Let me dive in here for a moment, with some thoughts about the show,
people's expectations, and the like.

In my case, I've always tried to be very honest about which episodes
I think are spiffy, and which are less than effective, whether I wrote them
or not. ("Infection," for instance, is one of my least favorites.) What
I have talked about being special is the *series* per se. The cumulative
and total effect of it. Where this series will go, is somewhere no other
series has gone.

But you can't just dive in from zero. You have to establish your
world, and your characters. Otherwise you'll lose your audience because
it's coming too fast, and they're not sufficiently grounded to appreciate
what's going on. So the first batch of episodes were, for the most part,
very straightforward. They gave little hints and tastes of what was
going on elsewhere, but they were fairly standard in some ways. And, of
course, we got hammered. "Where's this special series that we were all
told about?" Well, to that, I say, "You haven't SEEN the series yet, only
the opening."

My point of comparison, I suppose, would be "The Lord of the Rings,"
which spends the first several chapters, a LOT of time...on Bilbo's
birthday party, dividing up his belongings, bringing in Frodo, the
relationships between all the various Baggins's and other relatives, with
Frodo waiting around, and finally hitting the Road. You get a *sense* of
things happening around the corners, at the edges of the story, but for
the most part, it's fairly standard. Now, you could stop at this point
and say, "Well, so what's so special about this? It's just about some
dumb birthday party." But it's the *book* (or books) that are truly
extraordinary; it's where the road takes you.

Like Tolkien, and Jonathan Carroll, whose wonderful books start out
looking very nice and comfortable...and gradually take you to someplace
strange and dark and unique...I've tried to apply a similar structure to
Babylon 5. It seems to be chugging along at a good clip along relatively
familiar terrain. Now my job is to walk up alongside the story with a
crowbar and give it a good, hard WHAM! to move it into a different
trajectory. "Parliament" was just sort of a preliminary nudge. "And the
Sky Full of Stars" was a good, solid WHAM! This week's episode, "Signs
and Portents," is another WHAM, even bigger than the one that precedes it.

There are two more major WHAM episodes: "Babylon Squared," dealing
with the fate of Babylon 4, and "Chrysalis," our season ender, which is
really more of an atomic bomb rather than a crowbar. So roughly about
one-fourth of this season's episodes are WHAM episodes. That figure will
increase in year two to about one-third. Year three (Neilsen willing)
will be half-WHAM and half-not. Year four would be three-quarters WHAM.
And year five is all WHAM.

I guess where I'm getting in all this, is that I don't think that I
have hyped the episodes. (No, you didn't say this, I'm responding to what
you're responding to.) The only time I've slipped and waxed rhapsodic
about the show...is when talking about the *show*, which is in my head,
all of it...I know who the Shadowmen are, and what they want, and why the
Minbari surrendered, and what the Psi Corps is up to, and who is on that
shuttle you see in the last moments of "Signs and Portents," and what led
up to that moment. For me, the goal has always been the book in its
totality.

Along the way, we have an obligation to make each individual episode
stand alone, and be as entertaining as humanly possible. We invest
astonishing amounts of time working to make the show as good as it can be.
I try to keep down the "unrealistic expectations" you note as much as
possible. It's hard when you have such an incredibly talented team as we
have assembled *not* to sometimes glow a little, but we do try and keep it
down to a roar.

From my point of view, I think we've got a dynamite first season
under our belts. As I noted elsewhere, if in my entire career I never
did anything more than "Chrysalis," I'd be happy. Out of 22 episodes, I
think we have maybe four that, if all the negatives vanished tomorrow, I
wouldn't feel bad about. The rest I'll put up against any other SF series
ever produced. That we could make something as nifty as "Mind War" in our
first season should be achievement enough; to also have made "Sky," and
"Signs," and "Babylon Squared," and "Chrysalis," and "Parliament" in the
same first season is almost more than could've been hoped for.

And finally, some folks are never gonna like it. Lots of folks like
country music. I can't abide it. (Exceptions for bluegrass and anything
from Leon Redbone and the Red Clay Ramblers.) Tastes vary. And we have
encountered some who are defensive against the show, and dismiss it
without a fair chance. But there are always those on *every* show. So
this bothers me not at all. What matters most to me is that we are true
to the vision of what this show is, and true to our audience, that we don't
dumb it down or fail to deliver 100%. And in that, I feel very
comfortable.

jms