It's really interesting to ponder just how differently things could've gone had JMS not decided to collapse virtually everything into S4 because he didn't know whether or not the series would get a fifth season. I def-ly feel this should've been a two-parter. Better yet, the first arc of this season, which wraps up the Shadow/Vorlon story should've been something like 10 episodes.
What's weird in hindsight is how the Shadow War never really crossed over with the Earth Conflicts in any truly meaningful way. They were always two big arcs that kinda intersected at times but mostly existed separately, and so this season tries to resolve them both one after the other, without really having them come together into a larger whole.
I remember predicting that GoT was gonna pull something similar in its final season, and I turned out to be right.
Good points, especially the way the Shadow and Earth stuff end up being treated quite separately - almost as two different shows. The initial build-up in seasons 1 and 2 were very interlaced, and Earth used the emerging Shadow threat as a reason to declare martial law, after all.
JMS' story style, per episode, often involves seemingly distinct A and B plots, and then it turns out at the end that there's some sort of link, whereby A solves the problem of B, or vice versa. That doesn't end up happening with the two main long-running plots.
It's funny to talk of episode counts, now that we're in an era when 22-episode seasons are vanishingly rare, and an entire season is often only 6 episodes. Even with the truncated timeline and the slightly rushed feel to the conclusion here, I'd warrant that the pacing is still superior to most modern streaming shows.
I note JMS has always stated the Shadow War was intended to wrap up about 6 episodes into the season. Yes, perhaps this episode should have been a two parter, but - again, according to JMS - most of what got compressed in s4 was the MINBARI civil war (and what would have been more fallout with the League returning to squabbling) in order to move up the end of the Earth Civil War.
"Intersections in Real Time" was intended initially as the s4 finale. Boy, that would have been divisive. Imagine the reaction to a season finale basically being a two-hander in a single room!
This is why, ultimately, it doesn’t bother me too much that everything got shuffled, and that season 5 is more than a little wobbly. I’d much rather take that slightly compromised vision than the alternative: if B5 had ended on ‘Intersections’ and we’d never seen anything more from it, that would have been entirely awful.
As far as I know, that wasn't always the plan. He's described the process as having to strip out 6 of the more standalone episodes, moving things into the TV movies, plus 'Into the Fire' was going to be a 2-parter earlier on then got compressed into one, though apparently that was relief due to the sheer amount of VFX it had.
So the Shadow War part of the arc could've well been 10-12 episodes before the pivot to the Earth story + Minbari Civil War.
'Intersections' was intended at one point to be the finale, at another point it was going to be Sheridan being captured, with Intersections being the opener of S5. And just looking at how compressed the final resolution of the Earth arc is, I can definitely see the post-capture storyline, taking down the president, and dealing with the fallout taking up to 12 episodes easily.
Plus, the original original arc of the show was actually radically different, back when Sinclair was going to remain the main lead and the series would've set up Babylon Prime. But that's a whole other story.
The messages you've linked date back to when the show was in production, and, to a certain extent are unreliable. At the time JMS was being just a little politic in terms of not slamming the networks, a little vague in terms of avoiding spoilers, and, in rare cases deceptive (Although the best example of that is the "why Michael O' Hare left cover-up," which is understandable.
Besides the JMS newsgroup, there's also the old archive of his varied BBS messages (helpfully compiled on the Lurker's Guide).
There's ALSO the B5books site (which is about to shut down), but I own everything they ever published, which includes written-around-2005-2007 commentaries on every episode, a 3000 page compilation of all the newsgroup/Lurker's Guide messages, and a "Holy Grail" document - the original 5-year all-Sinclair outline JMS gave to Michael O' Hare (in which the last scene of the series is Sinclair-as-Valen teaching his son how to fish).
That's said, these volumes are in storage and currently inaccessible (I moved from the US to Ireland a few years ago and, now that we've FINALLY bought a house I look forward to getting those OUT of storage as I'd love to be re-reading the relevant materials alongside this re-watch).
B5scolls has interviews with varied behind the scenes people - which often directly contradict JMS statements (when it comes to the nuts and bolts of how B5's VFX, for example, were put together, I trust Mojo and Ron Thornton over JMS (and Mojo is a friend of mine).
I have all the varied Andy Lane analysis volumes, the Joe Nazzaro books, and B5books editor Jason Davis has been working since 2017 on a definitive history of B5 with ridiculous interviews (in which I was able to put him in contact with people who worked on the show who are friends of mine) and perusal of all the production paperwork. Davis has been doing bi-weekly updates involving discussion of the production and rough drafts for 8 years.
This is a VERY long winded (hopefully not arrogant) way of saying I have studied the production of Babylon 5 more than any other film or TV show. The printed volumes alone took up 12 feet of shelf space.
I will absolutely stand by my assertion that the Shadow War was truncated by 2-3 episodes - one of which would have been "Into the Fire pt2" - but the majority of the Season 4 cuts were around the Minbari Civil War and League fallout, even though the sources I imperfectly remember are not immediately available for reference.
But things JMS said between 1993-1998 I take with a few grains of salt, for reasons outlined above, where, in relatively recent retrospective after production JMS didn't have to pull punches.
JMS also gets things wrong. He'll insist the original VFX were rendered at 4k and transferred to 35mm film which was damaged in storage while the artists who actually created the VFX will say they were rendered at D1 (720x480). Producer John Copeland's interviews don't always agree with JMS on production/studio politics.
It sounds like you have an amazing compendium! I merely wanted to accentuate that the plan for the series and S4 in particular was not always set in stone, and definitely the Shadow War arc felt truncated alongside everything else. 9 episodes to me makes a lot of sense, as just from viewing it, I could infer that every 2 episodes had enough plot for three.
I certainly always felt that the League stuff was severely cut down, which is why I said that the post-capture arc of Sheridan to the penultimate episode feels like it could take up half a season.
I recognize that JMS isn't always reliable. Heck, he's definitely exaggerated the extent to which the series had followed the master plan over the years, when it's very clear it couldn't have, given things like unexpected cast changes and just the stuff from S1 that didn't align with what came later. That's par the course, imo, as showrunners want you to believe everything is perfectly coherent. Anyway, it would be fascinating to read a book devoted entirely to analyzing the evolution of the series one day.
At the time I wasn't certain how I felt about the resolution of Shadow War. But, let's face it, the Shadows and Vorlons couldn't be beaten by force.
Here we get the explanation of the "Third Age" as hinted at as far back as the pilot episode, and the clearest discussion of JMS's atheism. The entire Shadow/Vorlon arc is about rejection of religion in favor of a Hopefully rational approach, wrapped in the metaphor of outgrowing one's parents wrapped in the trappings of a sci fi war story.
Basically the entire story is summed up in this episode. What comes after is epilog and secondary themes.
Yes, "Get the hell out of our galaxy" is a shit line. JMS can be forgiven - he had a LOT on his plate.
Yes, this episode might "feel better" as a two parter, but, honestly, that would just mean dragging out everything else in the episode. In a theoretical two patter, however, the climax of part one is the fall of Morden with the cliffhanger being the Vorlon planet killer eclipsing the sun of Centauri Prime.
Which leaves for the second part not much... The discussion with the Shadow/Vorlon avatars and Loren
" deus ex convincica."
Yet with all the Shadow War stuff, the really standout sequence for me is Londo and Morden. As noted Jurasik is (tied with Katsulas) the best actor on the show, and Ed Wasser really gets to show his chops here when Morden's smugness is wiped away.
With big battles and First Ones and planet killers the best, and most meaningful VFX shot is from the orbit of Centauri Prime as the nukes destroy the island with the Shadow base. THAT is the moment in the episode where I could only breathe, "Fuuuuuuuck." It hits hard. The deliberate destruction of one of your own major population centers and those willing to die to set the trap.
Centauri are cray-cray.
Now we must discuss the most fist pumping "HELL ya!" moment.
The destruction of the island is shocking, especially when we realise (via the excellent VFX) that we’re not talking about, say, a small island and a spaceport being blown up. It’s clearly several nukes over a vast landmass. Even aside from the Drakh etc, that’s going to have consequences.
The nuking also understandable to the audience. We've been told about planet killers and see the aftermath, but not in use.
The most horrifying mass attack (to me) is that bombardment of Narn. But that one requires the viewer to understand by the time we see it that huge amounts of particularates have been blown into the air, meaning the explosions are muted.
Now Centauri Prime - everyone can understand angling down at a landmass as mushroom clouds and shockwaves erupt. We understand it and it's a depiction of REAL destruction in a way shooting up a Vorlon base isn't.
I feel the same way as Mikhail in his comment about this episode - except with one difference. It all felt squeezed and a bit rushed but watching it for the first time I felt they *just* about got away with it.
But that line "get the hell out of our galaxy!" as if Sheridan was admonishing a couple of naughty schoolkids was over the line for me. Just too much of a cheesefest, the kind of thing that turning it into a two- or three-parter could have alleviated by adding some build-up that could have made it feel earned? Asking us to believe the two most powerful alien races in the known universe could be sent packing with a good verbal ticking-off (even though what really did it was the argument behind it), especially when they've already proven themselves to be belligerent and petty...it was a nope for me.
But knowing the constraints that JMS was working under, and the profoundly disruptive effect of him being told he wouldn't get a fifth season (and then they did it to him AGAIN by greenlighting a fifth season he didn't initially known how to fill - what a nightmare), well, I can't blame him for handing in a B-minus instead of an A-plus.
I think I disagree with the premise the Earth/Shadow connection is underplayed after this episode. Like how much Kosh is in the series, I think, looking back, one thinks Earth/Shadow connections are a major part of the story, but it's always been something clicking away in the background.
So, season 1 doesn't really have anything connecting Earth and the Shadows.
Season 2 we learn Icarus went to Zha'ha'dum. That's about it. Even the Earth/Centauri treaty is non-interference, not mutual defense. (Nothing indicates Bureau 13 was part of a Shadow plot, and no other Shadow plots imply reanimated corpses.)
Season 3 we see Morden's meeting with a senator and Psi Cop, learn Morden helped assassinate President Santiago, that Psi Corp teeps are being processed as Shadow ship cores, and learn IPX unearthed a Shadow ship on Mars around 2248, but that's really it. It's not really huge overarching plot.
SPOILERS AHEAD:
Of course in season 4 we'll see the Shadow Omegas (and learn in Crusade Earthforce was working on Shadow hybrids to the extent of having a prototype in 2258). And, of course the telepath virus.
But there really isn't major Earth/Shadow interaction.
Here I speculate: I feel the Shadows were assessing Earth as either a possible ally/servitor race or as something to be destroyed. I lean towards destruction. The humans found Shadow tech and, within a decade were adapting it, which makes them a threat. Humans have telepaths, which make them a threat. I think the Shadows had two prongs of operation on Earth: destabilization and resource collection. Working with Clark and his ilk - racist isolationists - removes Earth from the galactic community and hampers alliances with others. In the meantime, telepath Shadow vessel cores make the Shadow fleet stronger. Hell, let's assume there were tissue banks (clones) or "breeding pairs" on Zha'ha'dum.
Edgars' telepath virus? Hey, 1000 years ago all the Narn teeps died. Edgars' virus was planted Shadow tech. Probably a subset of what killed the Markab, and what the Drakh will unleash to kick off Crusade.
So, yeah, I think the Shadows just wanted to isolate Earth, take as many teeps as possible, kill the rest, and if Earth had any great discoveries in the tech, steal them, but Earth wasn't part of their main plans.
Thus, I think, other than Shadow Omegas and Edgars' anti telepath virus the reason we don't get more Earth/Shadow connection in s4/s5 is there aren't any.
Not everything up to "Into the Fire" was Shadow related. The Strieb are NOT Shadow affiliated. Their asshole motives are their own.
It's really interesting to ponder just how differently things could've gone had JMS not decided to collapse virtually everything into S4 because he didn't know whether or not the series would get a fifth season. I def-ly feel this should've been a two-parter. Better yet, the first arc of this season, which wraps up the Shadow/Vorlon story should've been something like 10 episodes.
What's weird in hindsight is how the Shadow War never really crossed over with the Earth Conflicts in any truly meaningful way. They were always two big arcs that kinda intersected at times but mostly existed separately, and so this season tries to resolve them both one after the other, without really having them come together into a larger whole.
I remember predicting that GoT was gonna pull something similar in its final season, and I turned out to be right.
Good points, especially the way the Shadow and Earth stuff end up being treated quite separately - almost as two different shows. The initial build-up in seasons 1 and 2 were very interlaced, and Earth used the emerging Shadow threat as a reason to declare martial law, after all.
JMS' story style, per episode, often involves seemingly distinct A and B plots, and then it turns out at the end that there's some sort of link, whereby A solves the problem of B, or vice versa. That doesn't end up happening with the two main long-running plots.
It's funny to talk of episode counts, now that we're in an era when 22-episode seasons are vanishingly rare, and an entire season is often only 6 episodes. Even with the truncated timeline and the slightly rushed feel to the conclusion here, I'd warrant that the pacing is still superior to most modern streaming shows.
I note JMS has always stated the Shadow War was intended to wrap up about 6 episodes into the season. Yes, perhaps this episode should have been a two parter, but - again, according to JMS - most of what got compressed in s4 was the MINBARI civil war (and what would have been more fallout with the League returning to squabbling) in order to move up the end of the Earth Civil War.
"Intersections in Real Time" was intended initially as the s4 finale. Boy, that would have been divisive. Imagine the reaction to a season finale basically being a two-hander in a single room!
This is why, ultimately, it doesn’t bother me too much that everything got shuffled, and that season 5 is more than a little wobbly. I’d much rather take that slightly compromised vision than the alternative: if B5 had ended on ‘Intersections’ and we’d never seen anything more from it, that would have been entirely awful.
As far as I know, that wasn't always the plan. He's described the process as having to strip out 6 of the more standalone episodes, moving things into the TV movies, plus 'Into the Fire' was going to be a 2-parter earlier on then got compressed into one, though apparently that was relief due to the sheer amount of VFX it had.
He talks about this directly here:
http://www.jmsnews.com/Messages/Message/10250
http://www.jmsnews.com/messages/message?id=9627
So the Shadow War part of the arc could've well been 10-12 episodes before the pivot to the Earth story + Minbari Civil War.
'Intersections' was intended at one point to be the finale, at another point it was going to be Sheridan being captured, with Intersections being the opener of S5. And just looking at how compressed the final resolution of the Earth arc is, I can definitely see the post-capture storyline, taking down the president, and dealing with the fallout taking up to 12 episodes easily.
Plus, the original original arc of the show was actually radically different, back when Sinclair was going to remain the main lead and the series would've set up Babylon Prime. But that's a whole other story.
The messages you've linked date back to when the show was in production, and, to a certain extent are unreliable. At the time JMS was being just a little politic in terms of not slamming the networks, a little vague in terms of avoiding spoilers, and, in rare cases deceptive (Although the best example of that is the "why Michael O' Hare left cover-up," which is understandable.
Besides the JMS newsgroup, there's also the old archive of his varied BBS messages (helpfully compiled on the Lurker's Guide).
There's ALSO the B5books site (which is about to shut down), but I own everything they ever published, which includes written-around-2005-2007 commentaries on every episode, a 3000 page compilation of all the newsgroup/Lurker's Guide messages, and a "Holy Grail" document - the original 5-year all-Sinclair outline JMS gave to Michael O' Hare (in which the last scene of the series is Sinclair-as-Valen teaching his son how to fish).
That's said, these volumes are in storage and currently inaccessible (I moved from the US to Ireland a few years ago and, now that we've FINALLY bought a house I look forward to getting those OUT of storage as I'd love to be re-reading the relevant materials alongside this re-watch).
B5scolls has interviews with varied behind the scenes people - which often directly contradict JMS statements (when it comes to the nuts and bolts of how B5's VFX, for example, were put together, I trust Mojo and Ron Thornton over JMS (and Mojo is a friend of mine).
I have all the varied Andy Lane analysis volumes, the Joe Nazzaro books, and B5books editor Jason Davis has been working since 2017 on a definitive history of B5 with ridiculous interviews (in which I was able to put him in contact with people who worked on the show who are friends of mine) and perusal of all the production paperwork. Davis has been doing bi-weekly updates involving discussion of the production and rough drafts for 8 years.
This is a VERY long winded (hopefully not arrogant) way of saying I have studied the production of Babylon 5 more than any other film or TV show. The printed volumes alone took up 12 feet of shelf space.
I will absolutely stand by my assertion that the Shadow War was truncated by 2-3 episodes - one of which would have been "Into the Fire pt2" - but the majority of the Season 4 cuts were around the Minbari Civil War and League fallout, even though the sources I imperfectly remember are not immediately available for reference.
But things JMS said between 1993-1998 I take with a few grains of salt, for reasons outlined above, where, in relatively recent retrospective after production JMS didn't have to pull punches.
JMS also gets things wrong. He'll insist the original VFX were rendered at 4k and transferred to 35mm film which was damaged in storage while the artists who actually created the VFX will say they were rendered at D1 (720x480). Producer John Copeland's interviews don't always agree with JMS on production/studio politics.
It sounds like you have an amazing compendium! I merely wanted to accentuate that the plan for the series and S4 in particular was not always set in stone, and definitely the Shadow War arc felt truncated alongside everything else. 9 episodes to me makes a lot of sense, as just from viewing it, I could infer that every 2 episodes had enough plot for three.
I certainly always felt that the League stuff was severely cut down, which is why I said that the post-capture arc of Sheridan to the penultimate episode feels like it could take up half a season.
I recognize that JMS isn't always reliable. Heck, he's definitely exaggerated the extent to which the series had followed the master plan over the years, when it's very clear it couldn't have, given things like unexpected cast changes and just the stuff from S1 that didn't align with what came later. That's par the course, imo, as showrunners want you to believe everything is perfectly coherent. Anyway, it would be fascinating to read a book devoted entirely to analyzing the evolution of the series one day.
Pre-watch comment:
At the time I wasn't certain how I felt about the resolution of Shadow War. But, let's face it, the Shadows and Vorlons couldn't be beaten by force.
Here we get the explanation of the "Third Age" as hinted at as far back as the pilot episode, and the clearest discussion of JMS's atheism. The entire Shadow/Vorlon arc is about rejection of religion in favor of a Hopefully rational approach, wrapped in the metaphor of outgrowing one's parents wrapped in the trappings of a sci fi war story.
Basically the entire story is summed up in this episode. What comes after is epilog and secondary themes.
Yes, "Get the hell out of our galaxy" is a shit line. JMS can be forgiven - he had a LOT on his plate.
Yes, this episode might "feel better" as a two parter, but, honestly, that would just mean dragging out everything else in the episode. In a theoretical two patter, however, the climax of part one is the fall of Morden with the cliffhanger being the Vorlon planet killer eclipsing the sun of Centauri Prime.
Which leaves for the second part not much... The discussion with the Shadow/Vorlon avatars and Loren
" deus ex convincica."
Yet with all the Shadow War stuff, the really standout sequence for me is Londo and Morden. As noted Jurasik is (tied with Katsulas) the best actor on the show, and Ed Wasser really gets to show his chops here when Morden's smugness is wiped away.
With big battles and First Ones and planet killers the best, and most meaningful VFX shot is from the orbit of Centauri Prime as the nukes destroy the island with the Shadow base. THAT is the moment in the episode where I could only breathe, "Fuuuuuuuck." It hits hard. The deliberate destruction of one of your own major population centers and those willing to die to set the trap.
Centauri are cray-cray.
Now we must discuss the most fist pumping "HELL ya!" moment.
Vir gets his little wave.
The destruction of the island is shocking, especially when we realise (via the excellent VFX) that we’re not talking about, say, a small island and a spaceport being blown up. It’s clearly several nukes over a vast landmass. Even aside from the Drakh etc, that’s going to have consequences.
The nuking also understandable to the audience. We've been told about planet killers and see the aftermath, but not in use.
The most horrifying mass attack (to me) is that bombardment of Narn. But that one requires the viewer to understand by the time we see it that huge amounts of particularates have been blown into the air, meaning the explosions are muted.
Now Centauri Prime - everyone can understand angling down at a landmass as mushroom clouds and shockwaves erupt. We understand it and it's a depiction of REAL destruction in a way shooting up a Vorlon base isn't.
I feel the same way as Mikhail in his comment about this episode - except with one difference. It all felt squeezed and a bit rushed but watching it for the first time I felt they *just* about got away with it.
But that line "get the hell out of our galaxy!" as if Sheridan was admonishing a couple of naughty schoolkids was over the line for me. Just too much of a cheesefest, the kind of thing that turning it into a two- or three-parter could have alleviated by adding some build-up that could have made it feel earned? Asking us to believe the two most powerful alien races in the known universe could be sent packing with a good verbal ticking-off (even though what really did it was the argument behind it), especially when they've already proven themselves to be belligerent and petty...it was a nope for me.
But knowing the constraints that JMS was working under, and the profoundly disruptive effect of him being told he wouldn't get a fifth season (and then they did it to him AGAIN by greenlighting a fifth season he didn't initially known how to fill - what a nightmare), well, I can't blame him for handing in a B-minus instead of an A-plus.
It's the little head waggle that Boxleitner does that makes the line especially silly. He may as well have shouted "on yer bike!"
"CHOOSE BETWEEN YER? YOR AVIN A LARF, INCHER? YOR NOT MY MAVVA! GO ON, GET AHTA MY GALAXY!"
- unaired Babylon 5/Eastenders crossover episode.
I think I disagree with the premise the Earth/Shadow connection is underplayed after this episode. Like how much Kosh is in the series, I think, looking back, one thinks Earth/Shadow connections are a major part of the story, but it's always been something clicking away in the background.
So, season 1 doesn't really have anything connecting Earth and the Shadows.
Season 2 we learn Icarus went to Zha'ha'dum. That's about it. Even the Earth/Centauri treaty is non-interference, not mutual defense. (Nothing indicates Bureau 13 was part of a Shadow plot, and no other Shadow plots imply reanimated corpses.)
Season 3 we see Morden's meeting with a senator and Psi Cop, learn Morden helped assassinate President Santiago, that Psi Corp teeps are being processed as Shadow ship cores, and learn IPX unearthed a Shadow ship on Mars around 2248, but that's really it. It's not really huge overarching plot.
SPOILERS AHEAD:
Of course in season 4 we'll see the Shadow Omegas (and learn in Crusade Earthforce was working on Shadow hybrids to the extent of having a prototype in 2258). And, of course the telepath virus.
But there really isn't major Earth/Shadow interaction.
Here I speculate: I feel the Shadows were assessing Earth as either a possible ally/servitor race or as something to be destroyed. I lean towards destruction. The humans found Shadow tech and, within a decade were adapting it, which makes them a threat. Humans have telepaths, which make them a threat. I think the Shadows had two prongs of operation on Earth: destabilization and resource collection. Working with Clark and his ilk - racist isolationists - removes Earth from the galactic community and hampers alliances with others. In the meantime, telepath Shadow vessel cores make the Shadow fleet stronger. Hell, let's assume there were tissue banks (clones) or "breeding pairs" on Zha'ha'dum.
Edgars' telepath virus? Hey, 1000 years ago all the Narn teeps died. Edgars' virus was planted Shadow tech. Probably a subset of what killed the Markab, and what the Drakh will unleash to kick off Crusade.
So, yeah, I think the Shadows just wanted to isolate Earth, take as many teeps as possible, kill the rest, and if Earth had any great discoveries in the tech, steal them, but Earth wasn't part of their main plans.
Thus, I think, other than Shadow Omegas and Edgars' anti telepath virus the reason we don't get more Earth/Shadow connection in s4/s5 is there aren't any.
Not everything up to "Into the Fire" was Shadow related. The Strieb are NOT Shadow affiliated. Their asshole motives are their own.