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Even more of the original Babylon 5 plan
Okay, I found someone on Reddit who went through all the script books and typed up a summary of ALL the different Babylon 5 plans/plot/changes, and ... I can't believe I'm saying this, but if this is accurate, it sounds like the almost-cancellation/having to compress most of the plot into season 4 actually may have been an improvement over the original.
(It also sounds like JMS was constantly changing major details / long-term plans on the fly throughout all the seasons, which makes the cohesion of the final version even more impressive, even without taking into account all of the network meddling and cast changes! One reason why I've been going down a rabbit hole on this is because I really do think this is one of the most impressive creative feats I've ever seen pulled off, I want to understand it from a creative perspective myself, and the more I find out about it, the more impressed I am.)
Here is where I found it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/babylon5/comments/8hccek/crusade_questoin_what_was_the_darn_5_year_plan/
Technically the person is asking about the plan for Crusade, but the respondent typed up a long summary of ALL the changes leading up to it, and it's really fascinating!
Once again I am copying this under a detail cut in case of linkrot.
[In response to a question in which someone asked what the 5-year plan for the Crusade spinoff was]
Very complicated since the plan changed quite a bit in the details and you have to go back to B5 evolution to understand it all.
Will try to summarize quickly the plan evolution (french guy typing this quickly do forgive the typos here and there)
B5 Pilot and season 1 changed a bit due to actor replacement but are mostly the original plan.
B5 Season 2 : The minbari issue was originally that they were becoming infertile, Sinclair was the chosen one and was recognised by the triluminari thing. Delenn (who was supposed to have been a guy) in season 1 change race & gender to have a child with him that will be the minbari saviour.
Sakai has a terrible accident (mind wipe), Delenn confort Sinclair ans start a relationship with him.
The Sheridan replacement of Sinclair switched things around a bit but still mostly the same for S2.
Season 3 : Narm hold for much longer and fall only a third of the way in.
The relationsip part of the original season 3 plan is the same (Sinclair & Delenn start their relationship, Kosh gets closer to Sinclair). But galatic history wise, it's much slower than in the final version. The shadow stay hidden and continue to destabilize thing here and there, G'Kar become a refugee on B5 by mid season 3 after Narm fall.
Season 4 :
B5 is still NOT independent from Earth. Garibaldi fall back into his alcool addiction (something that will be used for S5 instead), he quits and become a mercenary on B5.
Mid season 4, the Shadow/Vorlon-Army of light war begins.
Same as in final version, Sinclair & cie have doubts about the vorlon motives, Delenn is pregnant by S4’s ending.
Season 5 :
Garibaldi is back and rejoin the staff. The cast and Gkar only discover now that Londo had shadow help.
Londo has no choice but to leave B5. He has regrets and want to help from home. He eventually become emperor and want to turn of the shadows but they put a keeper on him to force him to keep helping (pretty similar to final version).
Due to shadow influence, the military cast take over on Minbar and want to declare war on earth again.
On earth, Clark takes over, the B5 independence thing finally happens.
The shadows win the war and the vorlon are pretty much wiped out.
The minbari warrior decide to destroy B5 before attacking earth so they attack. That is the scene that was flashforwarded in season 1’s Babylon squared.
Sinclair, Delenn & the surviving cast escape right before B5 is destroyed (vision in signs and portants season 1).
End of Season 5
Start of second show, second first year plan : Babylon Prime Season 1 :
Main cast is the same minus Londo (recurring from Centori Prime), Gkar recurring leading the resistance and Zathras is in the main cast.
Sinclair & the B5 cast are refugee on Epsilon 3, protected by Draal and the great machine.
The whole galaxy is fucked. The surviving minbari non warrior grey council join them and still believe the chosen one, Sinclair, is the one that can save them all.
Since B5 is gone, they decide to go into the past to steal B4 and use it instead.
It’s basically war without end but they truly intend to use B4 in the present and not the past.
Their time stabilizer mess up, Sinclair & his son grow older due to that, the son become a fully grown adult in the mess but with the mind of a child.
They come back not at the time they left but 10-15 years into the future.
B4 is renamed Babylon Prime and since it has reactors, it can move around the galaxy.
After Season 1 (plan is not detailed there)
Sinclair forms the Interstellar Alliance to fight the shadows and free earth/minbar/narm. The first obvious allies are Gkar resistance.
Emperor Londo is a recurring character that does his best to secretly help them by drinking his keeper to sleep here and there.
Sinclair’s son become a minbari religious icon.
Eventually, they slowly take earth back from Clark and free Minbar and Narm.
It all end on centauri prime, with Sinclair and Delenn captured by the shadows & centauri allies.
Londo get drunk, manage to free them. Gkar is there and at this point has known about the keeper for a while. Londo ask for his help to kill him in order that he doesn’t warn the shadows.
They die together as friends as in the final show.
Vir becomes emperor. With the Interstellar Alliance help, they free Centauri prime and defeat the shadows. Delenn become leader of Minbar, Sinclair retire to a planet to spend his days fishing and their son become the new IA President.
The road is vastly different, but the end in 2281 is basically the same thing.
Since hoping for 10 seasons is a bit much, by mid season 2, JMS compress the plot and a good part of the second shows is compressed into B5 five year arc.
Plan 2 :
Season 3 B5 : Similar to what we had in the final version until the ending.
Sheridan goes to Z'ha'dum, blow them up with the white star.
The shadows attack B5 and destroys it.
The surviving cast members have to escape into the time rift opened in “War without end”.
They find themselves 20 years into the future, end of season 3.
No detail for season 4 & 5 of this second plan except that Sheridan comes back to life and rejoin the cast to start the fight again 20 years in the future.
It would have probably been similar to the Babylon Prime idea where they spend the two seasons freeing earth, fighting the shadows until season 5 would have ended on centauri prime with Londo (the time jump match for that).
Plan 3 :
JMS think it might be better to stay one more year in the present before having the time jump in season 4.
Production wise, B5 is cancelled, season 4 will be the last, so the plan will change again.
Plan 4:
The season 4 we got :
No more time jump, tie up as much as possible in one finale season.
Since the shadows are defeated there in season 4, it’s hard to explain how Centauri Prime is still under their influence in the future (flash forward seen in WWE). So comes the Drakhs as shadows of the shadows to explain that issue away.
By the end of S4, B5 is finally renewed by TNT for a S5 and a second 5 years show :
Plan 5 :
Since most of the story has been told in a compressed way; S5 is to be the bridge between B5 and the second show.
The second show will now be about the rangers travelling space to stabilize and expand the interstellar alliance.
Season 5 :
Elric & the technomages return to B5 & the known galaxy after the shadow war. He becomes a guide to ISA president Sheridan. Ivanova is B5 Captain and Franklin is second in command.
The first half is the season is mostly politics with Sheridan stabilizing the alliance and the internal conflict and trying to expand it.
Second half starts with Sheridan/Delann son arriving from the future.
The Drakhs starts messing with the alliance from Centauri Prime (similar to final version).
Ivanova is in a relationship with Byron the telepath but it doesn’t end well.
In the final episode, Londo is put under a keeper by the Drakhs.
Second show : Babylon 5 : Rangers
Main cast: Sheridan/Delenn/Gkar/Franklin/Zathras
Recurring ranger & technomage cast.
Show still centered on B5 (mostly beginning and ending of episodes), but we follow rangers and technomages going around the galaxy helping the IA members (against the drakhs and others threats).
TNT doesn’t like the idea want “a goal” for the show in the spin off, something more than just helping the IA.
Plan 6 :
Second show is called : The Babylon project : crusade
Earth will be attacked by the Drakhs with the virus, that will give the rangers a goal in the first season and make TNT happy.
The rangers travel the galaxy in fleets of White Stars to search for an antidote. They will travel mostly on former now abandoned lost planets to find advanced tech.
Main cast is Sheridan, Delenn, Marcus, G’kar, Zathras, a technomage, and Shereena, “a last survivor of somewhere (ring a bell? )
Going over post limit, go to next post ^
TNT doesn’t want any B5 cast in the second show.
Plan 7 :
Sheridan & Delenn are demoted to recurring.
Main cast is now :
Matthiew Singleton : Ranger captain of the lost star fleet.
Marcus Cole (all of this is negotiated while season 4 is being aired and JMS toy with not killing him).
A techno mage. Dureena : last survivor of a race
Zathras Since he knows the great machine, he is the only being in the galaxy that can understand the first one techs.
Dr Gwen Tracy
Varenni : Minbari warrior assigned by Delenn to the expedition.
Max Eilerson :IPX archeologist, only care about profit.
The show would have been about the hero having to navigate first one cities that were booby-trapped and face old creatures left there.
Drakhs would try to stop them here and there.
The white star fleet amiral ship is called the Excalibur.
In the end, the TNT deal for season 5 + spin off is signed at the last minute. (A funny story is that Peter Jurasik got his and Andreas contracts, went to Andreas in the middle of the night, told him “Sign it, it’s fair to us”. He did and went back to sleep.
JMS start to write season 5 in detail but the Claudia Christian mess happens (who knows why exactly). On top of that, his hotel throw away his season 5 episodes synopsis, he starts season 5 over.
Plan 8 :
Since TNT agree to a second show, he remove most of the politic / alliance building with the rangers from season 5.
With all the mess happening, JMS expend on the only arc from season 5 he can still write without Ivanova and he remember clearly, the telepath arc.
He admit he messed up that if I remember correctly.
He think about doing a full B5 spin off with telepaths having a hive/shared mind like Byron’s group (seeds of Sense8 maybe ? ) .
Garibaldi, who was to be on mars for most of season 5 (trying to stop Edgar’s many shadow projects) is brought back early to B5 since Ivanova is gone.
A whole sub arc with Sheridan son coming from the future is removed.
David was to have come and try to kill / stop Sheridan. He eventually fail and goes back into the rift and it’s never explained why. (My theory is that he had a keeper, I mean, the drakhs did put one on him according to the fast forward from WWE).
After B5 ends, a telepath war movie is planned between B5 & Crusade.
3 tie in novels are released (two before, one after, the telepath trilogy) but the movie itself is never made.
Lennier and Lyta die in the movie, Bester escape as a war crimimal. there is a long summary of what happened in detail, but my post is way too long already (have been typing for like an hour). If someone is interested, I’ll go into details.
After the cancellation, two other movies idea are brought up to replace it, also with synopsis in the books but they were cancelled too.
We finally arrive at crusade.
TNT refuse to have rangers in the show and that the ship be docked at B5.
So plan 9 :
It becomes a ship leased to the EA.
Without the rangers, JMS can’t show them going though the galaxy trying to build up the alliance, which was to have been the main center of the show after the plague thing was done.
In the mean time, a TNT exec meet Tracy Scoggins randomly and like her, so now they want her in crusade and the ship can go the B5 once in a while.
From there, it’s the disaster that is well known.
All scripts are rewritten by TNT, the order of episode is being moved around, it no longer makes any sense, they demand to have a sexual explorer on board the ship, more fights, more guns, they want to see Gideon pilot the ship from a Joystick …
Then it’s cancelled since the JMS-TNT relation are going downhill fast.
How it should have continued:
The apocalypse box manipulates Gideon over the course of the show, giving him what he wants when it’s in his interest.
They found a telepath recluse on a planet, it’s Bester.
The episode is full of flashback from Bester’s trial and escape after the telepath war. Bester actually help the heroes since he want to save the telepath on earth.
At the end, it’s discovered that Bester still has part of a former psy corp fleet augmented with shadowtech (during the clark administration) and that they are preparing their return eventually.
In the same episode, hunters are chasing our heroes and bester and it’s discovered at the end that it’s garibaldi’s men.
Dureena was to have been augmented eventually by shadowtech like the technomages (like Galen).
They discover Earth is still playing around with shadowtech. Earth call the ISA hypocrits since they are ally with technomages like Galen who use shadowtech.
Since Gideon and his crew want to go public with that, earthgov wants him killed, he his shot as he is about to reveal everything at the end of s01.
Season 2 :
The apocalypse box save Gideon, somehow.
Telepath arc : the senate wants to recreate a psy corps (linked to bester arc from season 1)
Drakhs/technomage arc : The Drakhs know how to use shadowtech but not how to create it, they try to bring the technomages to their side.
Mid season 2, the cure is found, they give it to earth then they are framed as traitors somehow by people in the government (because they know too much about shadowtech).
In season 3, Excalibur is on the run and wanted, they have to prove their innocence and stop the shadowtech project on earth (which is helped secretly by the drakhs).
Somehow the apocalypse box would have been a powerful telepath locked in.
Nothing is said after that.
2 years later, TNT lose the B5/crusade rights and scifi want to relaunch the show.
JMS thinks it’s too late for crusade so goes back to the original plan, a show about the rangers helping build up the ISA.
“The Hand”, from the pilot would have been just a group trying to take political powers. The whole thing about their being more powerful than the shadow was a lie.
They would have been dealt with by season 2. Afterward, they would have discovered a conspiracy against them in the minbar government and part of the rangers and would have to go against them.
Pretty similar to what crusade intended except with minbar instead of earth.
Also pretty similar to what the original Babylon Prime plan was, branded as outlaw, on the run and trying to save the galaxy. It seems like JMS really wanted that idea somewhere.
ANother great part of the plan of the second show was always "travel". From Babylon Prime to Crusade to Rangers, it was always about seeing more from the galaxy and not stay simply of B5. Some plans were about travelling in B4, some in a White Star fleet, the Excalibur or a ranger vessel, but it was always travelling around. They had started doing a bit of that in season 5 of B5.
In any case, what was always the true ending of the saga in every single plan, the fall of the drakhs/shadows, the liberation of Centauri Prime and Londo/Gkar’s death wouldn’t have been in crusade/rangers, it was put in the “legion of fire” novel trilogy.
[commenter]
BrotherChe
7y ago
Thank for this amazing detail. Had never heard most of this. Is it covered somewhere n book, or did you collect it from forums, etc?
Failing a more official and even more complete entry, I think this should be linked to in the sidebar. It's a great post!
[OP]
flobo09
•
7y ago
Well, a few years back, i found the whole collection of B5 scripts books in a UK library for sale and i took them.
They go in amazing details about the original plans, season by season and episode by episode. From cut scene to changed ideas, episode by episode.
While i was reading them all, i wrote a huge (in french) summary of the main changes to the plan/plotline over time.
Of course, the book goes into much more details than my summary.
What i posted yesterday was a very quick and dirty english translated summary of that summary i still have on my PC.
I could translate the whole thing, i guess, if people are interested in a more detailed version. (I only posted about the main changes in the summary, but even on what i call plan 1, there were subplan : 1a with Takashima staying, being the mole and shooting garibaldi in the finale, 1b with her and Kyle replaced and the way it impacted the plotline,...)
---
So, assuming all of this is accurate, apparently what was GOING to happen pre-cancellation is that there would have been a timeskip either at the end of season 3 or at the end of season 4 into the 20-years-from-now future we saw in "War Without End", a future in which the Shadows won the war, Londo and the Centauri were under the control of the Shadows (the Drakh were shoehorned into season 4 after the new plan had the Shadows being defeated in early season 4 so some other entity had to be inserted to explain the "War Without End" flash-forward), and this is where the rest of the show would have taken place. Either the final season/final two seasons would have taken place in the future, involved most of the characters on the run from the Shadows, trying to defeat them, and Londo enslaved on Centauri Prime.
So I think I was right in my original guess that Londo's redemption arc (as such) wasn't part of JMS's original plan for quite a while; it looks like in the various iterations of the show prior to the S4 cancellation/plot reworking - so all the way up through season three, even after the show was compressed from 10 seasons to 5 - Londo flees B5 after his connection to the Shadows is revealed and becomes Keeper-ified at some point after that, then slowly comes around and tries to help them while being Drakh-controlled on Centauri Prime. I mean, it's clear that Londo's better nature winning out eventually was the plan all along, but Londo spending a season or so rebuilding his relationships with everyone on B5 post-Shadow-War seems to have been a very late-in-production innovation (and I'm not gonna lie, I'm sure I would have enjoyed the other version, but I'm not sure it would have hit my buttons nearly as satisfyingly as the final version did ...). Apparently the answer to the question of "Why did no one notice for 15 years that Londo was being meatpuppeted by an alien brain parasite?" really is because in most versions prior to the final one, he'd cut ties with B5 by the time that happened.
Other things that network meddling and/or actor departures apparently saved us from include an Ivanova/Byron romance (God help us; derailed by Claudia Christian leaving the show), Garibaldi being on Mars for most of season 5 (he was brought back because they'd lost Claudia), and a major season 5 plot thread involving a time-traveling David Sheridan from the future (changed for reasons not really explained, possibly because it didn't tie very well into the various versions of a spinoff series that season 5 was now essentially setup for).
I hate to say it but the telepaths and Byron actually sounds ... better than a lot of what we almost had? Including the original plan, maybe, because I actually kind of hate the flash-forward idea and it sounds like JMS was wedded to it in multiple versions of the plan for season 4/5 until the near-cancellation and the need to make season 5 a bridge to a new set of spinoffs/movies derailed it completely.
(It does sound like the plan for most of the pre-cancellation versions was to make the liberation of Centauri Prime, and Londo and G'Kar's deaths, a big part of the show's climax, and that actually feels like it fits better with the overall arc of the show and really did get derailed completely by the near-cancellation; a lot of what's in the spinoff book trilogy was going to be in the show, which I do regret to an extent because Vir loses out on getting the Big Damn Hero hero role that he presumably would've had in that. At the same time, the show basically writing them as a palindrome - we see their ending in the middle; then it's just getting there - is one of the most original things I've ever seen on TV, and I'm not sure that seeing a bunch of the events that unfolded leading up to it would actually have improved it a whole lot. Meanwhile, I would genuinely have hated to lose so much of the character interaction we got in season five. I can only assume I would have loved the unfilmed version too, but reading this is not giving me a huge feeling of "oh, what we could have had!" ... in a lot of parts it's more like "Wow, bullet dodged.")
ETA: The OTHER impression I'm getting reading this is that JMS was also insanely prolific and would hit the ground running every time, so basically the network would give him a change, an actor would fall off a ladder, and/or he'd have a daydream in the bathtub and 2 days of coffee-fueled frantic script revisions later he would have a whole new plan for the next two seasons plus 3 hypothetical spinoff movies, and this just KEPT HAPPENING on a constantly repeating basis for the entire run of the show and then some.
(It also sounds like JMS was constantly changing major details / long-term plans on the fly throughout all the seasons, which makes the cohesion of the final version even more impressive, even without taking into account all of the network meddling and cast changes! One reason why I've been going down a rabbit hole on this is because I really do think this is one of the most impressive creative feats I've ever seen pulled off, I want to understand it from a creative perspective myself, and the more I find out about it, the more impressed I am.)
Here is where I found it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/babylon5/comments/8hccek/crusade_questoin_what_was_the_darn_5_year_plan/
Technically the person is asking about the plan for Crusade, but the respondent typed up a long summary of ALL the changes leading up to it, and it's really fascinating!
Once again I am copying this under a detail cut in case of linkrot.
Like 9 different iterations of the B5-and-spinoffs plan; this is LONG
[In response to a question in which someone asked what the 5-year plan for the Crusade spinoff was]
Very complicated since the plan changed quite a bit in the details and you have to go back to B5 evolution to understand it all.
Will try to summarize quickly the plan evolution (french guy typing this quickly do forgive the typos here and there)
B5 Pilot and season 1 changed a bit due to actor replacement but are mostly the original plan.
B5 Season 2 : The minbari issue was originally that they were becoming infertile, Sinclair was the chosen one and was recognised by the triluminari thing. Delenn (who was supposed to have been a guy) in season 1 change race & gender to have a child with him that will be the minbari saviour.
Sakai has a terrible accident (mind wipe), Delenn confort Sinclair ans start a relationship with him.
The Sheridan replacement of Sinclair switched things around a bit but still mostly the same for S2.
Season 3 : Narm hold for much longer and fall only a third of the way in.
The relationsip part of the original season 3 plan is the same (Sinclair & Delenn start their relationship, Kosh gets closer to Sinclair). But galatic history wise, it's much slower than in the final version. The shadow stay hidden and continue to destabilize thing here and there, G'Kar become a refugee on B5 by mid season 3 after Narm fall.
Season 4 :
B5 is still NOT independent from Earth. Garibaldi fall back into his alcool addiction (something that will be used for S5 instead), he quits and become a mercenary on B5.
Mid season 4, the Shadow/Vorlon-Army of light war begins.
Same as in final version, Sinclair & cie have doubts about the vorlon motives, Delenn is pregnant by S4’s ending.
Season 5 :
Garibaldi is back and rejoin the staff. The cast and Gkar only discover now that Londo had shadow help.
Londo has no choice but to leave B5. He has regrets and want to help from home. He eventually become emperor and want to turn of the shadows but they put a keeper on him to force him to keep helping (pretty similar to final version).
Due to shadow influence, the military cast take over on Minbar and want to declare war on earth again.
On earth, Clark takes over, the B5 independence thing finally happens.
The shadows win the war and the vorlon are pretty much wiped out.
The minbari warrior decide to destroy B5 before attacking earth so they attack. That is the scene that was flashforwarded in season 1’s Babylon squared.
Sinclair, Delenn & the surviving cast escape right before B5 is destroyed (vision in signs and portants season 1).
End of Season 5
Start of second show, second first year plan : Babylon Prime Season 1 :
Main cast is the same minus Londo (recurring from Centori Prime), Gkar recurring leading the resistance and Zathras is in the main cast.
Sinclair & the B5 cast are refugee on Epsilon 3, protected by Draal and the great machine.
The whole galaxy is fucked. The surviving minbari non warrior grey council join them and still believe the chosen one, Sinclair, is the one that can save them all.
Since B5 is gone, they decide to go into the past to steal B4 and use it instead.
It’s basically war without end but they truly intend to use B4 in the present and not the past.
Their time stabilizer mess up, Sinclair & his son grow older due to that, the son become a fully grown adult in the mess but with the mind of a child.
They come back not at the time they left but 10-15 years into the future.
B4 is renamed Babylon Prime and since it has reactors, it can move around the galaxy.
After Season 1 (plan is not detailed there)
Sinclair forms the Interstellar Alliance to fight the shadows and free earth/minbar/narm. The first obvious allies are Gkar resistance.
Emperor Londo is a recurring character that does his best to secretly help them by drinking his keeper to sleep here and there.
Sinclair’s son become a minbari religious icon.
Eventually, they slowly take earth back from Clark and free Minbar and Narm.
It all end on centauri prime, with Sinclair and Delenn captured by the shadows & centauri allies.
Londo get drunk, manage to free them. Gkar is there and at this point has known about the keeper for a while. Londo ask for his help to kill him in order that he doesn’t warn the shadows.
They die together as friends as in the final show.
Vir becomes emperor. With the Interstellar Alliance help, they free Centauri prime and defeat the shadows. Delenn become leader of Minbar, Sinclair retire to a planet to spend his days fishing and their son become the new IA President.
The road is vastly different, but the end in 2281 is basically the same thing.
Since hoping for 10 seasons is a bit much, by mid season 2, JMS compress the plot and a good part of the second shows is compressed into B5 five year arc.
Plan 2 :
Season 3 B5 : Similar to what we had in the final version until the ending.
Sheridan goes to Z'ha'dum, blow them up with the white star.
The shadows attack B5 and destroys it.
The surviving cast members have to escape into the time rift opened in “War without end”.
They find themselves 20 years into the future, end of season 3.
No detail for season 4 & 5 of this second plan except that Sheridan comes back to life and rejoin the cast to start the fight again 20 years in the future.
It would have probably been similar to the Babylon Prime idea where they spend the two seasons freeing earth, fighting the shadows until season 5 would have ended on centauri prime with Londo (the time jump match for that).
Plan 3 :
JMS think it might be better to stay one more year in the present before having the time jump in season 4.
Production wise, B5 is cancelled, season 4 will be the last, so the plan will change again.
Plan 4:
The season 4 we got :
No more time jump, tie up as much as possible in one finale season.
Since the shadows are defeated there in season 4, it’s hard to explain how Centauri Prime is still under their influence in the future (flash forward seen in WWE). So comes the Drakhs as shadows of the shadows to explain that issue away.
By the end of S4, B5 is finally renewed by TNT for a S5 and a second 5 years show :
Plan 5 :
Since most of the story has been told in a compressed way; S5 is to be the bridge between B5 and the second show.
The second show will now be about the rangers travelling space to stabilize and expand the interstellar alliance.
Season 5 :
Elric & the technomages return to B5 & the known galaxy after the shadow war. He becomes a guide to ISA president Sheridan. Ivanova is B5 Captain and Franklin is second in command.
The first half is the season is mostly politics with Sheridan stabilizing the alliance and the internal conflict and trying to expand it.
Second half starts with Sheridan/Delann son arriving from the future.
The Drakhs starts messing with the alliance from Centauri Prime (similar to final version).
Ivanova is in a relationship with Byron the telepath but it doesn’t end well.
In the final episode, Londo is put under a keeper by the Drakhs.
Second show : Babylon 5 : Rangers
Main cast: Sheridan/Delenn/Gkar/Franklin/Zathras
Recurring ranger & technomage cast.
Show still centered on B5 (mostly beginning and ending of episodes), but we follow rangers and technomages going around the galaxy helping the IA members (against the drakhs and others threats).
TNT doesn’t like the idea want “a goal” for the show in the spin off, something more than just helping the IA.
Plan 6 :
Second show is called : The Babylon project : crusade
Earth will be attacked by the Drakhs with the virus, that will give the rangers a goal in the first season and make TNT happy.
The rangers travel the galaxy in fleets of White Stars to search for an antidote. They will travel mostly on former now abandoned lost planets to find advanced tech.
Main cast is Sheridan, Delenn, Marcus, G’kar, Zathras, a technomage, and Shereena, “a last survivor of somewhere (ring a bell? )
Going over post limit, go to next post ^
TNT doesn’t want any B5 cast in the second show.
Plan 7 :
Sheridan & Delenn are demoted to recurring.
Main cast is now :
Matthiew Singleton : Ranger captain of the lost star fleet.
Marcus Cole (all of this is negotiated while season 4 is being aired and JMS toy with not killing him).
A techno mage. Dureena : last survivor of a race
Zathras Since he knows the great machine, he is the only being in the galaxy that can understand the first one techs.
Dr Gwen Tracy
Varenni : Minbari warrior assigned by Delenn to the expedition.
Max Eilerson :IPX archeologist, only care about profit.
The show would have been about the hero having to navigate first one cities that were booby-trapped and face old creatures left there.
Drakhs would try to stop them here and there.
The white star fleet amiral ship is called the Excalibur.
In the end, the TNT deal for season 5 + spin off is signed at the last minute. (A funny story is that Peter Jurasik got his and Andreas contracts, went to Andreas in the middle of the night, told him “Sign it, it’s fair to us”. He did and went back to sleep.
JMS start to write season 5 in detail but the Claudia Christian mess happens (who knows why exactly). On top of that, his hotel throw away his season 5 episodes synopsis, he starts season 5 over.
Plan 8 :
Since TNT agree to a second show, he remove most of the politic / alliance building with the rangers from season 5.
With all the mess happening, JMS expend on the only arc from season 5 he can still write without Ivanova and he remember clearly, the telepath arc.
He admit he messed up that if I remember correctly.
He think about doing a full B5 spin off with telepaths having a hive/shared mind like Byron’s group (seeds of Sense8 maybe ? ) .
Garibaldi, who was to be on mars for most of season 5 (trying to stop Edgar’s many shadow projects) is brought back early to B5 since Ivanova is gone.
A whole sub arc with Sheridan son coming from the future is removed.
David was to have come and try to kill / stop Sheridan. He eventually fail and goes back into the rift and it’s never explained why. (My theory is that he had a keeper, I mean, the drakhs did put one on him according to the fast forward from WWE).
After B5 ends, a telepath war movie is planned between B5 & Crusade.
3 tie in novels are released (two before, one after, the telepath trilogy) but the movie itself is never made.
Lennier and Lyta die in the movie, Bester escape as a war crimimal. there is a long summary of what happened in detail, but my post is way too long already (have been typing for like an hour). If someone is interested, I’ll go into details.
After the cancellation, two other movies idea are brought up to replace it, also with synopsis in the books but they were cancelled too.
We finally arrive at crusade.
TNT refuse to have rangers in the show and that the ship be docked at B5.
So plan 9 :
It becomes a ship leased to the EA.
Without the rangers, JMS can’t show them going though the galaxy trying to build up the alliance, which was to have been the main center of the show after the plague thing was done.
In the mean time, a TNT exec meet Tracy Scoggins randomly and like her, so now they want her in crusade and the ship can go the B5 once in a while.
From there, it’s the disaster that is well known.
All scripts are rewritten by TNT, the order of episode is being moved around, it no longer makes any sense, they demand to have a sexual explorer on board the ship, more fights, more guns, they want to see Gideon pilot the ship from a Joystick …
Then it’s cancelled since the JMS-TNT relation are going downhill fast.
How it should have continued:
The apocalypse box manipulates Gideon over the course of the show, giving him what he wants when it’s in his interest.
They found a telepath recluse on a planet, it’s Bester.
The episode is full of flashback from Bester’s trial and escape after the telepath war. Bester actually help the heroes since he want to save the telepath on earth.
At the end, it’s discovered that Bester still has part of a former psy corp fleet augmented with shadowtech (during the clark administration) and that they are preparing their return eventually.
In the same episode, hunters are chasing our heroes and bester and it’s discovered at the end that it’s garibaldi’s men.
Dureena was to have been augmented eventually by shadowtech like the technomages (like Galen).
They discover Earth is still playing around with shadowtech. Earth call the ISA hypocrits since they are ally with technomages like Galen who use shadowtech.
Since Gideon and his crew want to go public with that, earthgov wants him killed, he his shot as he is about to reveal everything at the end of s01.
Season 2 :
The apocalypse box save Gideon, somehow.
Telepath arc : the senate wants to recreate a psy corps (linked to bester arc from season 1)
Drakhs/technomage arc : The Drakhs know how to use shadowtech but not how to create it, they try to bring the technomages to their side.
Mid season 2, the cure is found, they give it to earth then they are framed as traitors somehow by people in the government (because they know too much about shadowtech).
In season 3, Excalibur is on the run and wanted, they have to prove their innocence and stop the shadowtech project on earth (which is helped secretly by the drakhs).
Somehow the apocalypse box would have been a powerful telepath locked in.
Nothing is said after that.
2 years later, TNT lose the B5/crusade rights and scifi want to relaunch the show.
JMS thinks it’s too late for crusade so goes back to the original plan, a show about the rangers helping build up the ISA.
“The Hand”, from the pilot would have been just a group trying to take political powers. The whole thing about their being more powerful than the shadow was a lie.
They would have been dealt with by season 2. Afterward, they would have discovered a conspiracy against them in the minbar government and part of the rangers and would have to go against them.
Pretty similar to what crusade intended except with minbar instead of earth.
Also pretty similar to what the original Babylon Prime plan was, branded as outlaw, on the run and trying to save the galaxy. It seems like JMS really wanted that idea somewhere.
ANother great part of the plan of the second show was always "travel". From Babylon Prime to Crusade to Rangers, it was always about seeing more from the galaxy and not stay simply of B5. Some plans were about travelling in B4, some in a White Star fleet, the Excalibur or a ranger vessel, but it was always travelling around. They had started doing a bit of that in season 5 of B5.
In any case, what was always the true ending of the saga in every single plan, the fall of the drakhs/shadows, the liberation of Centauri Prime and Londo/Gkar’s death wouldn’t have been in crusade/rangers, it was put in the “legion of fire” novel trilogy.
[commenter]
BrotherChe
7y ago
Thank for this amazing detail. Had never heard most of this. Is it covered somewhere n book, or did you collect it from forums, etc?
Failing a more official and even more complete entry, I think this should be linked to in the sidebar. It's a great post!
[OP]
flobo09
•
7y ago
Well, a few years back, i found the whole collection of B5 scripts books in a UK library for sale and i took them.
They go in amazing details about the original plans, season by season and episode by episode. From cut scene to changed ideas, episode by episode.
While i was reading them all, i wrote a huge (in french) summary of the main changes to the plan/plotline over time.
Of course, the book goes into much more details than my summary.
What i posted yesterday was a very quick and dirty english translated summary of that summary i still have on my PC.
I could translate the whole thing, i guess, if people are interested in a more detailed version. (I only posted about the main changes in the summary, but even on what i call plan 1, there were subplan : 1a with Takashima staying, being the mole and shooting garibaldi in the finale, 1b with her and Kyle replaced and the way it impacted the plotline,...)
---
So, assuming all of this is accurate, apparently what was GOING to happen pre-cancellation is that there would have been a timeskip either at the end of season 3 or at the end of season 4 into the 20-years-from-now future we saw in "War Without End", a future in which the Shadows won the war, Londo and the Centauri were under the control of the Shadows (the Drakh were shoehorned into season 4 after the new plan had the Shadows being defeated in early season 4 so some other entity had to be inserted to explain the "War Without End" flash-forward), and this is where the rest of the show would have taken place. Either the final season/final two seasons would have taken place in the future, involved most of the characters on the run from the Shadows, trying to defeat them, and Londo enslaved on Centauri Prime.
So I think I was right in my original guess that Londo's redemption arc (as such) wasn't part of JMS's original plan for quite a while; it looks like in the various iterations of the show prior to the S4 cancellation/plot reworking - so all the way up through season three, even after the show was compressed from 10 seasons to 5 - Londo flees B5 after his connection to the Shadows is revealed and becomes Keeper-ified at some point after that, then slowly comes around and tries to help them while being Drakh-controlled on Centauri Prime. I mean, it's clear that Londo's better nature winning out eventually was the plan all along, but Londo spending a season or so rebuilding his relationships with everyone on B5 post-Shadow-War seems to have been a very late-in-production innovation (and I'm not gonna lie, I'm sure I would have enjoyed the other version, but I'm not sure it would have hit my buttons nearly as satisfyingly as the final version did ...). Apparently the answer to the question of "Why did no one notice for 15 years that Londo was being meatpuppeted by an alien brain parasite?" really is because in most versions prior to the final one, he'd cut ties with B5 by the time that happened.
Other things that network meddling and/or actor departures apparently saved us from include an Ivanova/Byron romance (God help us; derailed by Claudia Christian leaving the show), Garibaldi being on Mars for most of season 5 (he was brought back because they'd lost Claudia), and a major season 5 plot thread involving a time-traveling David Sheridan from the future (changed for reasons not really explained, possibly because it didn't tie very well into the various versions of a spinoff series that season 5 was now essentially setup for).
I hate to say it but the telepaths and Byron actually sounds ... better than a lot of what we almost had? Including the original plan, maybe, because I actually kind of hate the flash-forward idea and it sounds like JMS was wedded to it in multiple versions of the plan for season 4/5 until the near-cancellation and the need to make season 5 a bridge to a new set of spinoffs/movies derailed it completely.
(It does sound like the plan for most of the pre-cancellation versions was to make the liberation of Centauri Prime, and Londo and G'Kar's deaths, a big part of the show's climax, and that actually feels like it fits better with the overall arc of the show and really did get derailed completely by the near-cancellation; a lot of what's in the spinoff book trilogy was going to be in the show, which I do regret to an extent because Vir loses out on getting the Big Damn Hero hero role that he presumably would've had in that. At the same time, the show basically writing them as a palindrome - we see their ending in the middle; then it's just getting there - is one of the most original things I've ever seen on TV, and I'm not sure that seeing a bunch of the events that unfolded leading up to it would actually have improved it a whole lot. Meanwhile, I would genuinely have hated to lose so much of the character interaction we got in season five. I can only assume I would have loved the unfilmed version too, but reading this is not giving me a huge feeling of "oh, what we could have had!" ... in a lot of parts it's more like "Wow, bullet dodged.")
ETA: The OTHER impression I'm getting reading this is that JMS was also insanely prolific and would hit the ground running every time, so basically the network would give him a change, an actor would fall off a ladder, and/or he'd have a daydream in the bathtub and 2 days of coffee-fueled frantic script revisions later he would have a whole new plan for the next two seasons plus 3 hypothetical spinoff movies, and this just KEPT HAPPENING on a constantly repeating basis for the entire run of the show and then some.
no subject
This is a true fact and I also love this sentence.
[edit] I'm sure that Delenn fully empathizes with the entire feeling of "This himbo, war criminal, and enemy of my people is now mine, and anyone who even thinks about laying a finger on him can fuck right off before they find my teeth in their throat." She and G'Kar should have a nice non-alcoholic drink sometime.
Seconding this motion.
[edit edit] Actually, this parallel pinpoints a major reason that Sheridan made a much better partner for Delenn than I can imagine from Sinclair, by which I mean that even though the doubling of the rebirth ceremony as a marriage ceremony in "The Parliament of Dreams" was clearly supposed to point to Sinclair/Delenn, Sheridan/Delenn is so much more complicated, interpersonally, politically, interculturally. Sinclair always had that contemplative element which translated so well into his reinvention as Valen. Minbar was planetarily allergic to Sheridan and when confronted with most of its customs, he returned the favor.
Adding it promptly to the ever-growing list.
Huzzah.
no subject
Yes! Sinclair and Delenn would have worked too, and would have been relatively uncomplicated and happy; he would have fit very easily into her world. In contrast, the entire Minbari warrior caste hates Sheridan, and he can't quite figure out how to make flarn right or get the point of Delenn staring at him while he sleeps for three days straight. (In which he stands in for the entire non-flarn-loving, non-sleep-staring audience as well.) Sinclair canonically could be happy as a Minbari; Sheridan and Delenn had to figure out a compromise betwen their two incompatible worlds of food and customs and unsleepable beds. I can see how Sinclair and Delenn would have fit together and worked, but I enjoy Sheridan and Delenn's push-pull much better.