Dating Issues b/w Earth and Minbar

[GaribaldisHair]

This thread only reinforces what I love about B5, especially when you compare it to the discussion going on around the possibility of Rick Berman leaving Enterprise over in the Non-B5 forum.

When you consider how ST (for example) has constantly thrown continuity to the dogs in recent years, it is somehow reassuring to know that the B5 universe is so strongly defined that all we can "argue" about is such "trivia" as how old one of the character's is and what contradictory messages have been given previously on the subject.

 

[**DONOTDELETE**]

No kidding It's nothing to get wrapped around the axle about, but it's fun to discuss. I'm just killing time until the Great Maker says something about the new project, and I'd much rather be involved in this debate than the one over the various regional differences in the word y'all.

V/R
John

 

[grumbler]

Using the wiggle room approach makes a lot of the dates on Terry's timeline debatable - not so much the 'series' timeline, but most of the backstory material he applies dates to. This is why I say pinning down an accurate chronology that everyone can agree on is...well, impossible is probably too strong a word. JMS could, after all, release all of his personal notes someday.

As for years vs. cycles...after giving it some thought, I've come to believe that the term 'year' when used on the show refers exclusively to human years, unless otherwise specified - even when it's aliens presumably speaking in their own language. B5 was written for a western human audience, one that universally interprets 'year' as being one orbit of Earth around the Sun.

Agreed, though I would note that "cycles" appears to be just an early attempt by JMS to "alienize" the term "years." As Delenn notes in SD, she "served the Council for sixteen cycles" and, as has been noted elsewhere, this corresponds to the sixteen years 2243-2258 (inclusive), which is when she served. So "cycles" do seem to correspond to earth years.

In short, it seems that JMS himself didn't try to play games with "Earth years" versus "Minbari years/cycles" when his charactors spoke, and so attempts to rationalize the chronology contradictions in the scripts by resorting to alien chronologies are probably less useful than accepting the idea that JMS just made some mistakes. Therefore, only he can really say which dates should be considered "real" and which ones just a "slip of the tongue" on the part of the charactor. He HAS to have wiggle room because otherwise we end up with no possibility of a resolution.

I can live with ambiguity... for a while!