Addressing specific points rather than editing my comment in perpetuity—
It was compressed into a single 5-season arc when it became apparent that they were probably not going to be able to count on 10 seasons with the networks in flux as much as they were in the 90s.
Counting on five seasons of network television was a hell of a gamble to start with and almost didn't even work out. Counting on five seasons of network television being successful enough to get five more seasons of continuing adventures is heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots time—fine, sure, there had been longer-running scripted series on American TV, but nothing with the kind of start-to-finish serialization that JMS was pitching. Especially given what actually happened with Warner Bros. and then TNT, I cannot imagine it would have lasted its ten-year run. The fandom would have been even cultier than it is now and a lot more frustrated.
such as Bester going from a one-off to a recurring character with a role to play in the ongoing plot.
Forever bummed about never getting the Bester episode of Crusade. It was about to start shooting when the show was axed. Walter Koenig has said it was his favorite script he'd received as Bester thus far. The show couldn't have been axed, like, two weeks later?
Catherine Sakai having more-or-less the Anna Sheridan role
At least in the show as it went into production, Catherine Sakai very definitely had the Anna Sheridan role, in that she was supposed to come back as a Shadow thrall after an exoplanetary survey gone terribly wrong, which I am fine with never having happened because it would have been a stupid, sketchy way to resolve the love triangle and much more of a traditional fridging than the situation with Anna, who is established as so normally dead—no hopes, no mysteries, just the grief that Sheridan two years after the fact is ordinarily working through—that her resurrection is a successful shock to the audience as well as the characters.
Something else that had occurred to me earlier is that the flash-forward to 20 years in the future comes just about halfway through the show's run - it essentially makes the show a bit palindromic, you see where it's going half of the way to getting there - and I'm now even more impressed with this because this aspect of the structure was apparently completely improvised AFTER season one had already aired!
I still don't think I have seen anything on television like the third-season flashforward of Babylon 5 because it actually is the future, a fixed set of events rather than a potential to be guided or averted à la Foundation and yet it doesn't make the show feel deterministic because the entire point isn't what happens, it's how and why and what it means: knowing the shape of the future, not knowing the truth of it at all. Which as we have discussed is partly the extra-diegetic result of the Sheridan swap, but the death-dream was plotted in from the very first episode, so some of that quality must always have been planned.
I feel like the slight jarringness of the show sticking to the original plan with Londo, the Keeper, and having him vanish from everyone else's life for 15 years was a side effect of this, because having him get as close to everyone in season five as he does, and then disappear, very much had that feeling (to me) of rerouting the plot onto its original track when it was starting to go down a different, more organic track that I've experienced with other shows.
I have a very hard time evaluating so much of Season 5 because it was so Doylistically jerked around, but I agree with you that the slight idiot ball quality of Londo just falling out of the narrative for fifteen years makes sense as the fossil of an older version of the story, which could also explain some of the emphasis on David in the flashforward when he is Kid Very Much Not Appearing in Babylon 5 itself.
The pain in the ass is that I know the information exists, I just don't know if it exists on the internet: in terms of interim stages, the intended shape of Season 5 before so much of it got accordioned into Season 4. I used to know someone who had the complete set of Babylon 5 script books, primarily because I spent most of a cast party reading about three-fifths of them. There was also a set of Q&As compiled from assorted dead internet sources which I don't know anyone who owns unless a library or something. None of them ever had e-books that I was aware of. Because Season 5 was such a vexed question, I suspect it's discussed in at least the latter volumes, but they are sure not on the Internet Archive.
no subject
It was compressed into a single 5-season arc when it became apparent that they were probably not going to be able to count on 10 seasons with the networks in flux as much as they were in the 90s.
Counting on five seasons of network television was a hell of a gamble to start with and almost didn't even work out. Counting on five seasons of network television being successful enough to get five more seasons of continuing adventures is heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots time—fine, sure, there had been longer-running scripted series on American TV, but nothing with the kind of start-to-finish serialization that JMS was pitching. Especially given what actually happened with Warner Bros. and then TNT, I cannot imagine it would have lasted its ten-year run. The fandom would have been even cultier than it is now and a lot more frustrated.
such as Bester going from a one-off to a recurring character with a role to play in the ongoing plot.
Forever bummed about never getting the Bester episode of Crusade. It was about to start shooting when the show was axed. Walter Koenig has said it was his favorite script he'd received as Bester thus far. The show couldn't have been axed, like, two weeks later?
Catherine Sakai having more-or-less the Anna Sheridan role
At least in the show as it went into production, Catherine Sakai very definitely had the Anna Sheridan role, in that she was supposed to come back as a Shadow thrall after an exoplanetary survey gone terribly wrong, which I am fine with never having happened because it would have been a stupid, sketchy way to resolve the love triangle and much more of a traditional fridging than the situation with Anna, who is established as so normally dead—no hopes, no mysteries, just the grief that Sheridan two years after the fact is ordinarily working through—that her resurrection is a successful shock to the audience as well as the characters.
Something else that had occurred to me earlier is that the flash-forward to 20 years in the future comes just about halfway through the show's run - it essentially makes the show a bit palindromic, you see where it's going half of the way to getting there - and I'm now even more impressed with this because this aspect of the structure was apparently completely improvised AFTER season one had already aired!
I still don't think I have seen anything on television like the third-season flashforward of Babylon 5 because it actually is the future, a fixed set of events rather than a potential to be guided or averted à la Foundation and yet it doesn't make the show feel deterministic because the entire point isn't what happens, it's how and why and what it means: knowing the shape of the future, not knowing the truth of it at all. Which as we have discussed is partly the extra-diegetic result of the Sheridan swap, but the death-dream was plotted in from the very first episode, so some of that quality must always have been planned.
I feel like the slight jarringness of the show sticking to the original plan with Londo, the Keeper, and having him vanish from everyone else's life for 15 years was a side effect of this, because having him get as close to everyone in season five as he does, and then disappear, very much had that feeling (to me) of rerouting the plot onto its original track when it was starting to go down a different, more organic track that I've experienced with other shows.
I have a very hard time evaluating so much of Season 5 because it was so Doylistically jerked around, but I agree with you that the slight idiot ball quality of Londo just falling out of the narrative for fifteen years makes sense as the fossil of an older version of the story, which could also explain some of the emphasis on David in the flashforward when he is Kid Very Much Not Appearing in Babylon 5 itself.
The pain in the ass is that I know the information exists, I just don't know if it exists on the internet: in terms of interim stages, the intended shape of Season 5 before so much of it got accordioned into Season 4. I used to know someone who had the complete set of Babylon 5 script books, primarily because I spent most of a cast party reading about three-fifths of them. There was also a set of Q&As compiled from assorted dead internet sources which I don't know anyone who owns unless a library or something. None of them ever had e-books that I was aware of. Because Season 5 was such a vexed question, I suspect it's discussed in at least the latter volumes, but they are sure not on the Internet Archive.