Emotional Reactions to "Deconstruction"? ****SPOILERS

[B5JMS Poster]

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From: "Laura M. Appelbaum" <l-appelbaum at mindspring.com>
Date: 27 Oct 1997 22:27:46 -0500
Lines: 81

David DeRubeis wrote:
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> > > ...and I really *hated* the part where they're
> > turned into holograms and manipulated so -- I mean, what does it say
> > for Sheridan that with his personality supposedly intact, he can be
> > turned into Adolph Hitler, and for Franklin into "Doctor" Mengeles?
> > Why was Garibaldi the only one they couldn't crush?
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> They where holograms with the personalities of those people so that they
> would seem authentic.  But since they weren't real people, they could be
> reprogrammed to act in any fashion.  

I realize that was the idea jms was trying to convey, so I'm not arguing
with YOU per se on this, but to me those two sentences are
contradictory.  Our moral values and how we express them are part and
parcel of our personalities, so I don't see how you can divest one from
the other.  If you just want to have someone who LOOKS and SOUNDS like
me in a holographic projection, but you wanted to "make" me talk about
how the only part of Babylon 5 that has ever interested me was Number
One's phenomenal acting <G>, you wouldn't use a program that contained
elements of my personality, because there'd be no WAY even a hologram of
me would say those things.  So if you want to make Sheridan into a
fascist murderer, why would you start off with his personality in the
matrix at all?  I just don't get it.

They weren't "crushed", their
> programming was just casually altered.  "Garibaldi" tricked the
> deprogrammer into letting him retain his original programming until it
> was too late.  If the deprogrammer had been more careful, he could have
> just as easily altered Garibaldi.  Remember, these where only programmed
> facimilies; they had no will or life of their own, beyond having their
> behaviour modeled after famous people from history.
> 
Again, if you saw a very tall, lanky guy in a stove-pipe hat with a big
nose and he addressed you about the glories of slavery and how the best
thing the United States could do would be to divide itself up into
hundreds of tiny dictatorships owned by individual plantation owners,
would you believe you were watching the behavior of Lincoln?

> [SNIP]
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> > And, of course, I may as well say what you all must EXPECT me to say
> > about now: how is it that SINCLAIR was forgotten?
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> Micheal O'Hare wasn't available?
> 
Maybe not ... but I meant in name, anyway -- why didn't the monks have a
page with him in it?

LMA


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From: jmsatb5 at aol.com (Jms at B5)
Date: 28 Oct 1997 02:02:12 -0500
Lines: 10

I think it's fair to say that Sinclair has been in large measure forgotten by
 Earth by the time of Deconstruction...but Valen lives on in the memories of
 the Minbari...a reasonable trade-off.


 jms




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