Cindy...yes, it's the characters that keep us coming back. I created
Sinclair. I made him interesting to the audience. (I'm not trying to take
away from the performance of the actor, I'm talking about the *character* per
se, his dialogue, his past, his phraseology, his interests, everything that
makes him what he is.) You found him to be of interest. That's good, because
he didn't just land here on the back of an asteroid, Sinclair was
*created*...the same way I created Kosh, and Garibaldi, and Delenn, and Londo,
and G'Kar, and Ivanova....

Those, judging from reactions, are interesting characters. What makes
you think that this new character to enter the mix is going to be a shlub?
They all come from the same pen. Or keyboard, in this case. YOU, as I
recall, kept pushing to shove Takashima out an airlock and bring in someone
else...even though there were lots of people who *liked* Tamlyn in that role.
They're all replaceable, you said.

This isn't a case of someone else taking over Person A's show and
changing everything around. These are my characters. My universe. And you
can be sure that the new character will be every bit as interesting all all
the OTHER characters.

I just kinda wish people would allow the time and space to actually SEE
what we have in mind before judging if it's going to work or not. A lot of
people pronounced us dead after the pilot. We made some changes, came back,
and the series was *considerably* better than the pilot (which you yourself
said, Cindy, in part because of some character replacements that *you* thought
would help the show [though that wasn't why they were made]). Even those who
*liked* Takashima, and Dr. Kyle, and who said that as far as they were
concerned if those characters were gone the show was gonna be crap, even THEY
have come around.

Our first year of the series was a jump in quality over the pilot. And
our second year will be a jump in quality over the first year. We took a
blood oath to make this show consistently better. All I can say, again, is
what was said when we made changes from the pilot: wait and see what it is
we're doing before you judge.

I haven't suddenly developed Alzheimer's or gotten stupid or been
possessed by a moron. The characters that appear in this show will continue
to be as interesting as the first batch. I don't tend to pull rank very
often, because it's a stupid and petty and arrogant thing to do...but if you
like Kosh's enigmatic attitude, it's because I wrote it that way (or my
writers) and created him to be enigmatic; if you like that Sinclair has a
missing 24 hours, it's because I decided he did...on and on. Sometimes I get
a little tired of this sense I get that people see these characters as having
sprung fully-developed from the brow of Zeus, and that I'm yanking one out to
put in some dumb character *I* came up with.

I'm not asking anyone to take my word for anything, only to maybe cut a
guy a little slack until you actually *see* what's going to be done, and to
kinda remember that I came up with these guys to *start* with, and that
nothing new in the show will be any less interesting than that which precedes
it.

jms