This is fascinating! We had friends who watched the whole thing in first broadcast, and then revisited in the early 00s, which got us to rent the DVDs from Netflix ca 2004-5. We stalled out in terms of watching S5 because everything we'd heard/read about Claudia Christian's departure (including from a friend who'd been on the forums in the 90s) sounded like some serious bullshit (I think what I'd heard boiled down to: Christian's agent asked for pay equity. Some combination of the network and JMS refused. Agent gave ultimatum, some deadline or other, the network/JMS missed the deadline? Christian wasn't even involved in this and said at some point that she didn't know it was happening.)
I will, however, die mad about everything I heard about the departure of Andrea Thompson/Talia Winters. The story I saw was that JMS hated Thompson and decided to pull the Lesbian Trifecta all in one person in order to get rid of her (beating out Whedon's Lesbian Trifecta, spread over 2 people). Someone said that JMS also either had joked or actually had a container on his desk that was supposed to be Talia's brain in a jar, and JMS was also apparently just nasty about the actress.
no subject
I will, however, die mad about everything I heard about the departure of Andrea Thompson/Talia Winters. The story I saw was that JMS hated Thompson and decided to pull the Lesbian Trifecta all in one person in order to get rid of her (beating out Whedon's Lesbian Trifecta, spread over 2 people). Someone said that JMS also either had joked or actually had a container on his desk that was supposed to be Talia's brain in a jar, and JMS was also apparently just nasty about the actress.