Ann Basart wrote:
Which of the main characters change most over time? How? Why? Are these real developments in character, or are we simply shown different (and perhaps surprising) aspects of a given person at different times? (As in the Servalan/Tarrant "Girl-next-door" exchange in "Sand.")
One of the things that I've always particularly liked about B7 is that the characters do change due to their experiences. Considering the kind of emotionally and physically stressful things they live through, and the edge-of-survival lives they lead, it would be totally unrealistic for it *not* to have an effect on them over time. I don't know that you can really call it "character development," though. It's more like "character degeneration," since it's almost inevitably a change for the worse (from the characters' POV that is, not from the viewers).
I think Avon in particular changes a lot. Watch a first-season epsiode and a fourth-season episode back-to-back, and it's impossible not to notice the contrast. Personally, I think the change makes perfect sense considering what the man's been through in the interim. Real human beings don't come out of those sorts of experiences unchanged.
Blake obviously changes a great deal, too, but most of it takes place in that two-year gap where we don't get to watch it happening, so we're left to wonder just what sort of experiences have shaped Gauda Prime Blake. Whatever they are, they must have been just as significant as the ones that altered Avon.
The other characters don't change nearly as much, I think, although most of them, of course, are on-screen for a much shorter time. Vila, being the main exception, doesn't seem to me to change a great deal until the 4th season, but I think there *are* subtle differences. His drinking does seem to increase considerably in the 4th season. And in the brief period after Malodaar an unfamiliar aura of despair seems to have gathered around him.
Tarrant and Soolin do change a great deal, as well, I suppose, but that feels a lot less like the characters developing over time in response to the events they've lived through, and more like the writers feeling their way towards a definition of the characters. Or, in "playing the game" terms, yes, I do think the different sides of them that we see are less new developments and more just seeing different aspects of the character at different times. (Though Tarrant *does* seem to me to gain considerably in maturity as time goes on, so I guess that is a real trend.)