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The Babylon 5 original show synopsis
Curious what the original B5 plan was before all the cast changes/brushes with cancellation, I went hunting for it and I found an absolutely fascinating rundown of the original 10 (not 5)-year synopsis from a message board, summarized from JMS's script books.
Because this is on a message board from 2008, I'm going to copy it below the cut to avoid having it vanish due to link decay. I found it here:
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/synopsis-of-jmss-synopsis-of-the-original-arc-for-b5-spoilers.53739/
The story is so big, that there's a lot left out here, and I'm sure some of the “missing” story elements were in fact included in JMS's huge pile of index cards. Most of the 7 page synopsis focuses as much on the big picture as it does on the individual characters. The only characters mentioned by name are: Sinclair, Garibaldi, Delenn, Londo, G'Kar, Kosh, and Catherine Sakai. (Notice a trend? Excepting Sakai, all of these are characters who appeared in “The Gathering”, and continued as main characters in the series. It's possible that this was written when JMS knew that the actors who played Takashima, Dr. Kyle, and Lyta were going to be unavailable, and he hadn't yet figured out how the replacement characters would fit into the story.) The characters of Santiago, Clark, and Sinclair/Delenn's son are mentioned, but no names are given for them.
One of the weirdest things is that the series seems to end on a cliffhanger, and the last page and a half of the synopsis details the storyline of a potential spinoff series, Babylon Prime, which resolves most of the major plot threads. The events in the outline seem to be in quasi-chronological order, though it's sometimes hard to tell, as there's a lot of jumping back and forth between the various threads. I've split up my synopsis of JMS's synopsis into four parts: Seasons 1 & 2, Seasons 3 & 4, Season 5, and Babylon Prime.
Here we go:
----------------------------------------------------------
SEASONS 1 & 2
Much of the stuff on the first two seasons matches what we actually saw on screen, including:
-Sinclair trying to figure out the hole in his mind from the Battle of the Line
-The “Babylon Squared” story
-Santiago assassination and Clark taking over
-Delenn undergoing transformation
-The Shadows slowly making their presence felt, and Londo allying with them, and Londo using them to gain influence with the Centauri
-Kosh revealing himself to all when he saves Sinclair's life at the end of Season 2
Main divergences from what we saw on screen:
-Sinclair stays on, and remains commander of the station throughout the series
-Unclear exactly when this is revealed, but the secret behind Sinclair & the Battle of the Line is not that he becomes Valen (Valen is never mentioned in this outline), but that he is the person who has been prophesied to save the Minbari from dying off. In order to fulfill the prophesy, Delenn must transform to become human and mate with Sinclair. Their son will be some kind of chosen one who will save the Minbari race from extinction(???). Some of the Minbari (warrior caste?) interpret prophesy differently, and think that Sinclair will actually lead the Minbari to doom.
-Not 100% certain on this, but it looks like the Centauri conquest of the Narn doesn't happen until early/mid-Season 3. It's also not completely clear whether there is even a Narn/Centauri war as such. The Shadows aid Londo's ascension by secretly staging a number of incidents, but does this involve a full blown Narn/Centauri war that lasts a season? Not clear. Rather, some time by mid-Season 3, the Shadows help the Centauri conquer the Narn homeworld and decapitate their empire, but I'm not sure if that's actually the culmination of a lengthy war.
SEASONS 3 & 4
-The Centauri conquer the Narn Empire with the help of the Shadows.
-After the Narn surrender, G'Kar briefly stays on B5 and tries to rally allies against the Centauri, but it doesn't work. So he returns to the Narn homeworld to join the resistance.
-Catherine Sakai is “mind-raped”, and all memory of her relationship with Sinclair is erased, and this crushes Sinclair. [This seems like some early iteration of the Anna Sheridan / Z'ha'dum story, but there's no explicit indication of how this happens to Sakai, or who's responsible.]
-Sinclair & Delenn become romantically involved, and Delenn is pregnant by the end of Season 4.
-Garibaldi returns to drinking, and resigns as chief of security. During Season 4, he's a mercenary operating out of B5, but there's no mention of the Psi Corps sleeper / William Edgars / Lise Hampton story.
-There is no mention of an overt war between the Shadows & Vorlons. But they are fighting each other by manipulating the younger races. There is no mention of an order vs. chaos ideological conflict between the two. Just that the Vorlons manipulated the younger races throughout history, and the Shadows rebel against that, and try to set themselves up as rulers of the galaxy.
SEASON 5
-The Minbari warrior caste overthrows the Grey Council, and orders the resumption of hostilities with Earth. They also want Sinclair and Delenn dead.
-The Centauri try to move in on B5's sector of space.
-Londo & the Centauri's longtime involvement with the Shadows is publicly revealed.
-The Shadows destroy a huge Vorlon ship (hundreds of miles long) which contains a large segment of their population.
-The series ends with the Minbari attacking B5 and destroying it. Sinclair & Delenn escape with their newborn baby. Everyone in the galaxy is after them for one reason or another....including Earth, which has been given info which makes them believe Sinclair is a traitor.
BABYLON PRIME
-Sinclair, Delenn, and their allies go back in time to steal Babylon 4, pulling it into the future in order to use it as a base to build a new alliance (army of light?). B4 is renamed Babylon Prime. B Prime can move through space like a starship, and they go off on a mission to clear their names and build the alliance to bring peace to the galaxy.
-The time traveling causes Sinclair, Delenn, and their baby to age rapidly. (I'll call the baby David, even though his name is never mentioned here.) David grows all the way to adulthood within a few years.
-Londo is Emperor, but controlled by a Keeper, as in the actual show.
-Londo & the Centauri capture Sinclair & Delenn, and are supposed to turn them over to the Shadows, but Londo rebels against the Keeper & the Shadows “at terrible personal cost” (doesn't say exactly what that cost is).
-David becomes a revered religious symbol.
-Conclusion of the story: B Prime and the Army of Light defeat the Shadows (but there's nothing about the Shadows leaving the galaxy). No mention of what happens to the Vorlons. Earth defeats the Minbari, and Sinclair's name is cleared. Delenn leaves Sinclair, in order to return to the Grey Council. David becomes the leader of a new interstellar alliance. Final scene is Sinclair, retired, alone on an otherwise uninhabited world....fishing.
----------------------------------------------------------
Plot points that are noticeably absent:
There is no mention of an Earth Civil War, or B5 seceding from Earth in Season 3 (though obviously, a lot of that storyline is transplanted into Babylon Prime). While Clark is said to be controlled by the Psi Corps, and Psi Corps is said to be a nefarious group at odds with Sinclair and B5, there's no mention of the Earth Alliance being transformed into some kind of Orwellian police state. There's no mention of the Shadows working with Psi Corps or anyone in EarthGov. There's no mention of any larger teep/normal conflict, beyond Psi Corps just wanting power for itself.
There's no mention of Sinclair going to Z'ha'dum (and in fact, no mention of Z'ha'dum), and dying there. (Though, as I speculated earlier, some of this storyline may have been there as part of the Sakai mindwipe story, but there are no details given.) There's no mention of Lorien or any other First Ones beyond the Shadows and Vorlons. There's no mention of Kosh mentoring Sinclair, or Kosh sacrificing his life. There's no mention of Marcus, or Morden, or Bester, or any other characters who I haven't already mentioned.
Still, just because something wasn't mentioned in this synopsis, doesn't mean it didn't exist in some form in JMS's lengthier treatment of the series that he kept to himself.
Brief tl;dr - the show was originally plotted for 10 seasons in the form of two 5-season series, Babylon 5 and Babylon Prime. Babylon 5 would have ended with the Shadow war still going on, B5 blowing up, and the cast relocating to B4 for a second 5-season arc that would have focused on an aged-up son of Delenn and Sinclair as a chosen one who would save the Minbari people from extinction and lead the galaxy into a new age of peace. 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.
My thoughts:
* Wow, I'm glad he ended up with the version he ended up with. I mean, obviously this has a lot of the same elements, but - as the message board commenters also mention - it does feel a lot more conventional, and it also sounds like the pace would have been absolutely glacial and it would have failed to include some of my favorite things from the show. That being said, this was obviously a pre-air draft and would likely have changed on the fly.
But it does make me think that at least some of what makes the show as fresh, original, and interesting as it is, is because JMS is unusually talented at adapting creatively on the fly to necessary changes - cast members leaving, network meddling - and the show was also shaped positively by that. (My guess is that the books/side canon are more typical of you get when JMS isn't being constantly forced to revise on the run by constant network/cast changes, and welp.) Not just negative changes, either - he seems to have been good at leaving enough flex room within the overall plan to roll with unexpected actor charisma or talent, such as Bester going from a one-off to a recurring character with a role to play in the ongoing plot.
* Interesting to see how some of these elements (Catherine Sakai having more-or-less the Anna Sheridan role, B5 blowing up and the cast relocating to B4) presumably were having their groundwork laid in season one, even after the show was cut down to five seasons. This was the biggest thing I was curious about - how did switching to Sheridan as the protagonist change things? It was already clear that a lot of Sinclair's storyline was repurposed for Sheridan (I really felt that in season five, and especially late season five, which feels a lot more Sinclair-y than Sheridan-y) and it sounds like Catherine in particular ended up getting cut completely because there was no room for her in the Sheridan version of the show, where she would have been a core part of Sinclair's life.
* Still massively impressed at how deftly they repurposed the B4 part of the storyline in "War Without End" considering how obviously it would have been used in a completely different context if Sinclair had remained the protagonist all the way through. I love what they did there, and how well they reused all the foreshadowing with different 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! Though it was possible that some kind of flash-forward in mid season three was always planned, and it just happened differently than it would have if the Sinclair-Sheridan switch hadn't happened.)
* Another thing I had vague suspicions about already is that the show putting so much weight on Londo's redemption arc and his friendship with G'Kar in season 5 was at least partly a side effect of having so much of season five compressed into season four, leaving them needing something to go there, and I think that even more so after reading this. 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. (White Collar, I'm looking at you.)
Anyway, I think that even more so after reading this, because it sounds like in the original plan, Londo didn't really have a redemption arc at all - he's working with the Shadows all through the original show's 5-year run, then it goes straight into the Emperor/Keeper part of his arc for Babylon Prime, with the Shadows still as the main antagonists, so I'm not sure there was meant to be a period when he was working with the good guys' side at all. It also sounds like G'Kar was largely offstage working with the Narn resistance for a lot of the original 5-year run in the planned 10-year arc (coming back into it in Babylon Prime, I guess?).
* One of the few things I actually like better in the original synopsis is Garibaldi breaking ties with B5 on his own and working as a mercenary for a while. I still wish they'd done something like that rather than having him spend S4 as a sleeper agent.
Thoughts?
Because this is on a message board from 2008, I'm going to copy it below the cut to avoid having it vanish due to link decay. I found it here:
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/synopsis-of-jmss-synopsis-of-the-original-arc-for-b5-spoilers.53739/
The whole thing copied here in case of link rot (it's long!)
The story is so big, that there's a lot left out here, and I'm sure some of the “missing” story elements were in fact included in JMS's huge pile of index cards. Most of the 7 page synopsis focuses as much on the big picture as it does on the individual characters. The only characters mentioned by name are: Sinclair, Garibaldi, Delenn, Londo, G'Kar, Kosh, and Catherine Sakai. (Notice a trend? Excepting Sakai, all of these are characters who appeared in “The Gathering”, and continued as main characters in the series. It's possible that this was written when JMS knew that the actors who played Takashima, Dr. Kyle, and Lyta were going to be unavailable, and he hadn't yet figured out how the replacement characters would fit into the story.) The characters of Santiago, Clark, and Sinclair/Delenn's son are mentioned, but no names are given for them.
One of the weirdest things is that the series seems to end on a cliffhanger, and the last page and a half of the synopsis details the storyline of a potential spinoff series, Babylon Prime, which resolves most of the major plot threads. The events in the outline seem to be in quasi-chronological order, though it's sometimes hard to tell, as there's a lot of jumping back and forth between the various threads. I've split up my synopsis of JMS's synopsis into four parts: Seasons 1 & 2, Seasons 3 & 4, Season 5, and Babylon Prime.
Here we go:
----------------------------------------------------------
SEASONS 1 & 2
Much of the stuff on the first two seasons matches what we actually saw on screen, including:
-Sinclair trying to figure out the hole in his mind from the Battle of the Line
-The “Babylon Squared” story
-Santiago assassination and Clark taking over
-Delenn undergoing transformation
-The Shadows slowly making their presence felt, and Londo allying with them, and Londo using them to gain influence with the Centauri
-Kosh revealing himself to all when he saves Sinclair's life at the end of Season 2
Main divergences from what we saw on screen:
-Sinclair stays on, and remains commander of the station throughout the series
-Unclear exactly when this is revealed, but the secret behind Sinclair & the Battle of the Line is not that he becomes Valen (Valen is never mentioned in this outline), but that he is the person who has been prophesied to save the Minbari from dying off. In order to fulfill the prophesy, Delenn must transform to become human and mate with Sinclair. Their son will be some kind of chosen one who will save the Minbari race from extinction(???). Some of the Minbari (warrior caste?) interpret prophesy differently, and think that Sinclair will actually lead the Minbari to doom.
-Not 100% certain on this, but it looks like the Centauri conquest of the Narn doesn't happen until early/mid-Season 3. It's also not completely clear whether there is even a Narn/Centauri war as such. The Shadows aid Londo's ascension by secretly staging a number of incidents, but does this involve a full blown Narn/Centauri war that lasts a season? Not clear. Rather, some time by mid-Season 3, the Shadows help the Centauri conquer the Narn homeworld and decapitate their empire, but I'm not sure if that's actually the culmination of a lengthy war.
SEASONS 3 & 4
-The Centauri conquer the Narn Empire with the help of the Shadows.
-After the Narn surrender, G'Kar briefly stays on B5 and tries to rally allies against the Centauri, but it doesn't work. So he returns to the Narn homeworld to join the resistance.
-Catherine Sakai is “mind-raped”, and all memory of her relationship with Sinclair is erased, and this crushes Sinclair. [This seems like some early iteration of the Anna Sheridan / Z'ha'dum story, but there's no explicit indication of how this happens to Sakai, or who's responsible.]
-Sinclair & Delenn become romantically involved, and Delenn is pregnant by the end of Season 4.
-Garibaldi returns to drinking, and resigns as chief of security. During Season 4, he's a mercenary operating out of B5, but there's no mention of the Psi Corps sleeper / William Edgars / Lise Hampton story.
-There is no mention of an overt war between the Shadows & Vorlons. But they are fighting each other by manipulating the younger races. There is no mention of an order vs. chaos ideological conflict between the two. Just that the Vorlons manipulated the younger races throughout history, and the Shadows rebel against that, and try to set themselves up as rulers of the galaxy.
SEASON 5
-The Minbari warrior caste overthrows the Grey Council, and orders the resumption of hostilities with Earth. They also want Sinclair and Delenn dead.
-The Centauri try to move in on B5's sector of space.
-Londo & the Centauri's longtime involvement with the Shadows is publicly revealed.
-The Shadows destroy a huge Vorlon ship (hundreds of miles long) which contains a large segment of their population.
-The series ends with the Minbari attacking B5 and destroying it. Sinclair & Delenn escape with their newborn baby. Everyone in the galaxy is after them for one reason or another....including Earth, which has been given info which makes them believe Sinclair is a traitor.
BABYLON PRIME
-Sinclair, Delenn, and their allies go back in time to steal Babylon 4, pulling it into the future in order to use it as a base to build a new alliance (army of light?). B4 is renamed Babylon Prime. B Prime can move through space like a starship, and they go off on a mission to clear their names and build the alliance to bring peace to the galaxy.
-The time traveling causes Sinclair, Delenn, and their baby to age rapidly. (I'll call the baby David, even though his name is never mentioned here.) David grows all the way to adulthood within a few years.
-Londo is Emperor, but controlled by a Keeper, as in the actual show.
-Londo & the Centauri capture Sinclair & Delenn, and are supposed to turn them over to the Shadows, but Londo rebels against the Keeper & the Shadows “at terrible personal cost” (doesn't say exactly what that cost is).
-David becomes a revered religious symbol.
-Conclusion of the story: B Prime and the Army of Light defeat the Shadows (but there's nothing about the Shadows leaving the galaxy). No mention of what happens to the Vorlons. Earth defeats the Minbari, and Sinclair's name is cleared. Delenn leaves Sinclair, in order to return to the Grey Council. David becomes the leader of a new interstellar alliance. Final scene is Sinclair, retired, alone on an otherwise uninhabited world....fishing.
----------------------------------------------------------
Plot points that are noticeably absent:
There is no mention of an Earth Civil War, or B5 seceding from Earth in Season 3 (though obviously, a lot of that storyline is transplanted into Babylon Prime). While Clark is said to be controlled by the Psi Corps, and Psi Corps is said to be a nefarious group at odds with Sinclair and B5, there's no mention of the Earth Alliance being transformed into some kind of Orwellian police state. There's no mention of the Shadows working with Psi Corps or anyone in EarthGov. There's no mention of any larger teep/normal conflict, beyond Psi Corps just wanting power for itself.
There's no mention of Sinclair going to Z'ha'dum (and in fact, no mention of Z'ha'dum), and dying there. (Though, as I speculated earlier, some of this storyline may have been there as part of the Sakai mindwipe story, but there are no details given.) There's no mention of Lorien or any other First Ones beyond the Shadows and Vorlons. There's no mention of Kosh mentoring Sinclair, or Kosh sacrificing his life. There's no mention of Marcus, or Morden, or Bester, or any other characters who I haven't already mentioned.
Still, just because something wasn't mentioned in this synopsis, doesn't mean it didn't exist in some form in JMS's lengthier treatment of the series that he kept to himself.
Brief tl;dr - the show was originally plotted for 10 seasons in the form of two 5-season series, Babylon 5 and Babylon Prime. Babylon 5 would have ended with the Shadow war still going on, B5 blowing up, and the cast relocating to B4 for a second 5-season arc that would have focused on an aged-up son of Delenn and Sinclair as a chosen one who would save the Minbari people from extinction and lead the galaxy into a new age of peace. 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.
My thoughts:
* Wow, I'm glad he ended up with the version he ended up with. I mean, obviously this has a lot of the same elements, but - as the message board commenters also mention - it does feel a lot more conventional, and it also sounds like the pace would have been absolutely glacial and it would have failed to include some of my favorite things from the show. That being said, this was obviously a pre-air draft and would likely have changed on the fly.
But it does make me think that at least some of what makes the show as fresh, original, and interesting as it is, is because JMS is unusually talented at adapting creatively on the fly to necessary changes - cast members leaving, network meddling - and the show was also shaped positively by that. (My guess is that the books/side canon are more typical of you get when JMS isn't being constantly forced to revise on the run by constant network/cast changes, and welp.) Not just negative changes, either - he seems to have been good at leaving enough flex room within the overall plan to roll with unexpected actor charisma or talent, such as Bester going from a one-off to a recurring character with a role to play in the ongoing plot.
* Interesting to see how some of these elements (Catherine Sakai having more-or-less the Anna Sheridan role, B5 blowing up and the cast relocating to B4) presumably were having their groundwork laid in season one, even after the show was cut down to five seasons. This was the biggest thing I was curious about - how did switching to Sheridan as the protagonist change things? It was already clear that a lot of Sinclair's storyline was repurposed for Sheridan (I really felt that in season five, and especially late season five, which feels a lot more Sinclair-y than Sheridan-y) and it sounds like Catherine in particular ended up getting cut completely because there was no room for her in the Sheridan version of the show, where she would have been a core part of Sinclair's life.
* Still massively impressed at how deftly they repurposed the B4 part of the storyline in "War Without End" considering how obviously it would have been used in a completely different context if Sinclair had remained the protagonist all the way through. I love what they did there, and how well they reused all the foreshadowing with different 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! Though it was possible that some kind of flash-forward in mid season three was always planned, and it just happened differently than it would have if the Sinclair-Sheridan switch hadn't happened.)
* Another thing I had vague suspicions about already is that the show putting so much weight on Londo's redemption arc and his friendship with G'Kar in season 5 was at least partly a side effect of having so much of season five compressed into season four, leaving them needing something to go there, and I think that even more so after reading this. 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. (White Collar, I'm looking at you.)
Anyway, I think that even more so after reading this, because it sounds like in the original plan, Londo didn't really have a redemption arc at all - he's working with the Shadows all through the original show's 5-year run, then it goes straight into the Emperor/Keeper part of his arc for Babylon Prime, with the Shadows still as the main antagonists, so I'm not sure there was meant to be a period when he was working with the good guys' side at all. It also sounds like G'Kar was largely offstage working with the Narn resistance for a lot of the original 5-year run in the planned 10-year arc (coming back into it in Babylon Prime, I guess?).
* One of the few things I actually like better in the original synopsis is Garibaldi breaking ties with B5 on his own and working as a mercenary for a while. I still wish they'd done something like that rather than having him spend S4 as a sleeper agent.
Thoughts?
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Yes I felt this way too, especially the first time I watched S5 long ago -- it felt like it rerouted back from where it was and I went bwuh??
Kind of curious if Garibaldi/Lise was a thing in the original plan now, kek.
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I'm glad it's not just me! I understand that it was part of the plan all along, but it feels like a derailment from the entire thrust of season five to have him end up like that.
Kind of curious if Garibaldi/Lise was a thing in the original plan now, kek.
I still can't get over how little chemistry they had! There were so many episodes to give her a personality, and it's not like the show is incapable of writing incredibly vivid, fun female characters. But no. :(
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But it does make me think that at least some of what makes the show as fresh, original, and interesting as it is, is because JMS is unusually talented at adapting creatively on the fly to necessary changes
Yeah, that's my takeaway from reading through that, too. Definitely agree that the tighter 5 year arc ended up being a lot more interesting than the original plan sounds like.
Catherine Sakai having more-or-less the Anna Sheridan role,
Nod. When I was first watching, I was just confused by why the stuff with Catherine Sakai never seemed to go anywhere (I had liked her more than Sinclair), but once I rewatched the show, I could see quite clearly it was planting to seeds to use her in the Anna Sheridan role.
(I really felt that in season five, and especially late season five, which feels a lot more Sinclair-y than Sheridan-y)
Might explain why I like s5!Sheridan quite a bit less...
And really interesting thoughts about Londo's redemption arc and how it works/doesn't work with the ending of the show. Wild that G'Kar doesn't seem to have been a central figure in the original plan (though it could of course be another thing like Bester, where the actor did such an amazing job, his role was expanded to take advantage).
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I had to save it for posterity. :D And don't miss
When I was first watching, I was just confused by why the stuff with Catherine Sakai never seemed to go anywhere (I had liked her more than Sinclair), but once I rewatched the show, I could see quite clearly it was planting to seeds to use her in the Anna Sheridan role.
Yeah ... I think they did an incredible job of working around the protagonist switch and making it look like the plan all along, but some things inevitably had to get dropped along the way, and she was one of them. It's too bad it wasn't possible (didn't work out? didn't occur to anyone?) to bring her back just for one episode later on to provide some closure, the way they did with Sinclair.
Might explain why I like s5!Sheridan quite a bit less...
He's so different! Rewatching early season two episodes, it's so interesting how he seems to have aged much more than just a couple of years - it's that feeling when you rewatch the first season of a show that went on for 10+ season and you're like, "They're just BABIES!" ... except this happened to him in 2-3 years. xD The writing for him is really different in season five, and some of it is just Sheridan growing into his president role, but I also wonder if it's not that some of it is being repurposed from developments that were intended for Sinclair.
And really interesting thoughts about Londo's redemption arc and how it works/doesn't work with the ending of the show.
It is 100% pure speculation! It just feels like one of the few times when I can really feel the author's hand forcing the show to go a particular way is in those episodes ... it's like everyone in the cast was great at outside-the-box thinking to solve problems, right up until they stopped, in order for Londo to get the canonical ending we already saw. It felt like the show suddenly shifted from character-driven plot into something almost like allegory at that point - Londo had earned a particular ending, so he had to get that ending, even if it no longer quite made sense in light of the direction of the show overall.
Wild that G'Kar doesn't seem to have been a central figure in the original plan (though it could of course be another thing like Bester, where the actor did such an amazing job, his role was expanded to take advantage).
I know! I wonder that too. Although see Sovay's link to the original character notes ... it sounds like G'Kar's general arc was always there, and I wonder if it's just that he was a bit more tangential to the overall mytharc than he became. But yeah, I do think that Londo and G'Kar both developed somewhat beyond what was planned, together and separately, because the actors were so charming and had such good chemistry.
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HARD SAME. I don't know that I had ever seen it all in one place, but I had encountered bits and pieces of the ten-year concept over the years and they never sounded anywhere near as interesting as the show that wound up on the screen. The pre-production five-year draft is a lot closer to extant Babylon 5, but even almost all of its improvisations were obviously improvements, too. Aside from the fourth-year crunch and losing Claudia Christian, my major point of AU curiosity is the character of Talia Winters: I just also like Lyta immensely, so my ideal version of AU B5 apparently just has a lot of telepaths running around.
[edit] Thanks to the Internet Archive: in 1999, JMS released his jotted-down original mid-'80's notes for what he then called The Babylon Project. What fascinates me about this synopsis in context is that it really makes the ten-year two-series plan look like a digression/expansion that was thankfully reined in. Its choice of core characters also maps much more closely to the finished show. (And if this text really represents his very first spitballing on the subject, then it seems relevant that the very first characters he scribbled down were preliminary sketches of Londo and G'Kar.)
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Oh, this is a DELIGHTFUL find; thank you so much for digging that up! There was a reference to this on the message board threads I was reading above, but all the links were to deceased forums that didn't turn up on the wayback machine. So this is fantastic; I really wanted to read it!
Its choice of core characters also maps much more closely to the finished show. (And if this text really represents his very first spitballing on the subject, then it seems relevant that the very first characters he scribbled down were preliminary sketches of Londo and G'Kar.)
Unsurprisingly, I noticed that immediately, even before reading your ETA! (I was reading this on my phone earlier, while out.)
The initial descriptions are really fascinating:
"Ambassadors from various worlds .... one drinker, decadent world in decline, wants old world back in full glory; other warrior/priest, oppressed people looking to strike back (victims enslaved by prior?); spiritual/priest character (but don't repeat other character in this, or becomes redundant, so priest character becomes warrior, warrior becomes priest, characters change and grow)"
I think it's really interesting how he pinpoints Londo's drinking as the core of how he originally conceived the character - I mean, the rest of it's there too, but basically Londo as a washed-up alcoholic is apparently the basis of him. It's also interesting that he seems to have originally seen G'Kar and Delenn as clearly signposted foils more so than G'Kar and Londo -- the warrior who becomes a priest, and the priest who becomes a warrior. I wouldn't actually have described Delenn that way in the final version (she's clearly a warrior from the beginning, however much of a mystic she still is) but it's true that she embraces her warrior side as the show goes along, and it is interesting to look at that as the character seed, an inverse of G'Kar so that the two of them are on inverted journeys towards who they're meant to be.
Also really interesting that the ambassadors are mentioned first and are definitely the crux of the show for him, at least initially, with the rest of the cast being fleshed out around that.
Thank you so much for finding this!
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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.
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Yeah, in some sense it's an act of stunning, impressive confidence to have aimed for, and got, five seasons! I recall the 80s and 90s TV scene was littered with the remains of short-lived sci-fi shows. And especially for something with the budget of a full on space opera, even by early 90s CGI TV standards! There were many cheaper shows that fell much harder. Pinning his hopes on 10 seasons would have been doomed, probably. (It would have had to run into the early 2000s! And no one could know how wildly the TV landscape would have shifted by then, but it was a whole different world in almost every way.)
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?
Do we know anything about what might have been in that unfilmed episode, or is it forever a mystery?
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
Agreed! I feel like in general, some aspects of the original story treatment feel more trite and ordinary than what the show ended up with - which is only what you'd expect for a writer still refining the storyline and working out his own ideas. But yes, the Anna Sheridan plot feels much more organic and believable as a human storyline. (My one complaint is that we never really see Sheridan reacting to her second death, but there was an awful lot going on during that time, and it might be another casualty of the compressed season four timeline.)
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.
Yes! I have tried to think of anything similar. The closest I can think of are shows that run in two simultaneous timelines, where one is the "now" timeline and the other depicts the unfolding mystery of how things got to "now." (Yellowjackets, a show I haven't seen, is the main one that comes to mind along those lines, but I know there are others and I can probably come up with some if I think for a bit.) However, those are generally different in that a) the dual time periods are telegraphed from early in the show, and we continue to revisit both of them, and b) I think those are always in the general realm of historical/contemporary or perhaps occasionally horror/fantasy.
I genuinely can't think of another example of this happening in the middle of another sci-fi canon, at least a canon that wasn't explicitly and only about time travel and messing around with time paradoxes*, not in the entire realm of experimental prestige TV since the show aired. Which is extraordinary.
*The movie Tenet, which I loved, sort of does this, in the sense that the movie is structured like a palindrome, and the first half of the movie involves various not-fully-explained encounters with time travelers, until in the middle of the movie the main characters' personal time flow reverses and they start to experience the other half of the plot, going backwards, and you get the rest of the context for what you've already seen. And other time travel shows play with timelines in various ways. But like every other example I can think of, it's baked into the structure of the plot, not something that comes in halfway through a 5-season show to blow everyone's mind.
(Further commentary in a new comment because I don't want to misclick and lose this one.)
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Do we know anything about what might have been in that unfilmed episode, or is it forever a mystery?
The author released it on the internet herself in 2000. I don't believe her original site is still intact, but: Fiona Avery, "Value Judgements."
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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
It just feels like it to me! I absolutely *love* the emphasis on Londo forming close friendships in season 5, and it would not surprise me at all to find out that this only had time to unfold to the extent that it does because of the expanded season 5 timeline - in fact, if the Earth civil war wrapped up in mid season 5 and then we did a speedrun through the forming of the Alliance to the fall of Centauri Prime, I can't see how it could have been any other way. But like I said in another comment, Londo being held to his original fate - a fate that made perfect sense for him in season three, and feels unbearably unfair and cruel for his season five self and everyone close to him - is one of the few places in the series where I can really feel the author's thumb pressing on the narrative scales to make the plot go in a certain direction. My husband very nearly stopped watching at that point and I don't really blame him, not because he's that attached to Londo (that'd be me, ha) but because up until that point, the characters had show themselves as clever, twisty problem solvers who can think their way out of almost anything, and then suddenly they stop doing that for no particular reason except "the narrative has to go this way." I don't blame him for losing faith at that point! Taken individually, "The Fall of Centauri Prime" is a brilliant episode; it has some of my very favorite Londo scenes, and Londo & G'Kar scenes. But in the entire context of the show, it is not invalid to ask, what just happened here.
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.
Also something I wondered about! As well as the Drakh being such nonentities, as it turned out, in terms of the overall plot. Knowing that JMS always conceived the show as a sprawling MCU-style universe, even in the early treatments, does not quite excuse not actually hitting all the key beats of the story in the primary allotment of main storyline. (I mean, I admire what he was trying to do, but it was such an incredibly challenging medium to do it in! Even the MCU, with far more clout than B5 had, actually hit a wall on the TV end of its production, constantly running into cancellations and dead ends.)
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.
Ahhhhhh, lucky you! <3 I have thought about trying to acquire some of the script books via Ebay or other sources. Back when I was into Highlander, in the late 2000s/early 2010s, I had pretty good luck getting my hands on some of the show's more esoteric and delightful out-of-print extracanonical sources, including a published book of fanfic written by the show's cast and some of the script writers, and an unauthorized sequel movie filmed by several of the actors at one actor's house.
(Highlander really had the best extras of any show I have seen to date. The show had an f/x budget consisting of 2 shoestrings and a shoebox, and a cast and crew who were about as invested as anyone I've ever seen in anything, including the script editors/writers of one run of episodes who wrote smutty fanfic of the show's currently featured tragic couple set in between the scripts (appearing in the official fanfic book). The official DVD release also had just about every cut scene, blooper, or alternate take filmed for the show, which in some cases amounted to almost as much runtime as the episodes on the disk. There were some disks with dozens of alternate takes of the same scene! I've never seen anything like it. In fact, the Highlander extras were how I learned to recognize when older TV shows are zooming/lightening a badly framed, too dark, or out of focus take to make it match the surrounding footage, which - now that I know what it looks like - I also noticed quite a bit in, for example, MASH. What I wouldn't give to have something similar to those Highlander extras for B5.)
Anyway, though, I bet the script books are still out there and possible to get hold of, hopefully not for exorbitant prices, but I suspect I'll be giving it a shot.
I may already have looked up B5 action figures on Ebay. They exist.no subject
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I also think they should have kept Ivonova to take over B5 after Sheridan left.
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Oh, no! That would have made the show a lot less than it ended up being.
s5 felt weird to me, I think because they'd pushed a lot of material into s4 when they weren't sure of a s5 and then didn't quite have s5 planned to the same degree as before. I may be misremembering how this happened.
I'm really glad JMS didn't get his original decade-long plan! I agree that it would have been "glacial," and s1 felt so slow I almost stopped watching. We only watched because people told us we absolutely had to watch (and they were right, but we couldn't see it until the last couple of episodes of s1).
I am so glad we didn't get Delenn and Sheridan's son with accelerated aging as a major character. Back when the original V miniseries used the alien-human hybrid with accelerated aging trope, I thought it was really cool! I was also a teenager, and I have become very tired of it since. It makes no sense: why would a hybrid age faster than either of its parent races?
B5 had so many wonderful surprises that it makes sense that JMS himself was surprised and kept having to fix things, but I'm even more impressed with his creativity knowing how much he had to change on the fly.