Good question, Jan. The shorter shooting schedule makes sense, and some parts of season five seemed rushed. More scenes were taking place in hallways which all looked the same. The Zocalo was used a lot less, I would think because of the cost of paying all those extras to walk around. I don't recall the casino being used for any scenes after season three, which would have been more because Londo stopped going there. It all made the station feel smaller, less lived-in. It wasn't like the huge setting that was home to 250,000 that the series devoted so much work towards portraying in earlier seasons. Netter Digital's work seemed more uneven than what Foundation was doing in season 3, like all the explosions that didn't look like they fit the things that were exploding because they were filmed separately, I think that started in season four.
Something I loved early on in B5 were the station interior CGI shots, the core shuttle traveling the length of the station and so forth. I thought it was too bad that they largely stopped doing that, it was really unlike what anyone else was doing with digital effects at the time. It was one of the ambitious, experimental things that really set B5 apart from the rest. Exploring the station's vastness and previously unknown areas was part of the fun of the series, the docking bays, the alien sector, the Cobra Bays... but not so much Grey 17. A lower budget basically dictates that this sort of thing take a back seat to telling effective stories, obviously. I also wonder what we would have seen while exploring Excalibur during Crusade?
I do wonder what season five was supposed to look like before changes were forced by necessity. JMS had stated earlier in the series that season five would be all 'Wham!', with more arc stories than the previous seasons. I would think budget dictated some of those changes, and JMS and company had to prioritize what they really wanted to focus on, while letting some stories and storylines go, or wait until later. Instead we got episodes like 'Learning Curve', a stand-alone episode that didn't really fit. Claudia Christian's departure obviously created some difficulties for the writers as well, but I'm afraid I don't know much about how that and the budget were related. I certainly enjoyed the Telepath Crisis, the ISA-Centauri War, Day of the Dead, The Corps is Mother, the Corps is Father, and other parts of season five which worked well.
Raw Shark
"You forget yourself, Mollari!"
Emperor Cartagia
