Season 5 Easter Egg: Marcus Cole: Dead or Frozen?

to dangle this "Marcus could still be alive" over us is down-right cruel!

the Poodle and her Tofu boy,

Think of poor Jason Carter, openly mocked by his castmates in DVD commentary.

Apparently, somewhere out there, there is a JMS-penned story kind of resolving the whole Dead or Frozen dilemma. Sadly, not legally available online, as far as I know.

Lyta and Byron? or Lochley and Corwin? Hee...Corwin...soooo cute. Ahem. Sorry, what were we talking about?

That's disgusting. But reinforces my already strong conviction that Marcus was a creepy, passive-aggressive jackass.

I didn't notice the passive-aggressiveness, when was that?

Lennier's character:

One of the mythologies that JMS played with, and which everyone seems to forget while hunting "LotR" references, is the Arthur cycle. Lennier was the Lancelot character. Now obviously Delenn was *not* going to commit adultery, but Lennier still played Lancelot's role in falling in love with the "Queen" and betraying his "King".

Lennier's moment of hesitation was *exactly* in character with the wounded Lennier who - despite his claim to Marcus of having a "higher love" for Delenn - could not handle living on the same station with the Sheridans after their marriage, and ran off to join the Rangers. He was trying to become a "man of action" like Sheridan - perhaps in the hope that in 20 years time he can "console" the widow.

"But Bill Mumy is on record as saying that when he complained about the end of Lennier's arc in S5 (he thought it was out of character) JMS assured him that these events put Lennier, "...right where I need him for the Telepath War." "

Yeah, the details are subject to change, but JMS still seems to have the same chronology in mind.

> How JMS does this when he films The Telepath War, may have changed since "The Path of Sorrows" did not work out as planned with Pat Tallman and Bill Mumy. <

Bill Mumy was never going to be in "The Path of Sorrows". The very brief scene was deliberately written so that we only see a Minbari from behind as he swings his pike, keeping the Psi Corps troops at bay while Lyta sets the timer on the bomb. Only when she calls "Lennier" do we realize who the Minbari is. The shot was set up that way because it would have been too expensive to bring Mumy in for even half a day to shoot a few seconds of footage. (And a waste of his time, too.)

Similarly when Garibaldi was featured in the tag of unfilmed script "Value Judgments", Fiona Avery wrote it so that we only hear the pilot's side of their conversation, then see a hand hanging up a telephone and a photograph if Lise Hampton-Edgars-Garibaldi on the desk.

Because they couldn't get Pat for the episode, JMS substituted another telepath for Lyta, and apparently in story terms it is Lyta specifically that Lennier is associated with, so he no longer had a part in a story featuring a different Teep. We know from the Psi Corps trilogy that the IA eventually intervened in the Telepath War, which started out as a civil war between Psi Corps and Lyta's army of Rogue Teeps. (It is one of the things that Bester blames Sheridan for.) It may be that Lennier was sent as the Alliance's emissary to Lyta, to try to head off a final, bloody show-down with the Corps, or it could be that he tried to intervene on his own, knowing what Sheridan and Delenn would want, and also knowing Lyta well enough to think he could reach her. (3rd possibility: G'Kar - who has a habit of running freelance intelligence operations - sends Lennier in with a message for Lyta either without telling Sheridan and Delenn or against their explicit orders. G'Kar is the only one of the inner circle that the disgraced Lennier could really approach to keep tabs on the Sheridans after "Objects")

Regards,

Joe

When the "Rangers" pilot was shooting he was asked about Lyta and Lennier on the moderated newsgroup. He replied, as usual, in Vorlon:

Q: Does Lyta die in the Telepath War?

A: Yes.

Q: Lennier?

A: Right around there, yeah.

The Telepath Trilogy also makes it clear that Lyta died in the Teep War, but is silent on the subject of Lennier. I don't remember more than one or two deliberately vague refrerences to the character in the Centauri Trilogy. (Which is a little surprising given how close he and Vir were.)

But Bill Mumy is on record as saying that when he complained about the end of Lennier's arc in S5 (he thought it was out of character) JMS assured him that these events put Lennier, "...right where I need him for the Telepath War."

Regards,

Joe

I contradict myself and contain multitudes.

It always reminded me of A Canticle for Leibowitz, one of the better books I was made to read in high school.

I could never get into Delenn and Sheridan as a couple, it always felt like a force-fit, in that she was too intense, intellectual, poetic, and spiritual and he was too much of a Gung-Ho Reactionary Idiot.

Delenn's riff on "cranky... grouchy... crotchety" still makes me laugh.

Despite its stupid aspects, I love the series finale. That last shot of Delenn watching the sunrise has me in tears every time. The show did a great job of convincing me that Sheridan and Delenn really loved each other and so, when I see Delenn, I imagine how I would feel if my husband had just died and the bawling begins. And then the credits sequence starts up, and I become a big blubbering mess.