I need to rewatch and actually watch the last season!
I support watching Season 5! It has some of the show's best acting in it and the visible traces of what is now an even weirder evolutionary record than had originally been apparent! What was understood at the time, and may still be the dominant narrative, because it's not even totally untrue, was that the cancellation of the show had forced JMS to cram as much of Season 5 as possible into Season 4, as a result of which he found himself with the equivalent air time to fill when the show was de-cancelled, thus leaving the impression that the original plan for Seasons 4 and 5 had been more or less what we got, only more evenly distributed—it is true that the second half of Season 4 is absolutely balls to the wall and the first half of Season 5 is kind of desultory—and presumably with some variance in B- or C-plots allowing for differences in pacing and the cast changes between the two seasons. The spinoff series was a known quantity while the last season of Babylon 5 was airing, but not how entangled it was with the plotting of said season and the wheeling and dealing of the renewal with TNT. I do not recall ever hearing anything about the proposed time jump etc. in the '90's. JMS was fairly open on message boards about subplots that never panned out, the rejiggering of storylines for a changing cast, the times his own characters surprised him with what they would or would not organically do, but the majority of the information in this post is new to me and it's not like I wasn't paying attention the first time around. It's nuts.
no subject
I support watching Season 5! It has some of the show's best acting in it and the visible traces of what is now an even weirder evolutionary record than had originally been apparent! What was understood at the time, and may still be the dominant narrative, because it's not even totally untrue, was that the cancellation of the show had forced JMS to cram as much of Season 5 as possible into Season 4, as a result of which he found himself with the equivalent air time to fill when the show was de-cancelled, thus leaving the impression that the original plan for Seasons 4 and 5 had been more or less what we got, only more evenly distributed—it is true that the second half of Season 4 is absolutely balls to the wall and the first half of Season 5 is kind of desultory—and presumably with some variance in B- or C-plots allowing for differences in pacing and the cast changes between the two seasons. The spinoff series was a known quantity while the last season of Babylon 5 was airing, but not how entangled it was with the plotting of said season and the wheeling and dealing of the renewal with TNT. I do not recall ever hearing anything about the proposed time jump etc. in the '90's. JMS was fairly open on message boards about subplots that never panned out, the rejiggering of storylines for a changing cast, the times his own characters surprised him with what they would or would not organically do, but the majority of the information in this post is new to me and it's not like I wasn't paying attention the first time around. It's nuts.