{original post had no questions}

"Very occasionally one catches a nuance that was missed on the first
go-round. But with the B5 reruns it's an entirely new experience,
because one doesn't catch a mere nuance, but entire leitmotifs that may
have been originally delineated, but are only fully visible in
retrospect. The best of TV or movies have a 3-dimensional feel from the
depth of the characters moving in an engrossing plot....B5 more and
more feels like a flamin' tesseract! It is truly amazing to sense the
layers from later episodes blooming from incidents and statements in
early episodes like a Web-page with all of the hyperlinks "active"
simultaneously."

And lemme tell you something...this has been INCREDIBLY hard to
pull off. If I'd known just how hard, I don't know if I would've tried
to tackle it. The only reason this got done was that I didn't know it
couldn't be done until I'd already done it.

One of the hard things was putting this stuff in, and having a
number of folks at the beginning say, "Where's the story? Where's this
so-called arc? It's nothing." I knew it was there, and knew that
they'd know it was there...but like life, we don't see the patterns
until afterward. That was a real risk. But I always wanted to plan
this story for the long-haul, timing it and measuring it out with the
knowledge that -- though it ran on a weird schedule for each of its
original years -- in the long run it would show every day for years.
So it had to serve two masters, the short term goal and the long-term
one.

It's what I promised when I talked about holographic
storytelling 4 years ago...the more you see, the more you can see
*through* the layers to the patterns they form, one behind the next.
It's not a form that's really been done much before, so I kinda had to
find ways to make it work on the fly. You have to have a mind like a
rabbit warren to keep all the pieces together, running simultaneously,
to write this stuff.

What's been rewarding is seeing so many people now coming
forward to say much the same thing as you just said. It means I did it
right. I gambled on the intelligence of viewers, and that gamble has
paid off.

All of which is one big reason why I'm going to be glad to be
finished with B5, as much as I'm going to miss it. It's been a hideous
struggle to get all this down on paper, and to stay ahead of the
Machine, the camera, which chews through stories at the rate of 24
frames per second. In a way, now I kinda know what John Henry felt
like, going up against the steam engine. Just a few more steps, and
I'll have beaten the damned thing.

jms