The interesting thing for me in this and related conversations is
that I frequently notice messages indicating that "jms is doing the whole
Kennedy thing," or it's the Lord of the Rings, or it's Dune, or it's
tracking the Bible, or it's following Yeats...or it echoes Shakespeare,
as in this case.

In a way, they're all right, and in a way, they're all wrong. Right
in the sense that in trying to create myth, or a story using traditional
epic structure, you can see echoes not only between B5 and other such
stories, but also between those other epics. The mistake is in thinking
(and this isn't directed at you, just sorta woolgathering) that it is in
fact a parallel to any one of them. That leads you into the error of the
blind men each touching a part of an elephant; if you think the trunk IS
the elephant, you've erred, and all conclusions that follow are thus
skewed incorrectly.

To the question of Shakespeare and Londo...yes, there's some
resonance there, because Londo is an almost archetypal tragic/comic, or
romantic/tragic figure. There was certainly a fair amount of Falstaff in
him; references to consulting three technomages certainly resonates with
MacBeth being "endorsed" as it were by the three witches. You can look at
Londo and see Lear, or Hamlet, or others...and they all resonate to one
degree or another, but none of them is wholecloth.

Right now, all that most viewers have of the B5 story is a piece of
the elephant, and are assuming that that *is* the elephant. Another good
comparison would be to say that if you stop a reader part way into The
Lord of the Rings, they'll assume it's all about some hobbits on the road,
having adventures. Because they don't yet know about Mordor, or Sauron,
or the Rings, or Rivendell, or the sheer *scope* of the thing. I don't
think anyone has yet twigged to what this story is, really.

One of the things really lacking in American culture, I think, is a
sense of *myth*. So the story of Babylon 5 has a very mythic kind of
structure. I think that's important. Which is why a lot of the elements
I draw on aren't traditional television devices...literature, poetry,
religion, hard SF, metafiction, Jungian symbology...there are an awful
lot of ingredients in this particular pie, culled from the less likely
aisles in the supermarket. You have to remember that my degrees are in
psychology and sociology, with minors in literature and philosophy. So
my tastes and predilections and resources are fairly eclectic and lean
toward the classical. (How else to explain an atheist who's read the
Bible cover to cover *twice*?)

And I think I just answered your question in far more detail than
could possibly have been desired....

jms