To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

If you do start watching from the beginning, there's a great guide to B5 here. (http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/) When I first watched, it was in reruns on TNT leading up to S5 airing on that network (which swore it would air the show until the sprockets wore off the tape--guess them's some flimsy sprockets!), and I found it fascinating to look at the page for each episode after I watched it. Among other things, there are comments from JMS, and I remember reading about how he would try to put things in the first few episodes of each season to catch up new folks (to the general consternation of those who'd been there from the beginning). So he did try. It's tough, though, with a series that was planned to last five years before it ever filmed a single minute, to do that adequately, I think. It's really no wonder you had trouble figuring out what was going on.