Glitches can always be headcanoned away in a time loop tale. Especially since we've only seen "one iteration." So, that segment of time infinitely loops, yah? So B2 showed us, say, the second time the universe looped and WWE is the third. As you said, time hits the right path of events, while Delenn's sleeves don't affect anything.
Over in Doctor Who my headcanon is the episode DAY OF THE DOCTOR is the "third loop." First time Gallifrey was, in fact, destroyed (so Eccleston and Tennant earn their angst). Second time, they try and fail to save Gallifrey. Third time they succeed BECAUSE OF CAPALDI. He adds another TARDIS's worth of power to the construct (AND brought Rusty the Dalek for fire support).
Back to B5. Another source of inconsistencies is, of course, the B5 show in the B5 universe is an ISN documentary and they just goofed.
The "ISN documentary also resolves the unavoidable actor inconsistency of WWE Emperor Vir being fat Stephen Furst and Sleeping in Light Emperor Vir being thin Stephen Furst. 😏
Cool! That's the big timey-wimey plot done, let's never do that again!
Oh, hello "Babylon 5: The Road Home!"
"The Road Home" is a big changed premise thing. JMS's posts in the 90's and with B5 books indicated Babylon Squared and War Without End are not about alternate timelines, but about a branch point within a single timeline. It's a Schrödinger's cat plot where the amount of ships the Shadows have are determined by this branch, but collapse the waveform in a single universe. "The Road Home" goes full multiverse.
How good is Tim Choate? He's so good he'll have a scene with Ivanova in s4 "Conflicts of Interest," and, again, the entire scene will be a single take hold on the master shot. Look, TV just doesn't edit like that. It's very rare for an entire scene to basically be an unbroken shot.
Yeah, yeah:
1) G'Kar's eye ripped out at the whims of that asshole, Cartagia, in season 4.
2) Sheridan goes to Zha'ha'dum and dies in season 3.
3) then gets (mostly) better, thanks to Lorien, in season 4.
4) Londo will detonate nukes on the surface of Centaur Prime to destroy a grounded Shadow fleet in season 4. The Centauri Prime novels will establish the Drakh do the same in populated areas of Centauri Prime as a check on Londo. The incident we flash forward to in WWE2 is after Londo calls the Drakh "bluff." They weren't bluffing. Now you know why the capital was actively burning.
5) The Drakh are introduced in season 4.
6) We see other Keepers in seasons 4 and 5.
7) Sheridan and Delenn marry in season 4.
8) Delenn becomes pregnant with David in season 5
9) Londo apologizes to G'Kar for being Londo in season 5 and they become friends.
10) Londo gets his keeper and becomes Emperor in season 5, leading to Centauri Prime coming under Drakh influence.
11) Londo gives Sheridan and Delenn a gift with a Keeper in it to give to David on his 16th birthday (which will lead into the flash forward events seen in WWE2).
12) The Drakh unleash the Drakh Plague (Markab Virus) on Earth in "A Call to Arms."
13) Emperor Londo tells two kids and Vir's wife the story of the Earth-Minbari war mere hours before his death.
14) Garibaldi's trust in Sinclair and Sheridan has been shaken -- offscreen he will discover Sinclair traveled back in time and became Valen. I do not think Garibaldi will take that well, and, with no Sinclair left in the present to be mad at, but talk it through and resolve things with, I posit his anger turns towards Sheridan, making him vulnerable to...
15) Garibaldi is kidnapped by and programmed by Al Bester of Psi-Corp, leading to...
16) Garibaldi betraying Sheridan to Earthforce on Mars (in the most Vejar sequence Vejar will Vejar in all of Babylon 5), which leafs to...
17) Ah, HELL no, I'm not tracing more things which directly or indirectly come out of this two parter, except...
18) Of course "The Road Home" can only happen because Sheridan is temporally unstable and vulnerable to displacement if exposed to tachyons...
I THINK that covers everything else in Babylon 5 hinted at, alluded to, foreshadowed by, and directly connected to this two parter.
And my Dad used to call the show "Babble-on 5," where it's all talk and nothing happens.
One may remember back in S1/ep1 "Midnight on the Firing Line where I traced six major arc story plots being set up? Yeah, the list above is the NEW stuff without getting to everything that just RESOLVED.
I'm still slightly marvelling at having the guts to do a time travel mystery that was intended to last 5 seasons and only resolve in the finale. I was always gobsmacked that they'd even attempted the B2/WWE story, split across 3 seasons, but the original Sinclair plan was even more daring (considering the vagaries of TV production, that is).
But yeah, all of the above hangs together remarkably well. Which is why the show is still such a delight to rewatch.
Thing about the above comment is I just intended to make the "Road Home" and Tim Choate comments, then I was all, "Oh I'll just quickly dash off off a list of the few other things set up... Holy crap, that was a lot!
Lots of wibbly wobbly timey wimey for sure. But overall it more or less worked?
I'll tell you what, though, the flash forward to Londo at the end of his life, that was breathtakingly tragic. Maybe it's just the mood I've been of late, but the way he played it, the look in his eyes... oh man.
Jurasik is a masterful actor. I guess there's a reason Mollari rather bookends the show, and is the narrator for much of it. And he never really gets any respite: his decisions and actions are too awful for forgiveness, so the rest of his life is him trying to make amends. He never can, but he keeps trying!
And, of course, while, at the time it was a resolution -- Ah, THIS is the moment G'Kar and Londo strangle each other! Make way for Emperor Vir! -- the next mysteries are seeded: G'Kar's eye, the Keeper (what is it, where did it come from?), what happened to where Londo would call G'Kar "old friend," and more...
Cool, that's the big timey-wimey plot done, let's never do that again!
It's a challenging runaround episode, closing some threads while opening others. We see the truth of Londo's death dream, but there's still missing context. Sinclair's arc is resolved, blah-blah.
JMS has never explicitly said this, but it's pretty obvious in context (and clear for owners of the B5 Books volume with the reproduction of the version of the five-year arc given by JMS to Michael O' Hare) this would have been Babylon 5's final story had O' Hare been on the show for five seasons. In fact, as told to O'Hare, the final scene of the series would have been Valen, teaching his son how to fish.
So, how does it all hold together? Pretty well. There are a few glitches and inconsistencies:
*Zathras is captured in the Central Corridor, not a conference room.
*In B2 Maj. Krantz says Zathras is captured shortly before the station shifted in time, not after as shown in WWE2.
*In Babylon Squared a sequence which is now supposed to be Delenn in the blue suit had male grunts dubbed over.
*Wardrobe put Delenn in the wrong colored costume to match her mostly offscreen shot at the end of B2.
*"The One" is obviously retconned into three "The Ones," but the "was/is/will be" is poetic and so well delivered by Tim Choate the edit holds for a very long time on the single master shot.
There are a couple other things, but let's not be petty.
But, overall it matches up quite well with B2. Probably better than it should. Especially when one considers JMS had to move up his series finale, and get it out the door during a season when he had to finish up a script a week, re-write around real world issues (like John Shuck not being available for part 1), while also supervising editing, post VFX, costume design, prop design, music, casting, and all the other things JMS was doing as an anal retentive control freak of a showrunner.
JMS's B5 books discussion on this episode (Simon, I'm assuming you haven't read volume 1 yet and picked up with Volume 2 on your "current" episodes) is interesting. Of course last episode he dropped a bunch of stuff and moved material from the beginning of this episode into that -- which rippled into part 2 and how it was assembled.
Initially the episode was to begin with the end sequence from part 1 ("You go this way, we go that way, you stay with the ship...") and stay on B4 through the teaser. We wouldn't back to Centauri Prime until Act 1, and the Act 1 commercial break would have been that Sheridan/Delenn kiss. That's perhaps the biggest shame of the re-edit, because if the commercial break had come on that kiss the broadcast audience would have had the entire break to deal with having their minds blown. Instead, we kind of rush on to "David is safe." On the other hand, as scripted, we don't go from Delenn's "...someone walked over my grave..." to Delenn being thrown into Sheridan's cell, and that's a nice cross-cut.
There are other ripples in the edit, but the timing of that kiss is the huge one.
This still doesn't quite look like a Mike Vejar episode, but that's because Vejar is doing something very tricky on the B4 plot -- he's shooting like Jim Johnston, who directed Babylon Squared. The best example is a dolly shot of the central corridor ending on Ivanova on a comlink. The very next shot is stock from Babylon Squared and it's the exact same camera move through the set we've just seen. Vejar perfectly matched Johnston's setup and the set decoration crew got 99% of the way to matching the set. It's pretty seamless.
Only on Centauri Prime did Vejar go full Vejar. Here we get some incredible lighting, some creative angles (the high shot in the cell), and Londo slipping in and out of shadow as he sits on his throne -- with simple lighting and direction Vejar sums up Londo's entire character arc of slipping back into shadow then clawing for the light.
Last episode I gave Mira Furlan MVP for having to, once again, deliver Exposition O' Doom, and a shout out to Michael O' Hare (so good to see him back on his game and, for a while, sane), but, of course we all know ALL the acting kudos go to Tim Choate as Zathras. He's an absolutely iconic character, yet we only see him in a few episodes, learn almost nothing about him, and we all love him on the strength of a brilliant performance. Zathras is funny, but, when the scene calls for it, possesses the needed gravitas.
How good is Choate? In WWE2 we basically hold on the master shot for the entire "The One who was/is/will be" scene with only two short reaction shots to Sinclair and Delenn (backs to camera in the master).
Anyways, yeah, good action packed two parter which resolves a few things and sets up others and hangs together nicely as long as you don't nitpick it too much. That's the best one can say about any Time Travel Tale (the first "Back to the Future" is, of course, the best time travel movie or TV story ever made. The sequels are fun, but not as tightly plotted. Of course MCU time travel makes no sense as the rules are broken within minutes after they are defined, and we won't even discuss how often Doctor Who breaks, changes, and ignores its own rules).
I wonder whether some of the inconsistencies can be headcanoned away with a shifting timeline. e.g., in B2 we see Sinclair and Garibaldi making a final stand aboard Babylon 5 - something which is highly unlikely to happen after the season 1 finale and Sinclair leaving the station. Not impossible, but unlikely. As such, there's a reading of the time travel stuff in WWE which acknowledges that the timeline has ALREADY shifted and adapted slightly: hence The One, Delenn's outfit being different, Zathras' position etc etc.
Events are still being pulled along more-or-less on their destined path, but the literal time line is being stretched and plucked at.
Glitches can always be headcanoned away in a time loop tale. Especially since we've only seen "one iteration." So, that segment of time infinitely loops, yah? So B2 showed us, say, the second time the universe looped and WWE is the third. As you said, time hits the right path of events, while Delenn's sleeves don't affect anything.
Over in Doctor Who my headcanon is the episode DAY OF THE DOCTOR is the "third loop." First time Gallifrey was, in fact, destroyed (so Eccleston and Tennant earn their angst). Second time, they try and fail to save Gallifrey. Third time they succeed BECAUSE OF CAPALDI. He adds another TARDIS's worth of power to the construct (AND brought Rusty the Dalek for fire support).
Back to B5. Another source of inconsistencies is, of course, the B5 show in the B5 universe is an ISN documentary and they just goofed.
The "ISN documentary also resolves the unavoidable actor inconsistency of WWE Emperor Vir being fat Stephen Furst and Sleeping in Light Emperor Vir being thin Stephen Furst. 😏
CHOATE IS THE GOAT (and gone too damn soon).
SPOILERS
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Cool! That's the big timey-wimey plot done, let's never do that again!
Oh, hello "Babylon 5: The Road Home!"
"The Road Home" is a big changed premise thing. JMS's posts in the 90's and with B5 books indicated Babylon Squared and War Without End are not about alternate timelines, but about a branch point within a single timeline. It's a Schrödinger's cat plot where the amount of ships the Shadows have are determined by this branch, but collapse the waveform in a single universe. "The Road Home" goes full multiverse.
How good is Tim Choate? He's so good he'll have a scene with Ivanova in s4 "Conflicts of Interest," and, again, the entire scene will be a single take hold on the master shot. Look, TV just doesn't edit like that. It's very rare for an entire scene to basically be an unbroken shot.
Yeah, yeah:
1) G'Kar's eye ripped out at the whims of that asshole, Cartagia, in season 4.
2) Sheridan goes to Zha'ha'dum and dies in season 3.
3) then gets (mostly) better, thanks to Lorien, in season 4.
4) Londo will detonate nukes on the surface of Centaur Prime to destroy a grounded Shadow fleet in season 4. The Centauri Prime novels will establish the Drakh do the same in populated areas of Centauri Prime as a check on Londo. The incident we flash forward to in WWE2 is after Londo calls the Drakh "bluff." They weren't bluffing. Now you know why the capital was actively burning.
5) The Drakh are introduced in season 4.
6) We see other Keepers in seasons 4 and 5.
7) Sheridan and Delenn marry in season 4.
8) Delenn becomes pregnant with David in season 5
9) Londo apologizes to G'Kar for being Londo in season 5 and they become friends.
10) Londo gets his keeper and becomes Emperor in season 5, leading to Centauri Prime coming under Drakh influence.
11) Londo gives Sheridan and Delenn a gift with a Keeper in it to give to David on his 16th birthday (which will lead into the flash forward events seen in WWE2).
12) The Drakh unleash the Drakh Plague (Markab Virus) on Earth in "A Call to Arms."
13) Emperor Londo tells two kids and Vir's wife the story of the Earth-Minbari war mere hours before his death.
14) Garibaldi's trust in Sinclair and Sheridan has been shaken -- offscreen he will discover Sinclair traveled back in time and became Valen. I do not think Garibaldi will take that well, and, with no Sinclair left in the present to be mad at, but talk it through and resolve things with, I posit his anger turns towards Sheridan, making him vulnerable to...
15) Garibaldi is kidnapped by and programmed by Al Bester of Psi-Corp, leading to...
16) Garibaldi betraying Sheridan to Earthforce on Mars (in the most Vejar sequence Vejar will Vejar in all of Babylon 5), which leafs to...
17) Ah, HELL no, I'm not tracing more things which directly or indirectly come out of this two parter, except...
18) Of course "The Road Home" can only happen because Sheridan is temporally unstable and vulnerable to displacement if exposed to tachyons...
I THINK that covers everything else in Babylon 5 hinted at, alluded to, foreshadowed by, and directly connected to this two parter.
And my Dad used to call the show "Babble-on 5," where it's all talk and nothing happens.
One may remember back in S1/ep1 "Midnight on the Firing Line where I traced six major arc story plots being set up? Yeah, the list above is the NEW stuff without getting to everything that just RESOLVED.
B5 is Dense...
I'm still slightly marvelling at having the guts to do a time travel mystery that was intended to last 5 seasons and only resolve in the finale. I was always gobsmacked that they'd even attempted the B2/WWE story, split across 3 seasons, but the original Sinclair plan was even more daring (considering the vagaries of TV production, that is).
But yeah, all of the above hangs together remarkably well. Which is why the show is still such a delight to rewatch.
Thing about the above comment is I just intended to make the "Road Home" and Tim Choate comments, then I was all, "Oh I'll just quickly dash off off a list of the few other things set up... Holy crap, that was a lot!
And, yeah, it holds together well.
Lots of wibbly wobbly timey wimey for sure. But overall it more or less worked?
I'll tell you what, though, the flash forward to Londo at the end of his life, that was breathtakingly tragic. Maybe it's just the mood I've been of late, but the way he played it, the look in his eyes... oh man.
Jurasik is a masterful actor. I guess there's a reason Mollari rather bookends the show, and is the narrator for much of it. And he never really gets any respite: his decisions and actions are too awful for forgiveness, so the rest of his life is him trying to make amends. He never can, but he keeps trying!
And, of course, while, at the time it was a resolution -- Ah, THIS is the moment G'Kar and Londo strangle each other! Make way for Emperor Vir! -- the next mysteries are seeded: G'Kar's eye, the Keeper (what is it, where did it come from?), what happened to where Londo would call G'Kar "old friend," and more...
Non - Spoilers:
Cool, that's the big timey-wimey plot done, let's never do that again!
It's a challenging runaround episode, closing some threads while opening others. We see the truth of Londo's death dream, but there's still missing context. Sinclair's arc is resolved, blah-blah.
JMS has never explicitly said this, but it's pretty obvious in context (and clear for owners of the B5 Books volume with the reproduction of the version of the five-year arc given by JMS to Michael O' Hare) this would have been Babylon 5's final story had O' Hare been on the show for five seasons. In fact, as told to O'Hare, the final scene of the series would have been Valen, teaching his son how to fish.
So, how does it all hold together? Pretty well. There are a few glitches and inconsistencies:
*Zathras is captured in the Central Corridor, not a conference room.
*In B2 Maj. Krantz says Zathras is captured shortly before the station shifted in time, not after as shown in WWE2.
*In Babylon Squared a sequence which is now supposed to be Delenn in the blue suit had male grunts dubbed over.
*Wardrobe put Delenn in the wrong colored costume to match her mostly offscreen shot at the end of B2.
*"The One" is obviously retconned into three "The Ones," but the "was/is/will be" is poetic and so well delivered by Tim Choate the edit holds for a very long time on the single master shot.
There are a couple other things, but let's not be petty.
But, overall it matches up quite well with B2. Probably better than it should. Especially when one considers JMS had to move up his series finale, and get it out the door during a season when he had to finish up a script a week, re-write around real world issues (like John Shuck not being available for part 1), while also supervising editing, post VFX, costume design, prop design, music, casting, and all the other things JMS was doing as an anal retentive control freak of a showrunner.
JMS's B5 books discussion on this episode (Simon, I'm assuming you haven't read volume 1 yet and picked up with Volume 2 on your "current" episodes) is interesting. Of course last episode he dropped a bunch of stuff and moved material from the beginning of this episode into that -- which rippled into part 2 and how it was assembled.
Initially the episode was to begin with the end sequence from part 1 ("You go this way, we go that way, you stay with the ship...") and stay on B4 through the teaser. We wouldn't back to Centauri Prime until Act 1, and the Act 1 commercial break would have been that Sheridan/Delenn kiss. That's perhaps the biggest shame of the re-edit, because if the commercial break had come on that kiss the broadcast audience would have had the entire break to deal with having their minds blown. Instead, we kind of rush on to "David is safe." On the other hand, as scripted, we don't go from Delenn's "...someone walked over my grave..." to Delenn being thrown into Sheridan's cell, and that's a nice cross-cut.
There are other ripples in the edit, but the timing of that kiss is the huge one.
This still doesn't quite look like a Mike Vejar episode, but that's because Vejar is doing something very tricky on the B4 plot -- he's shooting like Jim Johnston, who directed Babylon Squared. The best example is a dolly shot of the central corridor ending on Ivanova on a comlink. The very next shot is stock from Babylon Squared and it's the exact same camera move through the set we've just seen. Vejar perfectly matched Johnston's setup and the set decoration crew got 99% of the way to matching the set. It's pretty seamless.
Only on Centauri Prime did Vejar go full Vejar. Here we get some incredible lighting, some creative angles (the high shot in the cell), and Londo slipping in and out of shadow as he sits on his throne -- with simple lighting and direction Vejar sums up Londo's entire character arc of slipping back into shadow then clawing for the light.
Last episode I gave Mira Furlan MVP for having to, once again, deliver Exposition O' Doom, and a shout out to Michael O' Hare (so good to see him back on his game and, for a while, sane), but, of course we all know ALL the acting kudos go to Tim Choate as Zathras. He's an absolutely iconic character, yet we only see him in a few episodes, learn almost nothing about him, and we all love him on the strength of a brilliant performance. Zathras is funny, but, when the scene calls for it, possesses the needed gravitas.
How good is Choate? In WWE2 we basically hold on the master shot for the entire "The One who was/is/will be" scene with only two short reaction shots to Sinclair and Delenn (backs to camera in the master).
Anyways, yeah, good action packed two parter which resolves a few things and sets up others and hangs together nicely as long as you don't nitpick it too much. That's the best one can say about any Time Travel Tale (the first "Back to the Future" is, of course, the best time travel movie or TV story ever made. The sequels are fun, but not as tightly plotted. Of course MCU time travel makes no sense as the rules are broken within minutes after they are defined, and we won't even discuss how often Doctor Who breaks, changes, and ignores its own rules).
I wonder whether some of the inconsistencies can be headcanoned away with a shifting timeline. e.g., in B2 we see Sinclair and Garibaldi making a final stand aboard Babylon 5 - something which is highly unlikely to happen after the season 1 finale and Sinclair leaving the station. Not impossible, but unlikely. As such, there's a reading of the time travel stuff in WWE which acknowledges that the timeline has ALREADY shifted and adapted slightly: hence The One, Delenn's outfit being different, Zathras' position etc etc.
Events are still being pulled along more-or-less on their destined path, but the literal time line is being stretched and plucked at.
And yes, CHOATE is the GOAT.