The final season of B5 felt weak because JMS was afraid they were going to be canceled and wanted the Shadow War finished if that was the case. Sadly, the Shadow War felt a bit rushed as a result and left a lot of weak plots for Season 5. Personally, I hated the Psy characters (Byron's group), despite enjoying Walter Koenig's character throughout.
I would have liked to have seen Crusade proceed at least as far as the cure, although it sounds like bigger things were in store. I'd much rather see that done with a new cast than a reboot of B5 as it would be new material for the most part.
They're not going to beat the original cast, just disappoint people, IMO. They could redo the special effects to true HD and more realism if they really wanted to "improve" the series, along with a Dolby Atmos soundtrack. That plus a new Crusade would be a much better service to the fans, but sadly the studios only want proven projects (reboots for TV; movies can get sequels, but not shows unless they're continuations).
Frankly, a reboot would not be able to survive the woke wagon train and just further disappoint fans with endless episodes about gender, race, required introductions with personal pronouns and apologies for the "colonization" of other planets (the new cause of the Earth/Minbari War?). Snore....
The remastered versions are actually pretty good for "true HD". I was skeptical at first, especially because they lose the 16:9 formatting, but on the whole I've been happy with my rewatch.
There's more to the story of Season 5 than has been told here. As I understand it, several things happened that contributed to it being probably the weakest season of the show (and I include 1 with that).
First, there was the threat of cancellation. It was unclear towards the end of Season 4 what was going to happen with the show. Would it be renewed or cancelled? JMS always envisioned the show (and had planned for it) to be 5 seasons long, and had a general plot (plus trap doors) for the whole thing, but not necessarily a specific episode-by-episode plot in mind. But towards the end of Season 4, it seemed the show might end up cancelled. So, they filmed the finale, "Sleeping in Light" to be used as a final episode of Season 4. I think that would've mostly worked, but without the denouement we get in Season 5.
Then the show got renewed, so they filmed the Season 4 finale, which I actually really like. It's very different, but it's fun.
In the run-up to Season 5, two things happened that I think kinda hurt the season. First, Claudia Christian left the show. The precise details of her departure are...unclear to me. There are multiple stories that have surfaced over the years and I don't know which is the truth, which is only a partial truth, or whether they're all true and still require additional info to fully piece together. Suffice to say that with Ivanova gone, storylines that were probably gonna go to her had to be shifted to other characters (e.g., Lyta).
The other story I heard just recently was that JMS had more detailed notes for how he was going to do the story for Season 5...and they wound up being lost in a hotel room during a convention. Housekeeping tidied them into the trash or something. But it meant that he had to scramble to throw together a season again, and do it all in a rush.
I will say that I find the Byron storyline to be...irritating, but mostly because (1) I don't like how Byron was portrayed (even if I like his actor's other work), (2) I found that a bunch of the writing for Byron was too "Byron-esque" by which I mean overwrought, and (3) I thought it was misplaced as just a 5-episode mini-arc that then gets dropped. It would've been one thing if telepaths and telepath rights vs. psi-corp became a big issue in the rest of the season and carried into future stuff. But as it stands, we never see the Telepath War. It's hinted at, but we never see it actually happen. Several of the official novels talk about the background for Psi-Corps, and they're actually pretty cool and interesting, but we don't see the actual conflict itself. Anyway, the Byron arc is weak. No question. Not
awful, but weak. It also doesn't help that it feels like everything else is just treading water at that point. The Drakh are only
barely getting moving, setting the Centauri against the remaining Alliance worlds, the Alliance itself is just doing some boring political stuff, so the entire focus shifts to Byron and his community theater rejects. (WHY DOES EVERYONE HAVE LONG HAIR?!?!?!)
But when they switch to the Centauri war, things get good. It also sets up some interesting stuff in some of the books. I'm reading them at the moment and rather enjoying them. And the finale....holy cow, it breaks my heart in the best way.
I've only read the Technomage and Telepath trilogies, are any of the others good? I know there's an ebook that Claudia Christian wrote, based on a JMS outline, but I haven't read it yet.
So far, I've read the first two Telepath books, and am currently reading the first Centauri trilogy book. It's good so far. Much like the Telepath series, they really nail Londo's voice. Vir (so far) seems pretty good, too.
I gather there are two other books that are worth reading: (1) To Dream in the City of Sorrows, and (2) The Shadow Within, which I gather is kind of a prelude to the Telepath trilogy, given that it's written by the same author (Jeanne Cavelos).
These books are not hard to find, but they're getting expensive.
There are also several other novels, but they apparently weren't based on anything JMS wrote, so they're just kinda meh at best.
