...the military presence comprises only a very small percentage of B5 population and is mainly needed for security.
Not true. Although the show makes much of the "quarter million humans and aliens" who are on the station at any given time, about 99% of those people are transients, aboard for a few days or weeks as tourists or for business purposes, or merely stopping over to change ships. The
permanent population of merchants, maintenance workers, shop and restaurant employees, dock workers military personnel is small, and the military contingent is probably the largest, since it would also include all the normally unseen engineering and technical crew who maintain the reactors, atmosphere, water and waste management systems, the core shuttle, the maint and security bots, etc.
Since the majority of the residents were military, the station had always been run by Earthforce, the arrangement was only going to be for a year, and since the future of the station and everything else was very much in flux, it made more sense to maintain the status quo rather than try something as novel as introducing a civilian administrator. (The analogy with Bremer and Iraq is completely innapropriate, by the way. In Iraq we wanted to lower the profile of the U.S. military as early as possible, even before there was any suitable Iraqi civilian authority, and so used Bremer as a kind of half-way point in returning power to the Iraqi people. B5 was an Earthforce installation being temporarily leased to the IA for a year, after which it would revert to 100% Earthforce control.)
If she really deep down loved Marcus, I think it could take her a long time to deal with the grief.
Well, JMS, who created the character, disagrees with you. So guess whose isight I'm apt to trust?
What Marcus's death taught her is that you can't wait for everything to be perfect, sometimes you have to take love when it is offered, because you might lose the chance forever in an instant. She rejected Marcus because of her own fears and it would make sense that her awareness of what she had missed with him would encourage her to
ignore any doubts she felt about Byron, because of what attending to her doubts had cost her before.
I also don't see completing an arc about Ivanova as latent telepath. She was not even a P1 by her own admission and Bester never expressed any interest in her even though he knew about her mother. To me her telepath story was over with Ship of Tears. Season Four doesn't bring it up again, so I don't see that there is a story to complete after that.
"To me..." And that's the problem. You're assuming that the story has no more potential than your rather blinkered view of it. Bester did
not know that Ivanova could initiate contact with her mother. As a P1 Ivanova would not have been much of a teep, but she also wouldn't strictly have been a "normal" either. She would have been thrown out of EarthForce and put on sleepers if detected. That was a threat hanging over her since S1. You obviously missed this
major character point. And that's not the half of what you missed. You may want to go back and watch the series again, this time paying special attention to everything involving Ivanova and telepathy.
And
of course JMS didn't do a lot with this thread in S4. He didn't think there was going to
be an S5, remember? That's why he didn't introduce Byron and his teeps late in the season. He didn't want to open new plot threads that he was never going to be able to resolve, or complicate existing ones. That's why Franklin asks Garibaldi if he should book two flights to Minbar in "SiL" - because JMS assumed that we'd never Garibaldi and Sheridan's continuing relationship in S5. But don't forget that it is Delenn, Lyta and
Susan who are touched by the Shadows early in S4 - no one else on the crew. Lyta is a telepath, Delenn is "sensitive" to Shadows. Why Susan?
Trust me, she still had issues to deal with. Her relationship with Lyta would also have developed in S5 (with Susan being a rival to Lyta, whose love for Byron would have been unrequited in this version of the story. She would still have become his successor after his death. How would that have affected her and Susan? Intereting questions. Still think there was "nothing there"?)
I still don't understand why JMS couldn't have brought Ivanova back with her new ship for a two-part episode like he did Sinclair.
)
Because Claudia Christian left effectively without giving notice and on very bad terms with JMS and most of the cast. She then spent months waging a very public fight with JMS, falsely claiming he had fired her, that TNT and WB tried to cheat her of residuals and a number of other absurdities. (The basic SAG contract sets the conditions for residuals. No studio could evade them or would be stupid enough to try. Residuals are calculated according to different formulas for basic cable shows than they are for first-run syndication shows, which may have been the source of Claudia's confusion.) She later admitted that she had quit the show, but by then production on S5 was over. While they were still shooting the series neither JMS nor most of the cast would have had any interest in bringing Claudia back for a guest shot, and it is unlikely that she would have accepted had one been offered. Michael O'Hare had left on good terms with JMS, his decision was made early enough that JMS was able to plan adequately for it, and not only did they agree to O'Hare's return for "WWE" in S3, the actor also agreed to shoot the messages that Sinclair would leave for Garibaldi and Delenn before he left Los Angeles at the end of production on S1. Two totally different situations.
JMS was fond enough of the character of Ivanova that he brought her back to B5 (and let her meet Capt. Lochley early in 2262) in the short story "Hidden Agendas".
I'm glad that hatches have been buried and everyone is friends again, and also hope that Claudia (and Susan) will figure prominently in
TMoS
Regards,
Joe
