What Could Have Been / Babylon 5

aka: Crusade

This happened a fair bit on Babylon 5 and its aftershow Crusade. Or maybe we just know more about it than usual because JMS was a frequent Usenet poster.

Casting

• Among those considered for John Sheridan included Barry Bostwick, James Earl Jones, Michael Moriarty, John Rhys-Davies, and Michael York (the latter of whom would guest-star in S3's "A Late Delivery From Avalon").
• The role of Knight Two in "And the Sky, Full of Stars" was originally offered to Patrick McGoohan (who couldn't fit it into his filming schedule, thus depriving us of Number Two's nemesis Number Six playing Knight Two) and then Walter Koenig (who was too ill to take it). Koenig, of course, was soon cast as Alfred Bester.
• General Hague was killed off because JMS was furious at his actor, Robert Foxworth, for being inescapably booked to guest star on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine after JMS was assured he would be available; Foxworth guest-starred in DS9's "Homefront"/"Paradise Lost" two-parter at the same time that B5's "Severed Dreams" was to be filmed. Hague's replacement Major Ryan was written with Everett McGill in mind; JMS had been very impressed by his talents on Twin Peaks, but he couldn't remember the actor's first name when discussing it with his casting director. She suggested he might be referring to Bruce McGill, and by the time the mistake was discovered, it was too late to change it.
• During the fifth season, JMS wanted to have David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson do a cameo appearance playing Psi Cops, but the plan fell through.
• W. Morgan Sheppard came very close to being cast as G'Kar. He instead got a guest role as the Soul Hunter in Season 1, and later played G'Kar's uncle, giving a taste of what he might have been like in the role.

Departures

Many events in the series would have had much greater impact if so many actors hadn't left the show:

• Jeffrey Sinclair (Michael O'Hare) was originally supposed to be the CO of Babylon 5 for the entire run, and he didn't end up transforming into the legendary Minbari figure Valen. Midway through production of the first season, Straczynski came up with the idea of concluding the series with Sinclair's transformation, realizing that he had been unintentionally foreshadowing it in dialogue. After O'Hare's untimely death in 2012, JMS revealed that O'Hare was written out due to unexpected and crippling mental health issues. Joe had "written [himself] into a corner", so Sinclair's metamorphosis was sped-up to S3 in a two-parter. He was replaced as CO with John Sheridan from Season 2 onward.
  • Additionally, Sinclair's epilogue was supposed to serve as a Distant Finale, which is why he has grey hair at the end of "Babylon Squared". His story was wrapped up in "War Without End" (as a case of The Bus Came Back) instead. His appearance was Hand Waved as exposure to the "tachyon field" causing him to rapidly age.
  • The sacrifice by Sheridan at Z'ha'dum would have been even more meaningful given Sinclair's Death Seeker tendencies, as would Lorien's question about what he had that was worth living for.
  • Bonus: Garibaldi's betrayal of Sheridan would have cut all the deeper if it had been of his "old friend" Sinclair.
  • Regarding Garibaldi: With Sinclair gone, there was no way to incorporate the Flash Forward of Garibaldi's You Shall Not Pass! moment in the future (as forseen in "Babylon Squared"); it likely would've happened during the events of "Severed Dreams." It was retconned from a premonition of the future to a possible Bad Future. That future is averted in "War Without End", so Garibaldi never wages his last stand.
  • When the message for Garibaldi was filmed, in the interim between production for season 1 and 2, both Straczynski and O'Hare were hopeful that Sinclair could eventually return to the show in a lesser capacity (similar to Lyta in later seasons). However by the time season 2 wrapped it was very clear that O'Hare's wouldn't be in any shape to resume even the limited schedule necessary for such a part, and he was written out in the third season. If things had gone differently, it's possible he may have even become a regular later on.
• The original plan was for Laurel Takashima (the XO from the pilot) to be a Manchurian Agent: she was going to be the one who shot Garibaldi and eventually get put down (i.e. Talia's ending). Ivanova would have already been a CIC officer at this point, and would have then taken over as second-in-command. Takashima's actress declined to return for the series (a year had passed between the pilot and the beginning of the main series, and she'd found other work), so they had Ivanova replace her as XO and split Takashima's arc between Talia and Garibaldi's traitorous aide, Jack.
  • Ironically, the reason Takashima was planned to bow out in Season Two was because JMS knew that the actress had a film career and wouldn't stay long. He just assumed that she'd at least come back for the series. JMS let this particular detail slip, causing many fans to assume that Ivanova would now be the traitor. Anticipating this, JMS dropped in red herrings here and there that seemed to be pointing in that direction, like her off-camera escape from the raiders.
• Originally, Catherine Sakai would have been the one to go missing while investigating Z'ha'dum, not Anna Sheridan, meaning that her subsequent return as a Shadow Meat Puppet and death would have carried considerably more impact than it did with the previously-unseen A.S. (and it would have doubled as Death of the Hypotenuse). One also wonders what Morden's backstory would have been, as this would have meant he was already working for the Shadows before the incident. Still, fans are generally content with the changes, as "stuffing women into fridges" fell out favor with the public in the 2000s. Killing off a character we've grown to know and like just to further her fiancé's development would have aged a little poorly.
• Remember that Talia had her Psi power boosted by Ironheart. When the actress left, they had to bring back Lyta and have her Psi boosted by the Vorlons in order to fill Talia's role. So Talia would've been in the Byron role: the advocate for rogue telapaths trying to form a colony on B5, while Ivanova would've been torn between her feelings for Talia and her duty. That would've been much better, a-yup.
• Ivanova and Talia would have become an explicitly-lesbian couple if Andrea Thompson hadn't quit the show, though JMS still took it as far as he could in the limited time with the shot of Talia reaching out for an absent Ivanova while sleeping in a bed. He elected not to transplant the new telepath (Lyta) into Ivanova's love life as it would be too clumsy.
• Following Andrea Thompson's departure, Ivanova, who would have been station commander in the fifth season rather than Lochley, was supposed to become romantically involved with Byron the telepath, and have her latent powers awakened. When Claudia Christian left the show, the romance subplot was given to Lyta; she was originally going to have a platonic relationship with Byron, but still would have become one of his followers.
• JMS has said that if he had known Claudia Christian was going to leave him holding the bag in Season 5, he would have kept Marcus alive.

Main series

• Delenn was originally intended to be a male character played by a female actress with a digitally-altered male-sounding voice. The plan was to have Delenn's transformation to half-human after the first season also change the character from male to female. However, during the making of the pilot movie they couldn't get the voice effects right to change her pitch to "male", so they decided to just make the character female from the start – this only required re-dubbing one line to change a "he" to "she". Another issue was that Mira Furlan, not knowing about the story arc, was understandably confused and uncomfortable about why they even hired her if they were going to cover her face and modulate her voice. They changed the female Minbari makeup to appear more feminine once the first season began.
• After the infamous network memo demanded that a Han Solo-type character be added, JMS' first idea was that of a Japanese man who was deeply-invested in his heritage. The execs vetoed it, so we got Warren Keffer instead.
• It was long-planned that Harlan Ellison would write an episode, probably to be called "Demon In The Dust/On The Run", as a sequel to his 1964 Outer Limits episode "Demon With A Glass Hand". Unfortunately the episode never materialized.
• There was going to be an episode where Lennier hallucinates a cast-swapped version of the station, with the actors all switching roles, complete with makeup. JMS still occasionally vents about PTEN's low opinion of his audience, insisting that they'd be hopelessly confused by it and never watch again. Remnants of this can be still seen in "Sic Transit Vir", including a doctored photo of Sheridan as a Centauri bureaucrat. (Also, shows like Farscape, SG-1, and even Star Trek: Voyager have used the makeup-switching gag to great effect.)
• Also torpedoed by Executive Meddling, JMS had a Musical Episode planned.

Babylon Prime

JMS recently went one step further by releasing his original five-year document as part of the issuing of the complete scripts for the series. This document is startling, as it is very far removed from what happened in the actual series.

• Sinclair indeed remains on B5, but he doesn't become Valen. Instead, at the end of Season 5 the Shadow War is still raging, but the Alliance against the Shadows is betrayed by the Minbari warrior caste, who destroy Babylon 5 near the end of the series. Sinclair and Delenn go back in time, retrieve Babylon 4 and bring it forwards in time to serve as the new base of operations. This would lead into a sequel series, Babylon Prime, in which the conclusion to the Shadow War, Earth Civil War and so on would all happen. In the end, the two series ended up being mashed into one.
• That "original five-year document" dates back to 1993, having been written between the pilot movie and the first season. The actual original scribblings of JMS from when he first came up with the concept of B5 back in 1986 have been released on the Internet here, and are actually closer to the finished TV show in a lot of ways than the "original outline" is. For one thing, the original intention was that there be just one TV show lasting five years — no more, no less. Comparing the two documents, one gets the impression that the 1993 "original outline" was significantly watered-down to appease the network, pushing all the most expensive stuff into a hypothetical sequel series in order to sell them on the first one. And as it turned out, B5's success allowed JMS to do the entire Shadow War & Earth Civil War stories in the one series.

Crusade

Crusade was cancelled after a half-season due to TNT wanting to wash their hands of the property.

• Michael York, who showed up on B5 as a man hallucinating that he was King Arthur, was available to return as Captain of the Excalibur. But TNT said no, because they didn't want to imply every starship captain in the future will be British (read: they didn't want to invite comparisons to Star Trek: The Next Generation). TNT pushed for Gary Cole due to his "accessible" nature. Writer Janet Greek decided that Cole should be fired after she watched the first three episodes he filmed, to the point where she and other writers toyed with killing him off in the cliffhanger, "The End of the Line".
• JMS had a five-year arc planned out for the show, which he's teased at over the years and will be revealed with the publication of Crusade scriptbooks:
  • "To the Ends of the Earth", by JMS, would have kicked off the series' true story arc. This would also (presumably) have been the Season 1 title, in line with Babylon 5's volumes. Gideon gets a lead from his Apocalypse Box (a Soul Jar containing an ancient, insidious being) pointing to the phantom ship which mysteriously destroyed his old command, the Cerberus. The Excalibur goes AWOL when Gideon embarks on a Captain Ahab-type mission to find the phantom ship. They manage to destroy it after a prolonged chase and submarine-like battle in an asteroid field, but the Excalibur is damaged and Gideon alienates much of the crew. It's revealed that unbeknownst to Gideon, Matheson is aware of the Apocalypse Box. The episode ends with Gideon and Matheson finding evidence that the Excalibur has an "opposite number", and the audience learns the phantom ship had some connection to Earthforce.
  • "Value Judgements", by Fiona Avery: To open a telepathically-locked alien tomb, the crew seek out a seldom-seen local telepath who is rumored to be vastly-powerful—only to discover that it's Alfred Bester, now on the run for war crimes he committed during the Telepath War. Bester uses the opportunity to try and manipulate Matheson. Walter Koenig had signed on to reprise his role as Bester from B5 and thought the script was the best he'd read from the franchise yet. The episode would also have explored Matheson's history as a Psi Corps telepath and how normal/telepath relations had changed (or not) in the intervening years.
  • "Tried and True" was a standalone story, also by Fiona Avery: Mafeek, who was name-dropped in A Call to Arms as a big shot in the Thieves' Guild, imprisons his ex-pupil Dureena and interrogates her to find out why she signed on with the Excalibur.
  • A trio of episodes, loosely called "the Sword trilogy", would've focused on Dureena and Matheson during the unfilmed latter half of Season One.
    1. "War Story": Dureena is abducted by an unknown ship and Matheson believes he is responsible.
    2. "The Walls of Hell": Gideon and Matheson seek the help of the Apocalypse Box to find Dureena, but after first declaring that "Dureena is unimportant", the Box manipulates the situation to possess Matheson's body and take over the whole ship.
    3. The untitled third part of the trilogy: When Dureena finally returns to the ship, it's with no memories and a mysterious glowing sword.
  • "The End of the Line", by JMS, would have been the season finale: Gideon traces the origin of the phantom ship to a top-secret Earthforce base. He learns that the Earth Alliance was experimenting with Shadow technology well before the Shadow War, in direct violation of Interstellar Alliance policy. They now want to eliminate Gideon to maintain their secrets. The source of Technomage powers is revealed to be Shadow technology organically-bonded to living beings; the earliest Technomages were servants of the Shadows who went rogue. (This was later explored in the Technomage trilogy of novels by Jeanne Cavelos.) Galen has to break Gideon out of custody, and the first season would have ended with Gideon travelling alone to Mars in an attempt to expose Earthforce, only to be shot and killed by one of their snipers.
• Additionally, three scripts had been written and prepped for production when the show was cancelled, including the season finale. Side note: After none of these story arcs came to fruition, writers attempted to include them in their Expanded Universe novels. The Passing of the Techno-Mages trilogy delves into the origin of the techno-mages as tools of the Shadows. Also, the Earthforce/Shadow hybrid ship which destroyed the Cerberus meets a different end: it's destroyed shortly following a weapons overload.
  • The cliffhanger would be resolved in Season 2 by transferring Gideon's consciousness into the Apocalypse Box until his body can be restored to life. As the result of embarrassing their government, the Excalibur crew would be "black-balled" and become renegades much like B5's "Army of Light." Ultimately, the cure to the Drakh plague would have been discovered around the middle of the second season, since the Earthforce conspiracy was always meant to be the centerpiece of the show.
  • In 2010, it came to light that Peter Woodward (Galen) wrote an entire episode which JMS had slated for the second season. It's called "Little Bugs Have Lesser Bugs", and would've been/is (if you read the script) equal parts icky and funny.
• The captured Telepath Resistance member in Matheson's flashbacks to the Telepath War in "The Path of Sorrows" was originally going to be Lyta Alexander, but TPTB couldn't be convinced to offer Patricia Tallman an appropriate salary.
• The earliest conception of Crusade involved a quest to free Earth from a full-blown Drakh occupation.

---