Indeed, some cures come with more side effects than others. As @David cgc mentions, the main plot was an allegory of nuclear proliferation and perhaps the US military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about in the 50s. The Technomages depended on Shadow tech that required the taking of life in a analagous way to the healing device, which is why Galen was estranged from them. The series would have included more of his backstory and also Lyta Alexander, Bester, and the Telepath war, I'm guessing. An unproduced first season script has the Excalibur crew tracking down Bester.
Sure the life taking sounds bad but why can't the life be a pineapple or a pig or both so you can have a luau afterward? Funny the machines were so particular.
...or that crime against humanity, Hawaiian pizza? Yeah, I wondered if they were powered by jeopardy and dramatic tension.
So, CW news, Nexstar still in process to buy 75% ownership. News that should be good to B5 is that the president of cw looks to be continuing as Presdente .. As he's the b5 champion thing are looking promising
Really? I didn't know that. I mean, I DID know that the technomages employed Shadow tech but I did not know it required the taking of life. Where was that said?
The Psycore trilogy is awesome, Technomage & Centauri trilogies are very good, and To Dream is decent. If you can track them down they are all worth reading. The short stories are also fun and readily available.
The idea that a thousand + years of technomages had no idea how to use the technology that was riddled though their bodies is fricking ridiculous. They are not immortal. They make tech and they make nanotech and then they infect their children/babies. The idea that the tech inside them is harvested from the dead, because they don't know how to make new nano tech is ludicrous. These gothic looking a-holes are not Pakleds. Even if the TechnoMages initially couldn't build exactly the same tech that the shadows were using, after they were abandoned, they would have worked out a hybrid approximation like the white star fleet is a hybrid approximation of Vorlon tech, that is close enough and safer than putting very old hard ware that they do not understand completely into babies. Highly educated and highly motivated to the point of religious fervor. Books are not canon. Books are never canon. Anyone with authority who says that their books are equally canon to their TV shows or movies are liars who don't yet know when they are going to lose control of their IP eventually, and a suit from Disney probably, is going to use their "word of honor about the books being canon" as toilet paper.
The novels have plot holes, supposedly canon as they are. The Technomage reveal appears to inserted for shock value. That their implants and the alien healing device require draining some form of lifeforce from sapient beings in order to work is illogical nonsense used for dramatic effect.