Babylon 5: Previously unreleased concept art and interviews with 16 FX artists

[Ilwrath]

I would like to have seen the Vorlon/Shadow War take all of Season 4, the Earth Civil War take all of Season 5, scrap just about everything done with the produced/aired version of Season 5, and had Season 6 deal with Londo's salvation.

Yeah, well, like they said, it didn't look like Babylon 5 would get renewed for the 5th season.  So the story wrap up got crammed into the 4th season, preparing for the very real possibility that would be the end of show.  They actually filmed "Sleeping in Light" as episode 423, the series finale, fit to air as the last episode of season 4.  When they learned they got season 5, they held that episode back and it became 523.

The only real reason I'd re-watch season 5 is Garibaldi.  Corporate leadership suits him very well.    Otherwise, if ya wanna skip the resolution to the telepath storyline, slap "Sleeping in Light" at the end of Season 4, and you're all good.  

[Ilwrath]

In terms of characters there's nothing that came since that compares to the fantastic arcs of G'kar and Mollari.  Also Sheridans arc of discovering who the masters are, what the game is really about and leading the rest of the noobs to kick them out of the galaxy... Great stuff, and a very tough act to follow.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more, there.  So much of the story played out through G'kar and Londo.  It really anchored the story in a way that made people understand and care about the B5 universe.  Almost to the point that I don't see how you could possibly do another large Babylon 5 universe story without G'kar.  

I was really surprised to see how little of that was in the suspected original storyline referenced earlier.  You could tell early in the show that they were building toward the fall of Babylon 5, and switching to Babylon 4, but I just figured that plan got scrapped when they needed a convenient place to send Sinclair off to.  (Write the whole station swap off as an alternate future that didn't happen.)  But I figured the rest of the story was pretty much as planned aside from a bunch of season 5 content getting crammed into season 4.  But that outline showed something quite different.  (And I agree, the Babylon 5 we got was a LOT better than that outline!)