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Comment by fao_ | Hacker News Reader

> Season one it was a traditional adventure of the week style show that was popular at the time and before. because having a multi season story arc was unheard of and still more or less is today so the first season was traditional TV and only when mildly successful did it have the ability to spread its wings. and it did so so well that it forced other shows like DS9 to also have seasonal story arcs.

Unfortunately incorrect! JMS had the entire plot and "bible" written out start to finish before the show was produced, and the show was approved based on that bible. It had all the room it planned for and needed at the start. There were even built-in "escape hatches" planned for if actors had to drop out (which happened to Michael O'Hare, unfortunately)

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The first season is definitely the most conventional (for the time) and I think that reflects in some of JMS's statements saying the show was still getting onto its feet through the first season. Having the serialized story was very unfamiliar territory for Hollywood television back then, they were learning on their feet.

If I recall correctly JMS wrote basically every episode after season 1, where as season 1 had a few guest writers. The guest written episodes did not do well, including episode 14 which is probably the worst episode in the entire series.

The "TKO" 'A' plot is silly but it has one of the most moving and memorable 'B' plots of the series!

Agreed! In fact it is kindof annoying. Every set of orderable elements has a worst element, therefore every show has some bad episodes. You want to tell new viewers to just skip those episodes if they want, but it’s practically impossible with B5. If you skip TKO because part of it is cliche then you also miss the essential key to understanding Ivanova.

Both were pretty meh IMO.

Tangent, but a cartoon I immensely enjoyed as a young kid popped up recently on my YouTube feed - Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. That day I learned JMS wrote the story and it too featured an overarching story that backed the otherwise “episode of the week” format.

Season 2 had a similar writer split to season 1. It's season 3 where he took the reins entirely.

> It had all the room it planned for and needed at the start.

Almost. Come S4 they got concerned the show would be canceled before finishing the story, so they dropped all the secondary plots from S4 and S5 and compressed the main plots from S4 and S5 into just S4. Then they got renewed and quickly wrote a new S4 finale using S5 budget, postponed the series finale a year to S5, and reworked all the dropped secondary plots into S5.

Personally I think this worked really well, made S4 much more fast-paced and S5 feels more like a "the world keeps turning" extended epilogue.

Can't say I agree - to me S4 felt quite rushed and seemed to be missing a lot more than just secondary plot developments. They go from "unstoppable enemy with the Vorlons being the only real hope" to "telepaths go brrr, also Vorlons are dicks now" in basically no time and then also jam in the battle for earth in the same season which felt really jarring. Then S5 feels like it's setting up the next big plot (the remaining shadow allies and specifically their hold over the centauri) only for that to end on a cliff hanger where nothing gets resolved even in the finale set in the far future.

It's really unfortunate that so many bad things happened to this show since it being still great overall despite them suggests it could have been one of a kind if things had gone better.

I heard the original story with O'Hare was for Babylon 5 to blow up after an alien attack and for the Babylon 4 to be sent forward from the past to replace it. We saw hints for that in two different premonitions in season 1. That's a pretty big departure from the story we actually got.

That’s entirely possible. The story was deliberately quite fluid so that it could be adapted on the fly to unforseen changes in the cast.

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