re: #117 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

Roddenberry was an ideas guy, you could call him into a TV exec’s office and he’d pitch ideas for several TV shows that would sound interesting and full of potential. But then you’d greenlight one of them and find out that he only ever had the base outline in mind of what he wanted. That was most obvious in the ill-fated third season of TOS, when all the talented members of the writing staff saw the writing on the wall and jumped ship, leaving him and the guys with no better job prospects to muddle through under the new producer’s mandates until the axe came down.

JMS was basically the opposite, he came to the pitch meeting with five full seasons plotted out and the script for the pilot, all he needed to do was write the scripts for the remaining seasons. Problem was that the folks at Turner screwed him over by contracting him for five seasons, but then deciding during the production of the fourth that they didn’t like where the viewership numbers were and announced the series was ending a season early. JMS took them at their word and rushed the series’ end by cannibalizing heavily from the plotted fifth season, only for Turner to then change their minds and greenlight the fifth season. So that’s why the fifth season seems unnecessary, because all the story JMS wanted to tell was already told and he was basically fulfilling contractual obligations after that point.