Starburst #242

Night has fallen on the barren, desolate planet which has no name. Every once in a while, a flash of lightning illuminates the rocky landscape, revealing the form of a man, who sits quietly on one of the craggy outcrops. Dressed in dark shirt, trousers, and leather jacket, the grey-bearded John Sheridan looks very different from the officer who once commanded Babylon 5.

It's the first day of filming on A Call to Arms, the television movie that will act as a seque between B5 and Crusade. Taking place five years after the events of B5, ACtA places John Sheridan in an Ahab-like role, as he takes the new experimental destroyer, The Excalibur, on a secret mission. For Bruce Boxleitner, the TV movie is the latest chapter in a the saga of John Sheridan; a journey that has literally taken his character into the jaws of death and back. Along the way, he's fought the combined Shadow/Vorlon forces, led a revolt against Earth, and helped form the Interstellar Alliance. Having spent the last four seasons waiting to see what new surprises writer JMS had in store for him, Boxleitner is loath to give up the excitement.

"Joe makes these characters so interesting," he explains. "I get to be Errol Flynn, I get to be all kinds of people in this role. If you want to talk about archetypes, I can encompass anything in this role--he can be a swashbuckler or a cowboy; there are all those elements to the character. It's only limited by Joe's imagination, which is seemingly unlimited. I don't want to see this go; I'm just getting started!"

It's a situation that Boxleitner has faced before on Babylon 5, where the show's life expectancy was measured by the season. The actor still remembers the closing weeks of Season Four, where it truly seemed that the end was near.

"I was really having an anxiety attack in those last two episodes," he admits. "I was saying. 'No, no, please don't take it away now; we're enjoying it so much!' It was only my third season, and I was saying, 'Can't I do a series that runs more than three or four seasons?' I'm very comfortable here, and I'm all too aware of how hard it is to find something new out there. This show came to me in such an unusual way for me, but I also have to be realistic about it."

The emotional high point (or low point depending on one's interpretation) for Boxleitner's character had to be the fourth-season episode Intersections in Real Time, in which Sheridan is captured and tortured by an Earth Force interrogator.

"I read a letter in some magazine where a guy went off on it as being a 'poor man's Prisoner', and of course there was also the Next Generation episode, Chain of Command. This guy said it clearly pointed out why Patrick Stewart is a much more superior actor than Bruce Boxleitner, and that's fine, yes he is, but it was a cheap shot. This genre pays homage to a lot of films and books and other things that came before.

"There are a number of great stories about torture and resistance, like The Manchurian Candidate, but the message is still there: as long as a person says no, they can't get you. Maybe some lessons have to be told and retold, because those lessons are forgotten. People have already forgotten what the Hanoi Hilton was, and what POWs went through in the Vietnam War. Anyway, I thought it was a well-written piece and a real challenge to play."

<snip a paragraph in which BB praises Raye Burke's work as the interrogator>

According to Boxleitner, the events of Intersections...sent Sheridan spinning off into a new and dramatically different direction. "He really was changed after that; he really becomes a Captain Ahab in pursuit of President Clark. To tell you the truth, as insane and worrisome and Angst-ridden as it all was at the end of that season, dramatically, the show really went to a new level. Everything was more intense, and it was also very schizophrenic."

The incidents that Boxleitner is alluding to are TNT's eleventh-hour-pickup of Babylon 5 for a fifth season, the subsequent last minute negotiations, and Claudia Christian's unexpected departure from the series. The actor freely admits being effected on an emotional level as those events were taking place.

"I thought there was a lot of deception going on at the time and I also felt so out of the loop, about a lot of things that were going on that I learned about too late, and then you feel like a fool. I would say very frankly that there's nothing so big out there that she couldn't have waited until March 20th. I also believe in finishing the job you started, and to me, she was quitting. I don't see that she's moved on to somewhere else.

"I was just so tired at that point; this meant my ass and my career too, and I didn't want to see this go down because I lived in absolute fear that I was going to kill the show when I came on; that's how paranoid I was. If she was to walk in the room right now, it's all water under the bridge and I don't have any angst about it now. Once we were working, that's what became important, and that took the sting out of it. I just lashed out, because I felt that she had betrayed us actors."

Despite a rocky start, Boxleitner was still pleased with the way Season Five finally began shaping up, particularly with the addition of Tracy Scoggins as the incoming captain, Elizabeth Lochley. "She was extremely nervous, but I never saw it. She looks great, and I think we needed somebody like that. I think Mira adds something different, not that she isn't attractive, but I said jokingly, no one filled out an Earth Force uniform like Tracy. She's a very physical woman, and I wouldn't want to get into a fight with her!"

With Babylon 5 reaching an end, Boxleitner has a number of projects in the offing, including a project in Canada for Sliders executive producer David Peckinpah. There's also a series of books he's writing with veteran novelist Ed Gorman, described as a fusion of SF and western genres.

"I think it's a great mixture, and it's dark too. We have a two-book deal right now, so that's great. If nothing else happens with it, then it will just have been a bit of fun, but I'm hoping it will be something more. I'd love to take it to TNT, because they lost a very interesting series, The Lazarus Man, due to its star getting ill, but I thought that had some great possibilities, so we're going to try and build a relationship with them."

As for the inevitable end of B5, Boxleitner is refreshingly candid in suggesting that perhaps the show shouldn't continue in its present form. "In all honesty, I don't think Joe will want to sell out to the buck. I felt that on Scarecrow and Mrs. King that we were doing dumb stories by the end of our fourth season, because we'd done it all. It was dumb to begin with, but we at least had some fun with it, until it started to get redundant. I think most TV series run out of stories after a while. I honestly think we should wrap this up; personally, I wouldn't want to see it go for a sixth season. That was the uniqueness of B5, wasn't it?"

On the other hand, in a perfect world, nothing would make Boxleitner happer than exploring the continuing adventures of John Sheridan. "James Arness did Gunsmoke for 21 years, but then again what other opportunities am I going to get? I'm not going to be making feature film, the most I could do is go on and be part of another ensemble cast on another series. I'm not going to get a series of my own; those days are over. I'm just being realistic, I know the business. I've had my own show, I had to do it with one other person because I couldn't carry it alone and that's fine. I like being part of an ensemble. Maybe I'll play somebody's dad.

"In this town, you can always be reborn," claims Bruce Boxleitner. "I reinvented myself with this show, I'll reinvent myself with something else, maybe some kind of family series. Everybody always wants to do the opposite of what they've been doing, but they've never allowed me to be the bad guy. They don't want to see me like that. In television, the audience has to be comfortable with you, and I've managed to prove that I can be in American homes to some degree, and not necessarily where everyone knows me either."

Thanks, Diane!