Star Trek: Keeping Up With the Cardassians

[DaveSumm]

2 hours ago, Plessiez said:

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.

I strongly suspect that the jump forward was a result of fans annoyance that it was yet another prequel, and there was essentially very little they could do with the Federation at large when we already knew what it looked like 3 years before and 10 years after it was set. I’d be shocked if they went back again.

Speaking of Discovery, I was moaning last week about how the password scene would work with a universal translator, and they weirdly has yet another sign that they are just all speaking English in the last episode. Unless Saru had a complete guess that they called whatever language they were speaking the ‘common tongue’, and could we all please speak it because the UC could manage that one but not this new one you’re speaking? That’s getting really contrived though.

[Werthead]

 

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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.

I'm not sure what central aspects of the pitch you are referring to. I mean, they're both on space stations and the space stations are both round (kind of).

Beyond that, DS9 is a bog-standard and even relatively low-tech Cardassian station as opposed to B5 being a (more or less) start-of-the-art Earth Alliance facility. B5 is custom-designed from Day One to be an important trade and diplomacy station, DS9 doesn't really have those functions to start with: there's some talk of it becoming a trade hub with the Gamma Quadrant but traffic to and from the Gamma Quadrant is so rare that this never really happens. Eventually DS9 becomes more important to the galaxy at large, but that's more of a natural Trek progression with the story (i.e. the Enterprise-D becoming the most important ship in the fleet, Voyager becoming the most infamous ship in the Delta Quadrant).

Straczynski's position is that they stole his ideas for Star Trek but has later recanted that the Star Trek production team had any involvement or knowledge of those ideas (backed up by what his own wife witnessed whilst actually working for Star Trek) and then - rather lamely - put the blame on "nameless executives" at Warner Brothers (possibly related to the "nameless executives" at Warner Brothers who have dastardly conspired to stop anything being done with B5 over the last few years). I find the notion vague and unsubstantiated.

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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". 

I don't think the full five-year arc was in the 1989 pitch bundle (even the 1994 one is relatively light on the nitty details), so it'd be interesting to see how much of that was in there. Also, pre-Season 1, Sinclair's destiny was to lead the fight against the Shadows and defeat them in the present (well, after a 20-year time skip into the future). He had some Minbari spiritual/prophetic importance but it was actually far less than it ended up being in the final version (Sinclair becoming Valen was not something JMS settled on until O'Hare left the show, using the idea DC Fontana had given him in Legacies, by which time DS9 was well into its second season). If the original story arc had unfolded, the similarities between Sinclair and Sisko would have been far less pronounced; Sinclair became more like Sisko than vice versa.

A Starfleet officer becoming a prophetic/important figure to an alien society who may also ascend to another level of existence is also pretty much pure Trek: Decker and Ilya in The Motion Picture (who were remixed as Troi and Riker); Riker in Hide & Q; and Gary Mitchell in Where No Man Has Gone Before (not to mention the Who Watches the Watchers thing). It's not or unusual territory for Trek in any way. 

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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).

There are a lot of eyebrow-raising claims in JMS's book, but one of the most hilariously unconvincing is Walter Koenig - who is not someone who was involved in any capacity, at all, in Star Trek beyond being an occasional actor - being plugged into the development process and letting JMS know inside info. It appears the stuff he picked up about DS9 was from being at conventions when they were being discussed. Half the stuff he also reported about DS9 was inaccurate (the station being a centre for trade and diplomacy, which it was not).

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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).

I mean, this entire statement is so vague as to be absolutely meaningless. Some unknown person may have said someone based on a pitch they saw three years earlier to someone else who'd came up with the basic premise independent and from outside the company and they used this to add elements to the show that ended up not being very similar to the allegedly copied material. It doesn't make any sense.

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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".

Yes, but in the original story arc that trait wasn't held by Sinclair. There was a prophecy that he would be the one to reunite the two souls thing, but in the original arc he did that solely by having kids with Delenn. It didn't go any further than that. The whole thing about Sinclair going back in time to become a hugely important religious figure was only added between B5 Season 1 and 2 (when the entire story arc was hugely compressed from the original plan), way after the period under debate.

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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.

DS9 was not really a centre of diplomacy and trade though. There were shops for people on the station to use and the occasional passer-by but that was about it. They had this idea of DS9 becoming an important gateway to trade and diplomacy with the Gamma Quadrant but that never really happened: travel through the wormhole in either direction never really became a major thing (apart from to the colony on New Bajor, which the Dominion iced at the end of Season 2). DS9's function was first to operate an orbital defence and layover hub to guard against the Cardassians and then to monitor the wormhole. The function and importance of wormholes in Trek had also already been firmly established in TNG's The Price.

B5 wasn't located near a wormhole either. It had a fairly bog-standard hyperspace jump gate.

In the case of Sisko, he was based - perhaps a bit too closely - on Lucas McCain from The Rifleman (a Union Civil War veteran who loses his wife and moves to a frontier settlement with his son, harbours initial doubts about the decision but rapidly becomes a pillar of the community). Sinclair isn't a widower and he doesn't have a son. The idea of tying Sisko to Wolf 359 emerged out of Piller's frustration that they didn't have the budget to depict Wolf 359 in TNG adequately and he wanted to do the idea more justice (which ended up, ironically, being a bit disappointing, because they changed the scope of the battle in rewrites and had to take out tons of visual effects footage).

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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.

It's also a natural outgrowth of having a show set in a single place. In prior Trek the Enterprise turns up, causes/encounters mayhem and then moves on after Kirk/Picard give an inspiring speech and/or punch out someone. In a space station show you can't do that, the station stays put and people have to deal with consequences. TNG had already been moving in that direction anyway, with the Keiko/O'Brien marriage and having a child and story arcs like the Romulans causing problems (mentioned intermittently through the back half of Season 1), the Federation prepping for a Borg attack (mentioned intermittently through Season 3 before the end) and the Klingon Civil War arc extending from Season 2 to Season 5. When people say "Trek didn't have story arcs before B5 and then had them," that's kind of ignoring what had been happening for the last several years previously in TNG.

There was also the movement of television into a more serialised format which (contrary to Straczynski's claims) was happening right across the board anyway, and the Stephen Bocho shows and Twin Peaks were a much bigger influence on that then Babylon 5.

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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.

The problem being that there is no evidence of this whatsoever, and the people doing that have never been identified (JMS has even exonerated the primary players himself) and his wife who was uniquely positioned to see what was going on doesn't believe it happened. We also know who all the writers on DS9 were who came up with the ideas for the show and at no point do they indicate they were told by anyone further up the chain beyond Berman and Piller about what to include and what not to include.

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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.

I don't think the similarities - which are oft-overstated anyway - are necessarily random but a natural result of what happened at the time. Science fiction was an utterly dead genre, TNG resurrected it and suddenly everyone wanted an SF show (or at least were much more open to it) and we got everything from Quantum Leap to The X-Files to Space Rangers to Time Trax coming out of that. And logically you're going to get multiple space operas and a space station setting is a reasonably logical place to put your show on (especially when, specific to Star Trek, you already have a starship show and don't want to do a second one).

You see this happen a lot. Asteroids were a really huge thing after the impact crater in Mexico was discovered and suddenly everyone was writing asteroid books and pitching asteroid movies, which is how we ended up with two asteroid movies on at the same time, or two volcano movies, or multiple alien invasion movies.

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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.

The casts played in a softball league (with the Voyager team, who trounced the other two). I'm not sure they had a really friendly relationship though, mainly because the DS9 guys were constantly irritated by JMS spouting about they'd stolen his show and they'd literally never even heard of him. Some of the friendly relationship did sour later on, when B5 producer Doug Netter broke Foundation Imaging's contract to get them off the show to get his own CG team involved (for some reason it took JMS about ten years to realise this may have been a slight conflict of interest), and then the Star Trek guys gave Foundation a lifeline and got them to provide the CG for Voyager and for DS9's big battle sequences for waaaay more money (Foundation got the last laugh when Netter Digital went bust and Foundation took over their remaining contracts).

Actors being on both shows was more of just accepting a job. I don't think there was anything political about it apart from JMS employing Majel Barett on one episode of B5 to cool tensions and Billy Mumy being recruited to be on DS9 after B5 had finished as a goodwill thing (although Mumy was pretty narked off with JMS by that point).

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

To be clear on this point, they had a bundle of documents in their possession for a few months three years earlier, which someone may or may not have Xeroxed or made notes from (both of which could have cost Paramount dearly in a multi-million dollar legal clash if it had been ever discovered) and someone unspecified may or may not have had vague memories of. This is not an impressive amount of "insight."

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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.

JMS frequently cited Doctor Who and Blake's 7 as primary influences on Babylon 5 for their serialisation at a much earlier time than B5, and in B7's case, the dystopian SF setting, the amoral or ambiguous main characters and the trick of gradually assembling the crew over 4-5 episodes rather than front-loading them all awkwardly into the pilot.

[Werthead]

28 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

Speaking of Discovery, I was moaning last week about how the password scene would work with a universal translator, and they weirdly has yet another sign that they are just all speaking English in the last episode. Unless Saru had a complete guess that they called whatever language they were speaking the ‘common tongue’, and could we all please speak it because the UC could manage that one but not this new one you’re speaking? That’s getting really contrived though.

Yeah, that was a fair point. I didn't get what was going on there.

[Ran]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

: there's some talk of it becoming a trade hub

 

I didn't recall that, but put that as one more item in the column about similarities. It doesn't matter that the writers didn't do anything with it, that DS9 diverged in many interesting and not-so-interesting ways. The point is that JMS pitched certain things and a number of those elements just happened to appear on DS9, even when some of the elements weren't simply natural offspring of other elements.

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

 

Also, pre-Season 1, Sinclair's destiny was to lead the fight against the Shadows and defeat them in the present (well, after a 20-year time skip into the future).

That he had some prophetic destiny was the key point for me. It is, as I said, very much "not Trek"

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Decker and Ilya in The Motion Picture (who were remixed as Troi and Riker);

No prophecy is involved, I note.

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Riker in Hide & Q;

Also no prophecy.

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

and Gary Mitchell in Where No Man Has Gone Before

 

Prophecy? No.

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

 (not to mention the Who Watches the Watchers thing).

Not prophecy, and this is definitely an example of the typical trope of a primitive species believing advance people are gods rather than an advanced species deciding that someone is a prophesized figure of some sort of importance.

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

 

It appears the stuff he picked up about DS9 was from being at conventions when they were being discussed.

Richard Arnold, who Koenig spoke with, was not just some convention fan. He had been Rodenberry's assistant and an employee at Paramount, and worked with the writers of TNG (credited as "research consultant"). More saliently, he was working with the writers on TNG at exactly the time Michael Piller was gathering writers and interns to tell them about their plans for DS9. Not hard to imagine that Arnold was involved in these earliest discussions with the writing staff, when interns like Drennan were being included. I know Arnold has been on the convention circuit since providing insights on DS9, a show he didn't ultimately work on when it was in production, which makes me guess his insights come from pre-production development and whatever was floating around among the TNG staff.

I would say the details were not so much wrong as in flux, much as the first public announcements which said that one of the supporting cast of DS9 would be an alien from a low-gravity world who had a "warp-powered wheelchair" to get around. 

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

I mean, this entire statement is so vague as to be absolutely meaningless. Some unknown person may have said someone based on a pitch they saw three years earlier to someone else who'd came up with the basic premise independent and from outside the company and they used this to add elements to the show that ended up not being very similar to the allegedly copied material. It doesn't make any sense.

Star Trek decides to make a space station show some time in mid-to-late 1991. Soon after, this new network announces that they're doing a space station show, and it'll premiere (its pilot) first. Some exec gets antsy and wonders if they need to scrap their show because of this other show. Someone recalls they heard the pitch. Things progress and details end up leaking over to the development team without their realizing it.

It seems very natural in the competitive world of TV development that people would try to undercut an apparent rival, which has been what JMS's ultimate contention has been. Given that he's been in the industry for decades, it's hard for me to question his understanding of his own business and how it functions. (And of course, we both know another sci-fi writer guy with similar industry experience who is quite adamant that someone stole his ideas for their own show...)

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

There was a prophecy

Precisely. The fact of it is the thing. It is a weirdly "non-Trek" thing that can't be attributed to current events that shows up at a very specific time when another show, that was in development first, had it as well.

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

They had this idea of DS9 becoming an important gateway to trade and diplomacy with the Gamma Quadrant but that never really happened:

Ditto with this. The idea that it'd be a trade hub was there, even if the writers ultimately did nothing with it. Why did they have it there? An element that was suggested through some exec notes that they decided in the end wasn't their show, but glimpses of it are there in the first season? I don't know, but as part of the whole string of seeming coincidences, it feels like something was going on.

It's fairly obvious we've both made up our minds on this, so I don't want to keep going around on this. So I'll leave off on the topic here, anyways, though will of course read responses with interest.

Turning back to to the main topic of current shows, did watch the Discovery episodes, and... gosh, not liking it much at all. Book, I like. Otherwise, not so much. Sonequa Martin-Green's constant half-whisper to indicate intensity is starting to get on my nerves. It's a very "actorly" thing to do and is monotonous. I guess the main thing I'm interested in seeing is other "V'draysh" people and ships in the 32nd century. And also how they make "Calypso" happen under current conditions, since right now they seem to contradict one another (since that episode suggests Discovery has been waiting for a 1,000 years and I had the sense that it takes place in approximately a similar time frame as this season... but maybe it's supposed to be a 1,000 years past that?)

 

[RumHam]

10 minutes ago, Ran said:

 

Turning back to to the main topic of current shows, did watch the Discovery episodes, and... gosh, not liking it much at all. Book, I like. Otherwise, not so much. Sonequa Martin-Green's constant half-whisper to indicate intensity is starting to get on my nerves. It's a very "actorly" thing to do and is monotonous. I guess the main thing I'm interested in seeing is other "V'draysh" people and ships in the 32nd century. And also how they make "Calypso" happen under current conditions, since right now they seem to contradict one another (since that episode suggests Discovery has been waiting for a 1,000 years and I had the sense that it takes place in approximately a similar time frame as this season... but maybe it's supposed to be a 1,000 years past that?)

 

Nothing in Calypso establishes the year, only that Zora has been holding that position alone for near 1000 years. At the time we thought it was set around when season 3 is set, because we didn't know about the time travel. Now it seems like it's set roughly 1000 years after Discovery ends. I expect Zora to be installed on the Discovery this season, and the other federation ships probably have their own AI's.

Just saw this on Memory Alpha:

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The writer of "Calypso", Michael Chabon, confirmed on Instagram that "V'draysh" is a syncope (a type of linguistic distortion) of the word "Federation". [1]

Since Zareh and his men spoke Pidgin, it is possible that the syncope "V'draysh" is meant to be a Pidgin word.

 

[Derfel Cadarn]

Not sure what ‘prophecy’ proves either way. Did thr initial B5 stuff even have a prophecy? The Valen stuff came about after season 1, when the time travel element was added.

[Derfel Cadarn]

If someone wanted to point out similarities, there’s a big one:

The Centauri conquered the Narns about a century before (i think), strip-mined the planet and eventually left after a Narn insirgency.

Replace Centauri with Cardassian and Narn with Bajoran - except that was introduced by TNG with Ro Laren.

[Ran]

@RumHam

Oh, I know. I meant that they mentioned that there were a couple Federation/V'draysh ships out there in the galaxy, I think when the Starfleet guy on the space station searched for signals. 

And yeah, the idea that Discovery is there a thousand years later, could see that. I was also imagining the possibility of some weird thing where they have to send her 1,000 years in the past, tell her to wait, and then they recover her later. To let Zora have enough time to learn and grow, maybe? Who knows. 

@Derfel

There was definitely a prophecy in the pitch document. The Valen thing, as Wert said, was an elaboration or change on it that dovetailed with things going on, but even in the original pilot (which JMS wrote in 1987 and which he said was more-or-less what was shot in 1992) you can see that Sinclair means something to the Minbari ("You have a hole in your mind!", sole survivor of the Battle of the Line, Minbari rejecting every potential human commander until they got to him).

As I recall, the prophecy was going to be along the lines of an alien male having a child with a Minbari female, revitalizing the Minbari species or setting up a situation to defeat a great enemy, something of the sort. In that sense, Sheridan -- who is "the One", just as Sinclair and Delenne are -- takes on a lot of that stuff, while Sinclair becomes a historic messiah figure instead.

[DaveSumm]

1 hour ago, RumHam said:

Just saw this on Memory Alpha:

So ... the word ‘Federation’ has undergone linguistic drift, but also been remembered perfectly alongside it? I don’t think they’ve thought through the language issue this season.

[Aemon Stark]

1 hour ago, Ran said:

I didn't recall that, but put that as one more item in the column about similarities. It doesn't matter that the writers didn't do anything with it, that DS9 diverged in many interesting and not-so-interesting ways. The point is that JMS pitched certain things and a number of those elements just happened to appear on DS9, even when some of the elements weren't simply natural offspring of other elements.

Well, since this argument has been going on for almost 30 years, it's hard to see how it will ever be settled. But at most you're talking about coincidence based on the vaguest, most simplistic similarities. And it hardly matters, except that JMS and B5 fans seem to think the supposedly "derivative" aspects of DS9 should detract from its greatness or uniqueness as a Star Trek show or a scifi series generally. 

1 hour ago, Ran said:

That he had some prophetic destiny was the key point for me. It is, as I said, very much "not Trek"

But he didn't have any prophetic destiny in the show after the pilot until season five. Yes, Opaka tells him that he will find the "Celestial Temple", and that he was always "destined" to find it. But that makes Opaka the prophet... unless we consider that she has access to a so-advanced-it's-magic device in an Orb, which allows her to access the non-linear and non-corporeal Prophets. I've always felt it was of a "hard scifi" concept. 

In fact, "the Sisko" doesn't even have particular importance to the "wormhole aliens" until season four's Accession when some other guy shows up thinking he's the Emissary (and Sisko, while initially relieved, eventually opposes him for entirely political reasons). It's only in season five's Rapture where Sisko receives an actual vision that has "prophetic" importance. And there's little to no evidence any writers were thinking about that early on, let alone Piller who left after season two for Voyager. What dialogue or other text supports this? 

And the idea of alien races ascribing religious significance to Starfleet officers is, actually, very "Trek". 

1 hour ago, Ran said:

Richard Arnold, who Koenig spoke with, was not just some convention fan. He had been Rodenberry's assistant and an employee at Paramount, and worked with the writers of TNG (credited as "research consultant"). More saliently, he was working with the writers on TNG at exactly the time Michael Piller was gathering writers and interns to tell them about their plans for DS9. Not hard to imagine that Arnold was involved in these earliest discussions with the writing staff, when interns like Drennan were being included. I know Arnold has been on the convention circuit since providing insights on DS9, a show he didn't ultimately work on when it was in production, which makes me guess his insights come from pre-production development and whatever was floating around among the TNG staff.

Roddenberry was at most peripherally involved in TNG until his death in 1991, was never show-runner, and has writing credits only for Encounter at Farpoint, Hide and Q, and Datalore. I'd never heard of Richard Arnold before, but a cursory review of his IMDB demonstrates zero writing credits - not sure what sort of "research" he did, but how was he "working with the writers" let alone privy to outside story pitches to Paramount executives? Memory Alpha says his job involved "(vetting) proposals and final manuscripts for licensed tie-ins (novels, comics, guidebooks, video cover art, etc.) on behalf of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, until Roddenberry died in 1991". In this interview*, Arnold describes his title as "made-up". 

(*He also talks about how he's "not the greatest fan of" Duet and manages to misquote Kira's final critical line in the episode. So maybe I should have had his job.)

1 hour ago, Ran said:

I would say the details were not so much wrong as in flux, much as the first public announcements which said that one of the supporting cast of DS9 would be an alien from a low-gravity world who had a "warp-powered wheelchair" to get around. 

They did kinda do that episode. Wasn't great. 

1 hour ago, Ran said:

Star Trek decides to make a space station show some time in mid-to-late 1991. Soon after, this new network announces that they're doing a space station show, and it'll premiere (its pilot) first. Some exec gets antsy and wonders if they need to scrap their show because of this other show. Someone recalls they heard the pitch. Things progress and details end up leaking over to the development team without their realizing it.

It seems very natural in the competitive world of TV development that people would try to undercut an apparent rival, which has been what JMS's ultimate contention has been. Given that he's been in the industry for decades, it's hard for me to question his understanding of his own business and how it functions. (And of course, we both know another sci-fi writer guy with similar industry experience who is quite adamant that someone stole his ideas for their own show...)

Which is to say, there's no direct evidence of anything apart from some vague history and a lot of self-righteous indignation and supposition from JMS. 

1 hour ago, Ran said:

Ditto with this. The idea that it'd be a trade hub was there, even if the writers ultimately did nothing with it. Why did they have it there? An element that was suggested through some exec notes that they decided in the end wasn't their show, but glimpses of it are there in the first season? I don't know, but as part of the whole string of seeming coincidences, it feels like something was going on.

Interestingly, the series bible doesn't mention a whole lot about this idea, except that finding the wormhole would make Bajor the "leading center of commerce and scientific exploration in the sector", rather than the backwater posting Sisko thought he ended up with. 

47 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

If someone wanted to point out similarities, there’s a big one:

The Centauri conquered the Narns about a century before (i think), strip-mined the planet and eventually left after a Narn insirgency.

Replace Centauri with Cardassian and Narn with Bajoran - except that was introduced by TNG with Ro Laren.

And the Cardassians themselves date from the season before she appeared. 

[Ran]

8 minutes ago, Aemon Stark said:

But he didn't have any prophetic destiny in the show after the pilot until season five.

Oh, so he had a prophetic destiny in the pilot? 

Again, see what I said about the trade thing. The fact that the show did not make much of that aspect for some time frame doesn't matter to me. The fact that it's an element at all is what seems like an absurd thing to have and insist it's a mere coincidence.

(Also, I disagree with your take that it doesn't matter. The season finale turns in part on the uneasy relation Sisko has to the Bajorans entangling him in their religious factionalism because he's this prophesized figure.)

[Aemon Stark]

In the Hands of the Prophets generally considers the religious elements through a political lens. Sisko may be a sort of religious figure, but it’s all politics. Then-Vedak Winn arrives to “sharpen the contradictions” and arrange for the assassination of a political opponent. She certainly has no spiritual motive of note. We could go into more detail here, of course, but the point is that JMS didn’t come up with this, and has even exonerated the very authors of the DS9 bible. 

[The hairy bear]

52 minutes ago, Aemon Stark said:

JMS and B5 fans seem to think the supposedly "derivative" aspects of DS9 should detract from its greatness or uniqueness as a Star Trek show or a scifi series generally.

JMS has never claimed such nonsense. As for myself, I'm a fan of both shows, and I'm happy that the DS9 staff took ideas from the B5 pitch (if they did so) because that way they were able to create the best Trek show ever, which gave me many hours of joy. I think we are all capable of critically analyzing whether the resemblances between the premises of two shows are too many to be coincidental, while being able to enjoy both shows on their own.

[Ran]

1 minute ago, The hairy bear said:

JMS has never claimed such nonsense. As for myself, I'm a fan of both shows, and I'm happy that the DS9 staff took ideas from the B5 pitch (if they did so) because that way they were able to create the best Trek show ever, which gave me many hours of joy. I think we are all capable of critically analyzing whether the resemblances between the premises of two shows are too many to be coincidental, while being able to enjoy both shows on their own.

Co-signed. I enjoyed DS9. Preferred B5, but still. I think the flawed origins of DS9 (as I see it) is something that would be nice to see acknowledged rather than waved away, out of a sense of fairness, but I don't think the fact that it has (again, as I see it) a number of borrowed elements in its foundation necessarily harms my perception of the show.

[karaddin]

4 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

So ... the word ‘Federation’ has undergone linguistic drift, but also been remembered perfectly alongside it? I don’t think they’ve thought through the language issue this season.

I'd seen some speculation that in the aftermath of The Burn the Federation has actually splintered. The version still called "The Federation" are what we saw with the station in Ep 1 while the group calling themselves "V'draysh" has and/or will compromise on their values, probably becoming more authoritarian for the sake of security. From memory the reference to them in Calypso does not paint them in a flattering light. I don't think that dovetails so well with what we see in Ep 2 though, as the locals still seem to have the same attitude towards V'draysh as other Federation, so if there is a splintering I'd say its still early days and they haven't diverged much yet.

[sifth]

So I've been wondering something, do you think the writers of New Trek are aware that the Federation and Starfleet are two separate things? Given their track record for writing Trek, I honestly don't think they do, lol

[Werthead]

 

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No prophecy is involved, I note.

The V'Ger-Ilya hybrid makes a huge number of statements that V'Ger's destiny is to return to its origin point and merge with the Creator, and this has been foreseen (it's like 75% of her dialogue after she reappears). Decker agrees to fulfil this prophecy.

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Prophecy? No.

In Gary Mitchell's backstory it is noted that he had ESP abilities, was a master of games of chance and was interested in magic tricks, and had abilities that seemed at times almost superhuman. He notes that passing through the Galactic Barrier and triggering his abilities is the culmination of his life.

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Richard Arnold, who Koenig spoke with, was not just some convention fan. He had been Rodenberry's assistant and an employee at Paramount, and worked with the writers of TNG (credited as "research consultant"). More saliently, he was working with the writers on TNG at exactly the time Michael Piller was gathering writers and interns to tell them about their plans for DS9. Not hard to imagine that Arnold was involved in these earliest discussions with the writing staff, when interns like Drennan were being included. I know Arnold has been on the convention circuit since providing insights on DS9, a show he didn't ultimately work on when it was in production, which makes me guess his insights come from pre-production development and whatever was floating around among the TNG staff.

Richard Arnold is, very famously in Star Trek circles, someone who is known to have conflated and blown up his importance to Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek in general to ensure he still gets invited on the convention circuit. His importance and influence dwindled significantly after Roddenberry stopped being involved on a day-to-day basis (in 1989-90) and writers and people came on board who were walking Star Trek encyclopaedias themselves (particularly Ron Moore, who's noted that he had entire episodes of TOS committed to memory when he started work on TNG). He still worked at Paramount at that point but he wasn't an executive or writer. He heard rumours from the inside, the same as anyone else, and he certainly would not have had access to whatever material had been allegedly copied from some pitch by some guy three years earlier.

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Star Trek decides to make a space station show some time in mid-to-late 1991. Soon after, this new network announces that they're doing a space station show, and it'll premiere (its pilot) first. Some exec gets antsy and wonders if they need to scrap their show because of this other show. Someone recalls they heard the pitch. Things progress and details end up leaking over to the development team without their realizing it.

It seems very natural in the competitive world of TV development that people would try to undercut an apparent rival, which has been what JMS's ultimate contention has been. Given that he's been in the industry for decades, it's hard for me to question his understanding of his own business and how it functions. (And of course, we both know another sci-fi writer guy with similar industry experience who is quite adamant that someone stole his ideas for their own show...)

Warner Brothers announced Babylon 5 first (November 1991, DS9 in January 1992), which JMS has noted is almost certainly the sole reason B5 got made. If DS9 had been announced first, WB would have likely not commissioned the show (they noted that they felt uncomfortable going up again TNG and only went with B5 because the setting and premise were different; if they'd known they were going up against a Trek space station show, they would have never said years).

It is quite amusing that people keep repeating this mantra as if it's any kind of truth: "Well, Berman and Piller are lying when they say they just wrote the show, when really they just kept adding mysterious notes passed down from faceless executives based on an obscure pitch from three years earlier." The degree to which the Trek writing team was isolated from internal Paramount studio politics by Berman (one of his few redeeming qualities) is quite remarkable.

As for the GRRM/Torme thing, GRRM himself has shot that one right down:

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Tracy Torme, the writer/creator of SLIDERS, was never involved in DOORWAYS, nor did he ask to write for the show... at least not directly. At the time when it appeared that DOORWAYS would be on the ABC Fall 1993 schedule, Torme’s _agent_ approached me while I was visiting my own agent (we are both represented by ICM) and said that his client had read the script, loved the concept, and would be interesting in writing for the show if we went to series. A mutual friend (named Harlan Ellison) has subsequently told me that Torme says he has “never” read the DOORWAYS script and never expressed any interest in writing for it. I have no way of knowing, one way or the other. I have a great deal of respect for Harlan and if he says that Torme says this, I believe that Torme says this. It was not Torme who approached me: it was Torme’s agent, speaking on behalf of Torme. I have been in the business long enough to know that agents sometimes, well... emrbroider if they smell a job. At any rate: I was never involved in any aspect of Torme’s show and he was he was involved in any aspect of mine.

Straczynski's autobiography also has a very bizarre piece on his time on The Twilight Zone, ranting about GRRM trying to sabotage his career because he didn't want to have another "SFF lit figure" on the show (which is surreal, and overstating JMS's very modest non-screen SFF credentials at the time).

The problem with the original claim was that JMS made it and JMS was the only person really talking to fans on the Internet (still mostly true in 1996, and 100% true in 1991 when the Internet barely existed) and his version of the narrative has become dominant over the years. When other people push back on that narrative with facts and information that contradicts JMS's narrative, he gets incredibly angry and his fans seem to get even angrier (and their anger grows when people who've actually researched the topic through multiple years, magazine articles and interviews start talking about things like Tartikoff, or Evan Thompson's role at Chris-Craft, or the degree to which DS9 was based on The Rifleman, or Warner Brothers and Paramount's battles to create new networks rooted in late 1980s and early 1990s Hollywood politics, because these are things they've never heard of despite being highly germane) at the idea that anyone would contradict the "Great Maker." Yet we've seen, repeatedly and consistently, JMS saying things that aren't true: Foundation Imaging getting the Star Trek gig so they deliberately fucked up their work on B5, when in fact they only got the Trek work after Babylonian Productions Inc. broke their contract (JMS, weirdly, never mentions the resulting out-of-court settlement that Warner Brothers made which was fairly expensive); Andrea Thompson quit because they wouldn't make her the star of the show (she - a single mother at the time - was offered a shitload more money to make another show on a network and offered the B5 team the chance to improve their compensation to match and they were unable to do so, exactly the same reason Caitlin Brown quit); Claudia Christian quit because she was offered a movie (JMS and Warner Brothers got their wires crossed because JMS verbally promised Christian the time off to make a film and then come back, but didn't tell WB and they didn't know WTF she was talking about and told her agent to F off) and so on and so on. That's also not counting all the times he exaggerated things or said things that were verifiably not true (like suggesting they had NASA experts double-checking their spacecraft designs, which was news to the CG team, and that it was his idea to use Newtonian physics and not Star Trek "magic technology" when it was Ron Thornton's, and he still had tractor beams in the script as late as Soul Hunter).

At some point you have to acknowledge the guy is simply not a very reliable source and when he makes any grandiose claim, like "Star Trek stole my idea!" without any specifics at all to back it up, you have to be very healthily sceptical of them.

[Ran]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

The V'Ger-Ilya hybrid makes a huge number of statements that V'Ger's destiny is to return to its origin point and merge with the Creator, and this has been foreseen (it's like 75% of her dialogue after she reappears). Decker agrees to fulfil this prophecy.

Oh, come on.  V'ger = Voyager; it's not "prophecy", it's programming. An example of that dialogue you mention:

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To learn all that is learnable;
to deliver all collected data to
the Creator on the third planet.
That is the programming.

 

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

He notes that passing through the Galactic Barrier and triggering his abilities is the culmination of his life.

Gary Mitchell believing he had a destiny  is not the same as species or race or group having a  prophecy about you.

Re: Richard Arnold,

I did not say Arnold was saying anything about B5 at all. My point was that he was an insider -- working on that lot, an actual employee of The Next Generation and Paramount, familiar with many of the writers and staff -- and so when you dismiss Koenig as just hearing stuff "at conventions", I wanted to note that he heard it, specifically, from someone who was at that very time a Paramount employee who was still an employee of the TNG production and was a regular on the lot.

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Berman and Piller are lying when they say they just wrote the show

So they claim that the development process was done all by themselves, carte-blanche, no network notes from anyone? That is not how the networks work. They had a boss that asked them to produce something, and layers of people who would work with them to make it happen and get it approved.

 

[DaveSumm]

Never seen B5, just a curious bystander, but this sounds squarely in the territory of “maybe but maybe not and certainly not provably” so I don’t know what progress anyone expects to make. Nobody involved’s memory is getting any better, so sounds like JMS needs to start getting over it.

[Ran]

3 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

so sounds like JMS needs to start getting over it.

Oh, not in his character, at all. Once you learn more about him, you realize why he and Harlan Ellison got along so well -- they were cut from the same cloth, particularly when it comes to holding grudges.