Babylon 5 - Season Four

Okay - I finished Season 4. It got better. I didn't think I'd like the Garibaldi thing - and it was kind of goofy, but it ended pretty quickly after it was revealed what happened.

I'm frustrated by the unfortunate parallels to our real news media and the distortion of history and the media pundits who define our days for posterity.

Until I watched it again, I'd forgotten what happened to Ivanova. I knew she wasn't in Season 5, but I couldn't remember what happened to her, and I now know why. She just sort of faded away. For such a great character and a good actress, she kind of just left. No drama or discussion about it. It was too hurried and thrown together. I guess that storyline must have been sacrificed to the fact that they didn't know if they were getting a Season 5. Anyway - it would have been nice to see Ivanova and Marcus together. They could have made a dynamic couple. Sad. Very sad. In fact, I think they had more chemistry (at least friendly chemistry) than Sheridan and DeLenn.

And now, I watched about 1/2 of the first episode of Season 5. Yes, this was a bad season as I recall. They got rid of all the storylines so quickly in Season 4 that there's nothing left. I don't like Elizabeth Lochley so far. Then, again, maybe its because she's new. I'll keep trying to watch Season 5. But, I also might give it a rest for a few days.

Another result of rushing the story several times in the series is that suddenly people came out of the woodwork to tell the true story of what was going on instead of everything being discovered. All along, DeLenn kept giving a bit more of the story here and there. That's kind of lame, but I'll assume it was the production schedule that caused the problem, not the storytelling.

UPDATE: I just found this on Wikipedia. It makes me sad. If only Claudia Christian had stayed...

"Departure from Babylon 5
Amid the confusion over whether the show would get picked up for a fifth season, Claudia Christian declined to renew her contract, and did not appear in the fifth season. She was still able to appear in the final episode, as that episode was originally filmed as the finale of the fourth season and was moved forward. Ivanova did not appear in the episode that was created to serve as a new finale for season four.

Susan Ivanova on The Babylon Project, an external wiki
This departure necessitated substantial changes to the fifth season of Babylon 5. A planned episode title, "The Very Long Night of Susan Ivanova," was reused as "The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari," though the episodes did not share a plot. Furthermore, a planned romantic relationship between Ivanova and the telepath Byron that would have continued her pattern of tragic relationships was changed to be a romance between Lyta Alexander and Byron, which in turn precipitated the events of the Telepath War. A new character, Elizabeth Lochley, was created to take Ivanova's narrative role as commander of the station.

In the Season 5 episode A View from the Gallery, two maintenance workers discuss Ivanova's sudden departure. They speculate on the reasons she left, mentioning contract and pay disputes, before finally concluding that they will not ever know the true story."