Decades after it went off the air, Babylon 5 remains one of the greatest sci-fi shows of all time in part due to the vision and hard work of its creator, J. Michael Straczynski (JMS). In developing the series, JMS wrote out an entire five-year plan, from beginning to end, ensuring the show told a single, cohesive story.
JMS wrote 92 episodes himself, so why did the series go off the rails during its fifth and final season? It was because all of those plans found themselves in a hotel’s trash when a housekeeper didn’t realize what she was throwing away.
JMS has been very open over the years about the trials and tribulations of bringing Babylon 5 to life, including how his notes were stolen when someone broke into his house, prompting a series of rewrites and a few lost ideas for the final season. Losing his notes a second time during a work trip, after having recreated them once, was devastating. During interviews and appearances at conventions, he’s admitted to trying to recreate the season from memory, but a lot was lost, leaving us with the telepath storyline playing a large part in the first half of the episode, as that’s what stuck out in his memory.
The Psi-Corps at the front and center of the early season could never match the success of The Shadow War, and we’ll never know exactly what was originally planned for Season 5, even though it was always intended to be the final season. After TNT informed JMS that Season 4 was going to be the end, he moved up his plans and adjusted the climax so that The Shadow War could be completed.
This change meant large chunks of what was supposed to be Season 5 took place a year earlier than originally intended, and even then, after a round of rewrites and narrative realignments (can Marcus come back? How much should be spent on Sheridan managing the Alliance?), disaster struck again when Claudia Christian opted not to return to the series for reasons that depend on who you ask, meaning that the space station was now without Susan Ivanova.
The situation was mentioned in-universe with the episode “A View From The Gallery,” when Mark and Bo, two regular station techs on board Babylon 5, go over the reasons why Ivanova may have suddenly left, from a pay dispute to Marcus’s sacrifice, unable to settle on what the real story is, and realizing they’ll likely never know. Elizabeth Lochley, played by Tracy Scroggins, fills in, with the revelation coming later that she was married to Sheridan at one point, for “about five minutes,” according to the President.
If you go back and watch Season 5, you’ll notice that Lochley is part of the first episode, “No Compromises,” but isn’t a large part of the cast until the fifth episode, “Learning Curve.” After all, she wasn’t part of the original plan.
Lochley stayed with the franchise and became a recurring part of Crusade, the spin-off series that was going to be introduced during Season 5 of the main show, except that the amount of studio interference made it impossible. Originally developed as Babylon 5: Rangers, it would have been about a small group navigating the galaxy and solving problems for the Alliance. A jettisoned plot from Season 5 was going to highlight the Drakhs causing problems on the fringe planets, laying the groundwork for a full-scale civil war, which would be the basis of the new series.
That didn’t happen, and instead, fans were stuck with Crusade, focusing entirely on the quest for a cure to the plague. Who knows what the spin-off could have been if JMS hadn’t lost his notes twice and if Claudia Christian had returned for the final season? The only thing we do know is that the lackluster Psi-Corps storyline would have been handled much differently, and the final season of a fantastic series would not be considered a pointless mess by most of the fanbase.
