I've watched some of Andromeda in Sci-Fi reruns and it's a tough show to watch in reruns because ultimately across the 5 seasons of it there is more like 3 different shows with the same casts: the opening season and a half form a somewhat tight arc with clear intentions, the middle section is squishy and just shy of nonsensical, and the Sci-Fi purchased season 5 is nonsensical, bending the middle section back towards the opening themes weakly. The disjoints are clearly due to behind the scenes pressures and show up as clear events: 1) The head writer was thrown away half-way into Season 2 in an attempt to make the show more palatable to syndication. 2) Sci-Fi picked up the show, attempted to fix the show by returning to the arc-heavy roots while being faithful to the middle section shenanigans and without attempting to bring back the old head writer. (All of this reminds me of Sliders.)

Thanks to the Wikipedia I found Robert Hewitt Wolfe's Insider Info page, which contains a one-act, unofficial coda to the series. Wolfe was the aforementioned head writer of the show's opening sequence, and the coda is an enlightening glimpse of where the show was planned to go, rather than what it became. It's a rare and wondrous thing to get such a glimpse into a television series' back story, and it makes Andromeda more watchable even as it begs the question of how in the future we can encourage more shows to go the distance and give us the hard and true character's journey over the simplistic and easy "happy ending".

I've bought all of Babylon 5 because I love such art, and it is always amazing every time I think about how we get even its 5 and a half years (counting Crusade) and sundry movies out of the meat-grinder that is the world of television production...

I can only hope that the current renaissance being led by Lost and Heroes is a real thing and not a fad or a passing whim in the industry.