Season 4 was just as excellent as Season 3, and I think a reason is that there were less standalone episodes and more focus on the arcs. Essentially Babylon 5 looked doomed. The “network” that carried it, PTEN, was clearly near death. The channel was struggling for a while, and it was looking like it didn’t have too much left. So the fate of Babylon 5 looked shoddy. Straczynski looked at his baby and decided to make a few changes to his 5-year plan. He cut out a lot of the fat from the story, cut out most standalone stories (I can barely think of any stories that were standalone this season), and focused everything on wrapping up as many of the main threads as possible, without entirely closing the door in the event they did get a fifth season. Straczynski was so sure he was not going to get another year he shot a series finale, but when TNT finally did pick the show up for it’s fifth and final season, Straczynski quickly wrote and shot another episode to serve as the Season 4 Finale.
So with all that background out of the way, Season 4 was great. I mean I like the fact that Straczynski cut through the fat and really focused the show on the events at hand. I mean he covers a ton of a material in this season...and tackled a lot of it with resolutions that managed to be pretty satisfying. The Shadow War came to an end, and in the midst of that the Centauri-Narn occupation finally ended, and Londo and G’Kar even seemed to come to a sort of understanding of one another in the end. It was not like they become buddies, but they seemed to have a slight mutual respect for each other. We then got a Minbari Civil War which, while short, served it’s purpose...and then the final build up and execution of the Earth Liberation from Clark. I mean he fit the build up and whole War into this season. It was really well crafted for being an attempt to rush an end to the major threads like Clark and Earth and the Shadow War before the threat of imminent cancellation can take effect.
I wholly enjoyed this season, as well as many of it’s twists and turns...and I think had the show not gotten a chance to have one last year, this would have been a fine end for this series.
NEXT TIME: Ten Years Before
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