[Izkata]

> It had all the room it planned for and needed at the start.

Almost. Come S4 they got concerned the show would be canceled before finishing the story, so they dropped all the secondary plots from S4 and S5 and compressed the main plots from S4 and S5 into just S4. Then they got renewed and quickly wrote a new S4 finale using S5 budget, postponed the series finale a year to S5, and reworked all the dropped secondary plots into S5.

Personally I think this worked really well, made S4 much more fast-paced and S5 feels more like a "the world keeps turning" extended epilogue.

[account42]

Can't say I agree - to me S4 felt quite rushed and seemed to be missing a lot more than just secondary plot developments. They go from "unstoppable enemy with the Vorlons being the only real hope" to "telepaths go brrr, also Vorlons are dicks now" in basically no time and then also jam in the battle for earth in the same season which felt really jarring. Then S5 feels like it's setting up the next big plot (the remaining shadow allies and specifically their hold over the centauri) only for that to end on a cliff hanger where nothing gets resolved even in the finale set in the far future.

It's really unfortunate that so many bad things happened to this show since it being still great overall despite them suggests it could have been one of a kind if things had gone better.