Babylon 4 in the story. "I'd call it f**king with the audience when you think something lies in a certain place but it doesn't, it lies somewhere else. It's like Inspector Morse in terms of the brilliance of complexity of it. When the answer comes, everything falls into place like dominoes. This is more than just an episode ­ the references go way back and suddenly everything does really come together, but it raises an awful lot more questions."

Claudia Christian is equally impressed with the story, which finds her teaming up with Zathras on the B4 mission. "When I first read it I said, 'There's no way we can do all this!'" she laughs. "It's going to be exciting for the fans because it's like going into a maze ­ one turn after the next. I think people are going to be sitting there at the edge of their chairs going, 'What!' Reading the scripts I was blown away by how much Joe jam-packed into two episodes. It's unbelievable. There's 50 different things going on at all times. "I received both scripts at the same time," she continues. "I kind of glanced through, and then I realized I had to sit down and read them. You can't just glance through it."

As pilot of the White Star, Bill Mumy's character Lennier also goes to B4 ­ but is less involved in the action there. Nevertheless, the actor thinks that War Without End comprises two of Babylon 5's finest hours. "I think Joe's done a brilliant job with the storyline," he tells TV Zone. "I think it's a really great episode and I'm very impressed with the way it's all tied together so beautifully. It's an incredible tapestry to weave, going back to early episodes of the first season that were obviously put in place way back when that I wasn't even aware of at the time."

"I saw the script about a month before shooting," adds O'Hare. "It's quite an adventure story and it's quite a mind twister. The Shadows want to destroy B4. If they succeed they also destroy B5 in eight days time ­ so we have to stop them. It's complicated, but it's a good story ­ a good adventure saga. "The audience is going to get quite a kick out of it. For real aficionados of Babylon 5 it will be a real thrill I think. They'll see footage used from the first season, flashbacks to Babylon Squared. Babylon Squared intermeshes with this, as that story is going on during part of our two episodes." For O'Hare, the story has been a welcome opportunity to be re-united with old friends and colleagues. "I work with Mira [Furlan, who plays Delenn], and a little bit with Bill Mumy, and a little bit with Claudia," the actor offers. "Jason is new ­ but then Jason is a Ranger, so he and I have that bond." "It's nice to have Michael back," beams Claudia Christian. "He's working out really well, and it's been a really good atmosphere." Bill Mumy concurs with the sentiment: "It's great to be working with Michael again, and it's nice to see Michael and Bruce working together. I wish we could have more of that, but I don't think that any of the fans will be disappointed at the resolution of the character of Sinclair."

Biggest Challenge

War Without End represents the biggest challenge to date faced by the show's production team. The script requires countless effects sequences, taking the viewer from the Minbari homeworld and far through Time, and its ties to Babylon Squared represent a nightmare in terms of continuity. John Iacovelli, the production designer of Babylon 5, claims this has been an exercise in creating a big budget look on a shoestring. "The problem we have on this show," insists Iacovelli, "is that we are literally matching scenes that intercut with an episode we did in the first season. It actually is a masterful storyline in which Joe has tied to a whole load of loose ends he left in the first season." The fact that the two Babylon stations are intended to be the product of the same technology has allowed Iacovelli to re-dress standing sets, adding only minor differences. "Colour markings are the kind of identification we've always done really well on this show," he says. "On the observation dome of B4 the dominant colour there is green not blue, as it is blue on B5. Similarly all the colour stripes on B4 are not primary colours like they are on B5, they are secondary colours like magenta and turquoise. It looks similar, but it's just different enough. I'd liken it to the difference between the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth ­ two very similar ships, one has two stacks, one has three stacks. They were built almost in the same time and same place, but there are subtle differences."

Set Modifications

Since the first season, many of Babylon 5's standing sets have been modified and adapted as the budget has allowed. The central corridor of the station has been upgraded... such that it no longer matches the sequences shot in Babylon Squared. "All the upgrades we did to the central corridor we had to undo for scenes that are a part of this," the designer grimaces. "Now before we throw away a table or something we say to Joe, 'We're going to throw this away. Does this have to come back in a big way in two years?'" As an example Iacovelli points to the spacesuit worn by The One in Babylon Squared. The blue suit was originally used in the movie 2010, and had since found its way to a prop house in Los Angeles. Costume Designer Ann Bruce-Aling continues the story: "At that point we rented the 2010 spacesuit and we did what we call our Babylon 5 tweak ­ the props people put a different pack on it or whatever. We never talked about the fact that it would be coming back in two years time. I never knew we'd have to see that again." At the end of shooting for Babylon Squared, the spacesuit was returned to the rental house, and in the intervening two years it was purchased by a memorabilia collector. "That doesn't exist on the face of the Earth anymore!" insists Bruce-Aling. "So we had to have two new spacesuits built to basically match a polaroid. That has been our biggest challenge for this episode."

Zathras

The Costume Designer faced a similar quandary with the clothes for Zathras, which had to be reproduced in every detail because new scenes would sit side by side with flashbacks from Babylon Squared. "That first season had a lot more aliens being established," she recalls. "We called them 'Alien of the Week'. Every script had some new alien from somewhere, and with Zathras Joe wanted a kind of troll look. I was looking around to all the rental houses grabbing things and throwing them wildly together. But when we had to bring him back this year, we didn't own a piece of that costume. "Fortunately we were able to find almost all of the pieces and put them back together again. The pivotal thing was a scarf that he wore around his neck that we weren't able to find, so we had to recreate this kind of woven scarf from fabrics."

It was not only the design teams with continuity problems. The look of War Without End needed to match Babylon Squared, which demanded that Director of Photography John Flinn and his team shoot the episodes in a similar style. "It meant we had to be quite specific," confirms John Copeland. "The crew keeps very specific notes of what the camera position was, what the f-stop was, what, if any, filters we had for every shot that we've done since the beginning. They just went back to Babylon Squared and we could match in the look with the camera."

The results are extraordinary, and bear close scrutiny. Even so, Straczynski is fully aware that many fans will sit glued to their videos, eagerly attempting to spy out continuity glitches. He's even willing to hold his hands up in resignation and admit one error in advance ­ the result of having to edit down an over-long script. "One small glitch you will find is that in the original episode Krantz has a line, 'We found Zathras. It was the conference room, there was a flash and he was there.' That was part of the eight-pages-too-long part. I could still do that, but it would take pages from elsewhere. So now I have him found in the corridor and apprehended, so it isn't quite the same ­ but that's the only part I couldn't make fit over the two episodes."

Watching the story, it's easy to assume that it received a higher budget and a longer shooting schedule shedule than most Babylon 5 tales, but this is a myth that John Copeland dispels. "No, you just fit it in," he says. "In reality we're really just shooting two more episodes. To spend more money would be the only way we could spend more time on it. There's been only one episode where we took longer than seven days ­ we took a half day longer on The Fall of Night. We knew that we were under budget and could spend that, and we wanted to make sure that the end sequence where Sheridan bails out of the shuttle after the Centauri has planted the bomb had enough time and we didn't cut any corners." "If they had given me the money, this would have been the show to get me an Emmy nomination," says John Iacovelli. "But I've worked on other tv shows where we've had all the money I've wanted and it's very boring. Whatever we needed we got. "It's much more fun and interesting to be a problem solver, and that's what we are on this show.

Thanks Karen H and Claudia!