Star Trek: Keeping Up With the Cardassians

[Werthead]

Ah, J. Michael Straczynski having another meltdown on Twitter, claiming (on the basis, this time, of an obscure comment made on an io9 article in 2013) once against DS9 stole its ideas from Babylon 5.

I'm going to argue that perhaps after 29 years of no-one caring (the numerous Star Trek writers, actors and producers on Twitter comfortably ignoring him, as usual) and no-one providing any firm evidence of this claim, and substantial mountains of evidence to the contrary, he should really let it go.

[Ran]

I don't mind his talking about it, as I always thought it was suspect (which I guess means I cared).

As I recall, his feeling are that the numerous similarities in the base premise are due to Paramount execs who met with him over his pitch later giving guidance to the creators of DS9 that  steered them into taking on those ideas without realizing they were inspired by the B5 development pitch.

There's no Paramount exec who is ever going to admit to it, Piller and Tartikoff have gone to the grave, and Berman never had a reason to say anything but the company line (if even that? I don't think he's ever chosen to remark on the situation in public) since doing otherwise wouldn't look great for him or for his employers. 

So long as there are people who want to tell JMS that they don't believe him, he's going to continue to speak out about it.

 

 

 

[Aemon Stark]

Wait, he apparently never even watched DS9? How do you know something is a "rip-off" if you've never even watched it? I never quite made it past season one of Babylon 5, possibly because the production values and acting have aged terribly. I know it gets a lot better, and the overarching plot is really well done. But while Babylon 5 was planned out from the get-go (supposedly), DS9 definitely wasn't - the early focus on Bajoran politics gave way to slow introduction of the Dominion, likely with studio pressure for more traditional "starship" adventures with the Defiant, then changing gears in season four with Worf's arrival and a war with the Klingons. What often made it work was that it wasn't constrained by a clear "five (or seven) year plan" or a strictly serialized structure. 

[Werthead]

1 hour ago, Ran said:

I don't mind his talking about it, as I always thought it was suspect (which I guess means I cared).

As I recall, his feeling are that the numerous similarities in the base premise are due to Paramount execs who met with him over his pitch later giving guidance to the creators of DS9 that  steered them into taking on those ideas without realizing they were inspired by the B5 development pitch.

There's no Paramount exec who is ever going to admit to it, Piller and Tartikoff have gone to the grave, and Berman never had a reason to say anything but the company line (if even that? I don't think he's ever chosen to remark on the situation in public) since doing otherwise wouldn't look great for him or for his employers. 

So long as there are people who want to tell JMS that they don't believe him, he's going to continue to speak out about it.

And if you solely look at JMS's claims, that's somewhat fair enough. If you look into it a bit more, more holes emerge. One of those is that there don't appear to have been many, if any, meetings with Paramount. Evan Thompson at Chris-Craft (the proto-PTEN network of stations which first saw promise in the idea; they later set up PTEN and then swapped sides to Paramount and helped found the UPN) delivered a pitch package to Paramount which consisted of a very early proto-Gathering pilot script, a series bible and 22 episode outlines (not all of which actually made it into Season 1 itself). Paramount sat on it for nine months (through most of 1989) and when Thompson asked them what was going on, was told that there was one group of executives who wanted to look into it more because they liked the ambition and another set who were completely dead-set against doing a non-Trek SF show because they thought it would confuse the hell out of audiences and they didn't want to compete against themselves. Because Paramount wouldn't break the deadlock, Thompson asked for the pitch package back and took it to other studios (they'd shown it to CBS, ABC and HBO before Paramount, and then several other studios after before landing at Warner Brothers). They didn't option or buy anything.

That's quite a key point because Paramount weren't given copies of the pitch, they were given a package which they had to give back. It wasn't an email with outlines and PDFs, it's a physical thing. If Paramount had made copies or summaries of the package for later use, they were opening themselves up to massive financial liability if they were found out, which they had no real reason to do.

You then have Tartikoff arriving at Paramount out of NBC some two years later, being asked to save the television division which is going down the toilet, and the only hit show they have on is TNG. So he asks for a spin-off of TNG (fairly logically) and gives them the idea of basing the premise on The Rifleman (as both TOS and TNG were based on Wagon Train), of bereaved war veteran and his young son working in a frontier settlement in constant danger, and whether that was a good idea. And they actually took that way too literally (Sisko and Jake are very much Lucas and Mark McCain in a different context), even down to the show being set on a planet. They only moved it to a space station when the financial department came back and said it was a great idea if they had three times the budget of TNG, but since they didn't, they needed to find a way of using sets only with a minimum of exterior shooting. And of course you can't have two Star Trek starship shows on at once, so a space station it was.

It is also interesting that JMS's wife Kathryn Drennan was working on TNG at the very time DS9 was announced as a writing intern and assistant to Michael Piller (literally to the point of recusing herself from a meeting when they started talking about DS9 for the very first time, which she realised it was a space station show), and she was 100% adamant that Piller hadn't known about Babylon 5 at all, in any way, shape or form.

As for Berman:

Quote

"There was a time when, I don’t know whether it was specifically Straczynski or other people, it was implied that he had pitched an idea similar to DS9 to Paramount and that it had been rejected and that, lo and behold, a year or so later DS9 came about. The implication being that Michael Piller and I perhaps stole all or part of his idea, which was always amusing to Michael and I because it was completely untrue. We had no knowledge of this gentleman. If he did pitch something to Paramount, we never heard about it. DS9 was a show that was created by Michael and me and Brandon Tartikoff, who was the recent head of Paramount at the time, without any knowledge of Straczynski or of anything that he had ever pitched. So when we were accused of stealing his idea it was a little sad but at the same time a little comical to us."

 

Berman was kind of a dick at times, though, so take that for what it's worth.

The shapeshifter thing was annoying, because that's in the 1989 version of The Gathering and JMS was way ahead of the curve on that one, but (ignoring the fact it was a one-off character who died in the pilot) DS9 didn't steal that from B5, they stole it from Terminator 2 and The Abyss, as everyone was at the time (91-93, you couldn't move for people morphing into other people or animals; Star Trek VI had a shapeshifter, Michael Jackson's "Black & White" had it, adverts had it, even Red Dwarf in the UK was doing it on a tiny budget by comparison).

Some of the other complaints are hugely amusing, like DS9 somehow stealing the name Dukhat. That's forgetting that Dukhat is not mentioned in the original pilot script and isn't mentioned in the outline (unless the 1989 show outline was waaaay more detailed than the 1994 one published in the script books, which seems very unlikely) and wasn't named until quite a way into B5's first season, a full year after Dukat debuted on DS9. And if you mention Ron Thornton's 1997 assertion that Warner Brothers asked JMS to introduce the White Star because they thought the Defiant was cool, then best cover yourself in flame retardant. Nothing must challenge the Straczynski Narrative. Truth is a three-edged what now?

[Werthead]

5 minutes ago, Aemon Stark said:

Wait, he apparently never even watched DS9? How do you know something is a "rip-off" if you've never even watched it? I never quite made it past season one of Babylon 5, possibly because the production values and acting have aged terribly. I know it gets a lot better, and the overarching plot is really well done. But while Babylon 5 was planned out from the get-go (supposedly), DS9 definitely wasn't - the early focus on Bajoran politics gave way to slow introduction of the Dominion, likely with studio pressure for more traditional "starship" adventures with the Defiant, then changing gears in season four with Worf's arrival and a war with the Klingons. What often made it work was that it wasn't constrained by a clear "five (or seven) year plan" or a strictly serialized structure. 

He definitely did watch DS9, he mentions at various points seeing stuff and getting annoyed by it, sometimes in a highly illogical manner: there's an episode where one of the characters gets branded by a religious sect, exactly what happens in B5's The War Prayer, which JMS got annoyed by even though there's zero way based on the production dates they could have impacted on one another. He also watched the Season 4 two-parter (Homefront/Paradise Lost) because he was annoyed with them for stealing Robert Foxworth - who had been a recurring character on B5 the prior season - to play "essentially the same role" (note: actually a completely different role, Foxworth playing a good guy on B5 and a villain on DS9). There was a whole conspiracy thing about that when in reality it was just Foxworth's agent getting his client the gig which paid him four times as much (as DS9's day rates were way higher than B5's and DS9 was a two-parter).

What is interesting is that the DS9 writing team apparently informally agreed not to watch B5 because they didn't want to be influenced by it. Ronald D. Moore definitely hadn't watched it at all by the time they'd stopped shooting and Hans Beimler refused to watch it at all because he was tired of hearing about JMS shitting on the show in the press. Moore did ask JMS for feedback on the BSG pilot script, so I don't know if that means he'd watched it by then (I have a memory of the BSG audio narrations where he said he'd still never watched it by Season 2 or 3). So JMS did seem to be torturing himself by watching DS9 and trying to spot similarities to B5. I do remember him launching into a tirade about the last episode stealing Babylon 5's ending, taking the commander into the unknown (which isn't quite what happens in DS9) and blowing the station up (which definitely 100% doesn't happen). That was weird.

[Ran]

45 minutes ago, Werthead said:

That's quite a key point because Paramount weren't given copies of the pitch, they were given a package which they had to give back. It wasn't an email with outlines and PDFs, it's a physical thing. If Paramount had made copies or summaries of the package for later use, they were opening themselves up to massive financial liability if they were found out, which they had no real reason to do.

Do you really need to make copies or summaries to remember some of the central aspects of a pitch that you then feed to unwitting writers? Do we really think that there's only one development exec and that Tartikoff coming in means there's a complete firewall between the people who B5 was pitched to and the people giving Berman and Piller notes? I find these notions naive.

The space station aspect isn't really the issue for me. It's the captain figure who has some sort of prophetic importance -- a fact that was definitely in the pitch (and which later morphed a bit) and motivated some of the initial starting state -- that is a very oddly specific thing, and also very, very "not Trek". 

ETA: Totally random, but decided to visit JMS News and saw his Facebook post from last week in which he revealed he was the executor of Harlan and Susan Ellison's estate, with moves already made to get new literary and media agents to start getting all that wonderful Ellison writing out there again. How cool, but I do not envy what will certainly be years of work.

[Aemon Stark]

26 minutes ago, Ran said:

Do you really need to make copies or summaries to remember some of the central aspects of a pitch that you then feed to unwitting writers? Do we really think that there's only one development exec and that Tartikoff coming in means there's a complete firewall between the people who B5 was pitched to and the people giving Berman and Piller notes? I find these notions naive.

Feed to writers... several years later? The timing doesn't make any sense, and the people involved in the pitch weren't involved with DS9. 

26 minutes ago, Ran said:

The space station aspect isn't really the issue for me. It's the captain figure who has some sort of prophetic importance -- a fact that was definitely in the pitch (and which later morphed a bit) and motivated some of the initial starting state -- that is a very oddly specific thing, and also very, very "not Trek". 

Sure, the Bajorans called Sisko the "Emissary" from the premiere onward, but Sisko didn't take it seriously until at least season four. The Prophets were still just the "wormhole aliens" in the season one finale. Plus a lot of that early stuff derives more from Arthur C. Clarke's concept that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. DS9 didn't really lean into mysticism or ideas about "prophetic importance" in any literal way until at least Rapture in season five. Before that - and especially early on - it was all pretty secular, even Bajoran politics (the odd "orb experience" aside). 

[Derfel Cadarn]

Ironic that the White Star bridge is a pure Trek rip-off.

[Ran]

9 hours ago, Aemon Stark said:

Feed to writers... several years later? The timing doesn't make any sense,

Sure it does. That show Paramount passed on, the one that raised conversations about whether it was too similar to Star Trek and which Paramount apparently just suddenly lost interest in, was eventually announced as being one of the pilots ordered by this new syndicated network in 1991. DS9 comes into being that same year, and in the course of development ends up somehow hitting some major and some minor notes that just happened to be in JMS's pitch, as recognized by people with feet in both camps at the time (e.g. Walter Koenig).

Quote

and the people involved in the pitch weren't involved with DS9. 

The idea that people at Paramount don't talk to one another is contrived. Tartikoff wants them to develop a show, they start hitting on the idea of a space station, word gets around Paramount about this B5 show PTEN is going to do that's also a space station, some exec working under Tartikoff asks what the pitch was like, and notes start filtering in to the writers that steer them without being aware in ways to co-opt some of the bits that seemed most interesting (and possibly undercut this potential rival show while they're at it, helped along by getting the show out a month ahead of it).

9 hours ago, Aemon Stark said:

Sure, the Bajorans called Sisko the "Emissary" from the premiere onward, but Sisko didn't take it seriously until at least season four.

It's not relevant that the character didn't think it was serious, it was a motivating aspect of a running plot in that first seasons, from the pilot all the way through to the finale's introduction of Vedek Winn, and beyond. It was, as I said, very specific, very oddly "un-Trek".

As to mysticism, that really wasn't what was going on with B5, either, but the idea that writers who were nudged to create a captain who some people believe is a prophetic figure end up coming up with a different take on it seems unexceptional. It's the specificity of the initial idea that seems out of step.

 

 

[The hairy bear]

It's not only the space station setting, but the fact that both are located near a wormhole, with a dual purpose of being a diplomacy center and an interstellar commercial hub. And with commanders that besides serving as a prophetic figure for an alien race, have survivor guilt syndrome after escaping alive from the greatest defeat in the Terran recent history.

The fact that DS9 is the only Trek show that included long-term archs and showed a non-utopian view of the future (with some factions within the Federation being the bad guys) are also very suspicious, as those elements are in the essence of B5.

We could throw in dozens of additional similitudes. Some big, some small, some that were doubtless coincidental. But it is very difficult for me to believe that at the brainstorming sessions that devised DS9 there wasn't anyone who had knowledge of the B5 premises and, consciously or unconsciously, pitched a few borrowed ideas.

No one is saying that everyone at Paramount intended plagiarism and was on board with it, or that there weren't much more influences that the ones that came from B5 in the conception of DS9, or that besides the similar premises the shows weren't completely different in terms of tone and themes. But I think the coincidences are too much to believe that they were random.

[Ran]

Oh, yeah, forgot the survivor's guilt angle that showed up in the pilot and then I think became less of a thing with Sisko over the show. But again, starting premises...

There's just a lot of things like that to imagine there was absolutely no leak between the Paramount execs who took the pitch and the writers creating DS9. 

[Aemon Stark]

There are superficial similarities, but that's about it. The central premise of B5 as a "novel" for television is completely absent in DS9's format, Sisko never had "survivor guilt" (he was mourning his wife and not over it until confronted by the fact), this "Terran defeat" in The Best of Both Worlds was already produced (in 1990!) - and didn't B5 change captains after its first season? 

The deconstruction of the Federation utopia didn't really occur until the Maquis were introduced well into the show (and essentially in synergy with TNG). 

[Ran]

B5 changed captain because Michael O'Hare was suffering mental illness and needed to be written off the show to get treatment, not because it was the plan that was pitched.

The decision to make Sisko a survivor of a terrible battle who is marked by loss, when Sinclair is a survivor of a terrible battle who is marked by loss, could be coincidence. It's the totality of coincidences that go beyond "space show on space station" that people are pointing to as seeming unlikely.

 

[sifth]

Ohh J. Michael Straczynski, what happened to you man. I use to love this guy................until he started writing for Spider Man.

I love both Babylon 5 and DS9, but aside from both series taking place on a space station, where both humans and aliens live, they really aren't all that similar. Babylon 5 for starters is easily a lot more political. DS9 is a more character driven story, while Babylon 5 is a more plot driven show. Don't get me wrong, I love the characters on Babylon 5, but they seemed to have very few standalone adventures and their stories always seemed to movie the plot along.

Also several of the Babylon 5 alien villains seemed very over the top, compared to the DS9 ones, that seemed on much more even footing with the Federation. Don't get me wrong the Changelings and the Jem'Hadar were strong enemies, but compared to the Shadows and the Vorlons, they're nothing.

To be honest, I was always under the impression that both shows had a friendly relationship with each other, when they were both on the air. I know several actors for example, who were on both shows.

[Derfel Cadarn]

JMS has a bit of a cheek, given he essentially ripped off Dr Who serial, Frontier In Space.

War betwen Earth and aliens caused by mistake, powerful alien race in the background manipulating other races to cause conflict, using some as puppets...

[Ran]

1 hour ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

JMS has a bit of a cheek, given he essentially ripped off Dr Who serial, Frontier In Space.

You seem stuck on the idea that JMS is ripping off past shows as a counter to a show he was developing, that wasn’t yet public, was being used by Paramount to feed ideas to a show they in turn were developing.

JMS had no insight into DS9. Paramount had insight into B5. 

As to Dr. Who, I couldn’t say how familiar he was with the show or not, and what influence it had on his show. But for the inciting incident of the Earth-Minbari war, he did explaon his thought process:

Quote

• Open gun ports as a sign of respect?
  It goes back a long time...if you look at certain members of the animal kingdom, they will often flash their teeth or growl to establish their identity, to show equality with someone else. You have to step outside a human perspective and ask how an alien would show respect, which may not be how we would logically do so. (Heck, in many cultures here on earth, a perfectly normal habit -- crossing your legs and the bottom of your foot showing -- is taken as a grave insult in some cultures. Certain customs are deeply rooted in cultural backgrounds or incidents that are often incomprehensible to us.)

Seems very plausible to me, and no surprise that someone 20 years earlier had had a similar idea.

 

 

[Plessiez]

I bounced off Discovery pretty hard when it first came out (I think I managed all of three episodes) and nothing I'd read about it since had made me regret that.  While (unlike JMS) I have fairly fond memories of watching Deep Space 9 in the 90s, two things I really didn't like about DS9 were the frequent Mirror Universe episodes and Section 31.  And, from what I could tell, the first two seasons of Discovery seem to feature both pretty heavily (as well as it being yet another prequel series).

But I watched the first two episodes of Season 3 over the weekend and I actually quite liked them.  They're pretty silly at times, but the characters seem mostly likeable and I think the post-Federation setting looks interesting (though it's obviously somewhat reminiscent of Andromeda).

It definitely feels that the writers have used the jump forward into the future as a soft reset, and are trying to make things understandable to new viewers.  The only time I felt the need to consult a wiki to understand something was actually because I'd watched more than zero previous episodes...

Spoiler

... and so I was confused to see that Michelle Yeoh's character was still alive.  Googling suggests that I avoided exactly the sort of thing I was trying to avoid by not watching Season 1 -- honestly, the Mirror Universe is such a boring concept -- though the character herself was fine in the most recent episode.

But is there any word (official or otherwise) on how permanent the change is?  I'd prefer not to start watching again if they're only going to jump back into some sort of 23rd century Section 31 conspiracy stuff halfway through the season.

[Jaxom 1974]

On 10/24/2020 at 4:22 PM, Werthead said:

What would be interesting is if she was semi-redeemed, went back to the Mirror Universe and founded/took over their version of Section 31...which of course would be an undercover organisation devoted to good and justice.

Ha, that might even be interesting.

Not sure how it would have worked, but it would have been more interesting if it had been the Mirror Spock forming Section 31 after meeting with Kirk and seeing how that went when they got to DS9, rather than the whole Cardassian/Klingon thing...

[Derfel Cadarn]

25 minutes ago, Ran said:

You seem stuck on the idea that JMS is ripping off past shows as a counter to a show he was developing, that wasn’t yet public, was being used by Paramount to feed ideas to a show they in turn were developing.

JMS had no insight into DS9. Paramount had insight into B5. 

As to Dr. Who, I couldn’t say how familiar he was with the show or not, and what influence it had on his show. But for the inciting incident of the Earth-Minbari war, he did explaon his thought process:

Seems very plausible to me, and no surprise that someone 20 years earlier had had a similar idea.

 

 

A lot of the similarities are pretty superficial, and a lot of sci-finstiff gets re-used anyway.  Star Trek had wormholes plenty of times in TNG, even a (supposedly) stable wormhole long before B5 or DS9. It’s not really like the B5 gate (which is basically just to enter hyperspace), and serves to let the station-bound crew do exploration.

At most, I think all that possibly influenced DS9 from the B5 proposal was setting it on a station. 
 

Similarities in Sisko and Sinclair’s backstories are superficial; basically both were in a bad battle. Sinclair had survivor’s guilt (and annesia), and Sisko was dealing with thr loss of his wife while raising his son.

The messiah thing is superficial; Sinclair wasn’t Valen until JMS rejigged the plot between seasons 1 and 2. Wasn’t he originally just a guy with a Minbari soul?

[Derfel Cadarn]

35 minutes ago, Ran said:

You seem stuck on the idea that JMS is ripping off past shows as a counter to a show he was developing, that wasn’t yet public, was being used by Paramount to feed ideas to a show they in turn were developing.

JMS had no insight into DS9. Paramount had insight into B5. 

As to Dr. Who, I couldn’t say how familiar he was with the show or not, and what influence it had on his show. But for the inciting incident of the Earth-Minbari war, he did explaon his thought process:

Seems very plausible to me, and no surprise that someone 20 years earlier had had a similar idea.

 

 

There was more to it than that; the daleks, using the Ogrons as puppets, tried to manipulate Earth and the Draconian empire back into war again, similar to the Shadows using catspaws to sow conflict. 
If you ever watch it, there are a lot of similarities. I wonder if Mordon was inspired by the Master as an agent stirring shit up? 
Harlan Ellison, who was involved ij B5, was certainly a massove Dr Who fan.