David Sheridan (Babylon 5)

In the fictional Babylon 5 science fiction saga, David Sheridan was the son of the Interstellar Alliance President John Sheridan and his wife Delenn. Sheridan was named after his paternal grandfather David Sheridan. He did not appear in any of the Babylon 5 television episodes or made-for-television movies, but was featured in Out of the Darkness, the third novel in the canon Legions of Fire novel series.

His existence was first established in the two-part "War Without End" episode from the third season of Babylon 5 when his father traveled forward in time briefly and was told by Delenn that they had a son. This foreshadowing served to alter the tone of the relationship between Sheridan and Delenn, which was at that point still developing. It also served as part of the motivation for Sheridan's actions at the end of the third season, which in turn resolved many of the major plotlines thus far in the show. The final episode of season four, "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars" contains a reference to an incident involving David, in a segment set one hundred years later, but does not detail the nature of this.

Towards the end of the fifth and final season of Babylon 5, Delenn finally became pregnant with him. His birth takes place off-camera between the penultimate episode, "Objects at Rest", and the final episode, "Sleeping in Light", set some 19 years later. In "Sleeping in Light", we learn that David was in training with the Rangers at the time of his father's death. That was after the resolution of the trap set for him and his parents by the Drakh, who used Mollari as their unwilling agent.

According to the DVD commentary for the final episode of Babylon 5, "Sleeping in Light," Straczynski decided not to have David Sheridan appear in that episode, partly because he hadn't figured out how he wanted David to look, and partly because he feared that debuting an important character would detract from the story he wanted to tell in that episode.

David Sheridan finally appeared in the Peter David novel Out of the Darkness as a main character, where he brings his story full circle by, under the control of the evil Drakh, luring his parents to Centauri Prime, thus creating the situation that his father stumbled into in "War Without End", and explaining the reference in "Deconstruction of Falling Stars". David is saved when the Drakh controlling him is killed, thus causing David's Keeper to wither and die.