Babylon 5: Season 4 arcs in reverse

[Jan]

A few months ago, someone here started a thread revealing the original untold version of the show, in which there was the 5 year spin-off which actually resolved the story, where at the end of the first five seasons the Shadows destroy B5 and take out the Vorlons. I don't know the link or thread title. It might have been information gleaned from those script books you have pay $100 each for.

There was a complete set of all of the B5 books published on Ebay a few days ago for only a few dollars more than the regular price. Yeah, there are some individual copies listed for a hundred bucks apiece but they're not selling, either.

Yes, there was an outline in Volume 15 (the bonus volume) that was written by JMS very early in the first season. But B5 was *not* destroyed by the Shadows. From that timeline:

Season Five ends with an assault on, and the destruction of​

Babylon 5 by the Minbari.

If the other thread indicated otherwise (and I don't think it did), it was in error.

Jan

 

[JoeD80]

Thematic ideas alone do not make a story; any story, be it fiction or non-fiction, has to have a 'narrative through-line' or 'narrative focus/end-goal'.

Wasn't saying that themes existing in a vacuum make a story. Was trying to get at that Babylon 5 is not so much about what the Shadows do; it's about what Sheridan does in rejecting their philosophy; it's about what Londo does in bringing the Shadows into play and his personal consequences for those decisions. Joe's "end-goal" according to him as stated previously was "Movements/Fall of Centauri Prime": creating that sense of dread when the viewer has "seen the train coming over the course of years." It's the personal choices of the characters affecting the story around them.

In order to further illustrate what I'm talking about in terms of narrative through-line and thematic ideas being complimentary yet independent things, I present the following example: C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia.
...
At first there wasn't anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord."

It would seem that JMS and C. S. Lewis write differently:

In any work of fiction, there are two primary elements: theme and plot. Plot are the incidents, theme is what it's *about* on a very core level.

I've always tried to deal with issues that matter to me in what I write. I can't do it any other way. If you pull out any of my work, from whatever show, I try to sneak in the issues that get caught in my filter. Hell, it's even in the animated series I wrote.
...
[The He-Man script] "Origin of the Sorceress" ... virtually all of the themes in B5 are right there in that one episode...the points of personal sacrifice, responsibility, on and on.

 

[Mr Light]

The Minbari destroy B5? Then why does the "B2" flash-forward show the Shadows destroying it? Of course at that point the story probably changed.

 

[JoeD80]

I don't know for sure because the outline is vague in places, but I think that the flash-forward of the firefight on the station points to a plan for season four where Garibaldi is described as coming back when "most needed" which seems to fit his future scene in that episode; there's a short description in the season four portion of the outline at that point of the Babylon Squared episode as well as the note that the Shadows are finally revealed physically, but no mention of the station being destroyed or the time travel until season five.

 

[Pauln6]

I would have preferred the sinister mystery of the Shadows and Vorlons to have been dragged out to the start of Season 5 so they we would not have had such a lull before charting the fall of the Centauri.

Just because Earth was being assisted by the Shadows doesn't mean that the Shadows would have saved them from an assault by the Alliance. The Shadows believe in strength arising out of conflict so they might have left Earth to its fate to see who came out on top, giving us our first clue that aiding their 'allies' might not be their priority.

We have to remember that series 5 wasn't green lit until after they'd finished filming 4, which led to problems scripting the war too. How pissed off would we have been if the series had finished with the Shadow War left unresolved! At least we'd have got a TV movie.