"You may not find out who built the Great Machine in the series, but that will be one of the features of one of the planned TNT movies. And there will be more on the Valen/Sinclair transformation as well."
Did I miss something there?
If you mean, "Is there another TV movie or two that I don't know about?", the answer is, "No."
I don't know the date of that JMS message, but you have to realize that there was this odd interim period when PTEN was folding and it was absolutely certain that there wasn't going to be a fifth season. Nobody was even interested in picking up the show for another year. But the show wasn't completely dead because the syndication rights to the reruns had been sold and that deal included at least two TV movies with the possibility of more. I think that JMS post you quoted must come from this period.
Both TNT and The Sci-Fi Channel, however, were interested in picking up the series reruns. TNT eventually won the bidding war.
At that point they had never produced an original series, and weren't interested in doing so. But they did produce TV movies that got very respectable ratings and often very good reviews. So they decided to commission two original
B5 movies to show in conjuction with the reruns of the four completed seasons, and later also offered to finance the re-edit and re-scoring of
The Gathering.
This was at the beginning of season 4, so JMS went into the year knowing that he had 22 episodes in which to wrap the series, but that he also had 2 TV movies as well. He pitched what became
ItB and
Thirdspace to the network and they agreed. So now he could do "Atonement" as a single episode instead of the planned two-parter, and get the "dark side of IPX, greater mysteries in the universe" thread that he'd wanted to fool with in S5 at least briefly explored in a TV movie.
The discussion at that point turned to the idea of perhaps doing 3 or 4
B5 movies a year going forward, assuming the ratings for the reruns and the first two movies were good. These would all be 2 hour (90 miniutes of story time) films along the lines of
ItB and
Thirdspace. (Whch were, the 2nd and 1st TV movies shot, respectively.) So the business about exploring the origins of the Great Machine and doing a Valen story were probably in the context of that original TV movie plan.
There had been some hardcore
B5 fans at TNT lobbying to pick up the 5th season for awhile, but nobody took them seriously. That began to change when they started shooting
Thirdspace (which was shot first even though they always planned to air it second, because it used the
B5 sets - which were still standing after the end of S4.
ItB required all the available stage space that Babylonian productions had, so they had to strike and store all the regular
B5 sets in order to make it.) TNT saw what a model of efficient production Babylonian was, and began to believe that they really could produce a series for the kind of budget and on the kind of schedule that they would require. That's what got them talking to Warner Bros. at the 11th hour, and that's what saved the show for a fifth season.
As S5 got going JMS was ramping up production on
Crusade, he was
still expecting to do a couple of
B5 TV movies a year for TNT, the books were just coming out and Warner Bros. was thinking seriously about a feature film. Again, he saw himself as having a larger canvass to work with and other venues in which to tell certain stories, so the seeds of the teep war were planted in S5, but nothing more, and some TV movie ideas were pushed down the priority list so that more time could be spent laying the groundwork for
Crusade (directly in
A Call to Arms) and establishing the new characrter of Lochley, who as commander of B5 would carry over into the spin-off. (
River of Souls - which also continued the "ancient mysteries/IPX search for alien secrets" thread that would also continue in
Crusade)
Then TNT sabotaged
Crusade and the whole theoretical house of cards came tumbling down.
Regards,
Joe
