Babylon Prime

[pascalahad]

I have some questions regarding the original series outline published in volume 15 of jms' scripts. Is there an indication of when and why jms decided to make Babylon 5 a self-contained show, instead of a 5-years show with an open ending, possibly leading to the Babylon Prime spin-off? Has he discussed it anywhere?

Season 1 seems to follow closely the pattern described in the outline, with the end of the station featured in Babylon Squared (no shaving your head Mister Garibaldi!).

[JoeD80]

I don't think it would have been as open-ended as people think. Joe once described constructing the show as a "russian puzzle-box." I take that to mean that once the five years had been done, you would have been able to piece together what was going to happen in Babylon Prime whether it was green-lighted or not.

Also, some of those concepts may have been moved into the main Babylon 5 show (taking Babylon 4, end of the Shadow war, putting together the Alliance) but there was stuff that was still left open-ended that we would have seen parts of in Crusade (Telepath War, Earth using shadow tech).

Certainly the change from Sinclair to Sheridan is the major piece that shifted other parts of the show around. Really a lot of the stuff in the outline was still used though.