"In WHTMG, Marcus is talking to G'Kar about his friends and says he's had
"Damn few of them, and most of them are dead." My instant reaction was
"That can't be an allusion to Return to Zork." Can it?"

Y'know, if I were to read this group as an outsider, I'd think that this
jms person was incapable of coming up with a single line on his own.

NO, it wasn't a Zork reference, for chrissakes. Can we possibly get any
more obscure here? I don't even know what this REFERS to. Marcus came
from a mining colony. The shadows struck, and killed everyone there.
Hence, the line above.

There was some goofing around with SF references early on in the show;
this got out of hand, and it stopped. I don't sit here, thinking, "Oh,
goody, I can make a reference to The Day The Earth Stood Still here," or
some other show. I write what is appropriate for the character to say.
Period.

I'm sorry if I'm a bit cranky in answering this, but jesus christ, people,
give it a rest and stop looking for references that don't exist. There
are only so many permutations in the english language, and something has
got to echo somewhere for everyone...but that ain't the source. "Oh,
look, he use the word THE in this episode, he must be nodding at "The
Ipcriss Files" or "THEM" just leaving off the M to throw us off."

Your point of reference is your point of reference, it's nothing to do
with me. It's like a Rorscharch test, you see what you're familiar with.


As a writer, you work your brains out trying to come up with something,
and you try your damndest to make it original, and fresh, and
interesting...do you have any idea how infuriating, how maddening, how
bottomlin *insulting* it is to have 10,000 people parsing every sentence
and saying, "Oh, here, did you take this from that? Is this a reference
to this over here?"

NO, IT'S NOT.

I allowed a little of that in the first season or so, often in scripts by
other people, on a couple of occasions by myself, but that's the end of
it, because everyone decided that the show was one big easter egg hunt.
Fanfic is full of this stuff, which is perhaps why everyone keeps looking
for it here.

If it's an absolutely blantant, and extremely recognizeable line, line the
Tolkein reference in year two's "Geometry," then yeah...but some of this
is getting so obscure and ridiculous that it's starting to make me crazy.

Can we *please* declare a moratorium on this for a while?



jms