To your point, the five-year-arc comments probably referenced the original story arc for just the B5 portion, as it and BP were supposed to be two separate entities. Of course, the fact that one was strongly dependent on the other is hard to dismiss. I’m not sure, based on that outline, if ending B5 without the BP follow-up would have been satisfying. In the end, that’s why I feel the eventual final version of the series was ultimately for the best, warts and all.

Jason, sounds like you and me are in that same boat called “I truly want to produce a show of my own, but I must be insane for still wanting to do this after knowing all that I know about the job”

Maybe that’s what’s really behind my main dream of running my own scifi network…

I do wonder who made the call to expand the series to 4 books? Did Jason make the call?

Also, for the sake of pedantry, it should be noted that BABYLON 5 and BABYLON PRIME were two separate series, just like B5 and CRUSADE. There was never the idea of a single, ten-season series. The raises due to the cast alone would make such a thing impossible, which is why you rarely see a long-running series (LAW & ORDER or ER, for example) with its original cast intact a decade into the run.

You have NO idea… Since I was ten-years-old, all I’ve ever wanted to be was a showrunner and editing these books briefly made me doubt the sanity of my desire.

I’m reformulating my outline and I may pitch again to UK publishers, since B5 was bigger over there at first, it might make enough of an impression to get past the first door, at least.

I believe we mentioned this in the first of the “B5 Topics” episodes… we want to cover everything we possibly can about the main series first, including resolving our own questions and theories, before moving onto Crusade, because we likely won’t get to talk about them again, not even when we begin to cover the novels, comics and games.

So we’re sweeping the floor and cleaning out the fridge before we close the door on the main 5 seasons of B5. And with me around, trust me, we will definitely be talking about Crusade with the same lovingly obsessed detail that we’ve shown B5

Plus we had originally wanted to have the Crusade scriptbooks in hand to go over and include in our discussion of the series, but those were delayed a few months longer than planned…

Surprises:
1. End of episode 10 Believers, didn’t end the way I expected, pretty shocking compared to any sci-fi at the time.
2. Episode 13 Signs and Portents, when I realized there was a “bigger picture”. I had no idea about story arcs, I was used to sci-fi shows “resetting” at the end.
At this point, I was hooked.

Some these topics should also include what JMS did in Crusade so that the B5 Universe as a whole could be discussed together.

Rob in MI

Star Trek handled and continues to handle time travel plots badly; Doctor Who before Russell Davies handled time beautifully and with style and grace. JSM weaves the time travel bits into B5 with the assumption that the viewer will accept them and doesn’t spend too much time explaining the paradox. Now, I find in this discussion that he switched time direction? JMS may be worthy of the label, “The next Rod Serling,” one of his heroes and television’s greatest writer.

This episode of the Babylon Podcast gets 5 stars. Good job, everyone.

Cheers!
Michael

When part of the rules say “we don’t kill anymore — we just wipe the personality,” but Garibaldi has knowledge of brutal capital punishment techniques and Psy Corp actually implements them, this indicates to me that bureaucratic justice vs street justice in B5 are just as we experience them today.

I just wish I could have waded through the boxes of source material they found with them. I would have been so happy, I probably would have glowed like a Vorlon and floated away

Jan

More books!!

And for that matter, when I first read the outline, I was taken aback by much of what I read. Because I really thought that the gist of the differences would pertain to Sinclair becoming Valen in the series finale somehow, with that being the payoff for “Babylon Squared”. I was floored by that outline, especially the Babylon Prime stuff!

It wasn’t until later that I realized how the outline actually addressed my laundry list of items from the first season that didn’t seem to add up. While I still think the show holds together just fine, I think the final version didn’t serve Sinclair quite as well as the original intention would have, in terms of what made it to air. The character fit the original timeline better, IMHO.

(Perhaps a minor point…I see JMS’ decision to write the bulk of the episodes after the first half of the second season as a direct consequence of compressing the two-series, 10-year Sinclair-centric story into the eventual five-year Sheridan-centric arc. There’s no way he could have done all that rearranging and plot gymnastics while also dealing with keeping other writers on the same page. At least some of the problem in the first season was the lack of consistency between the freelancers and JMS, IMHO.)

I meant to mention it on the show, but it kinda reminds me of that huge set of books put out by Christopher Tolkien, outlining the origination and evolution of the Middle Earth novels. I mean, those books contained every single scrap and revision that could be found, exposing every minor deviation from the eventual canon version of the stories. It’s a similar exercise, though on a much smaller scale. I found it fascinating to get a look “under the hood” of the writing process, to see the roads not taken, but at the end of the day, the story is the one that gets the stamp of author approval.

And as usual, I see I have been brief, focused, and concise…LOL…

On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t a case of believing is seeing.

Oddly enough, I’ve started a rewatch of the show, because my daughter is suddenly interested in it. And what I find is that I’m even more convinced that JMS was following the original outline during the course of the first season. The Minbari ritual in “Parliament of Dreams”, as Tim mentioned, makes so much more sense, from beginning to end, when Sinclair’s original story arc is considered.

That one they’d have to keep secret, else you’d have mundanes falling all over themselves to see if they were latent telepaths. Hell, that might have eliminated the tensions that led to the Telepath War in the first place.

So, no…. those rogue emopaths had a secret shopper program going or something.

Be well.
Matthew

First, I agree with Kurt. In the scenes where the fighting was still going on, it’s easy to see where Lyta could have believed that Byron was in mortal danger, and gone into a mama bear protective mode, where her instinct to protect a loved one overrode whatever subconscious limits she was still holding herself to, and laid a major smackdown on someone, telepathically or telekinetically. It wasn’t until afterwards, after Byron made his decision to end the fighting and immolate himself, and she could see that he couldn’t be talked out of it, that she went back to being her typically restrained self.

Tim must have used some telepath mojo on Bret, because Bret was right the first time.

Second, yeah, I also think Hated Bunny must have confused some of what we were saying. The statue of Li has both male and female anatomical aspects because she’s the goddess of passion and fertility. We see she has female breasts and male members, and we can assume she also has representation of the matching female genitalia along her spine. Plus deities can do that sort of thing if they wish.

But we have never ever said that the Centauri females have those tentacles.

Excellent! As one without the script books and much else, this would make a great episode. Sometimes the “what if” game becomes tedious and tasteless right away, but in this instance a “What-if” roundtable or email collage would prove interesting. One of my strongest judgments of JMS’s work is how it stands up to continuity scrutiny and if a what-if investigation can produce a better, more interesting story line, then his plot execution is lessened. I don’t think his eventual solution will come out substantially worse off than the original premise, but I would love to hear this episode.

Cheers!
Michael

There are some additional ideas for show topics listed in the Farpoint Forums under the Babylon 5 Podcast directory.

One good idea for a show would be an interview with an expert on O’Neill stations.

Jim

Rob in MI