According to one of the two B5 companion books (not sure which one now as my dogs destroyed them) it sort of got a bit more complicated than that.
Claudia wanted to be able to take a couple of episodes off, as you said, and the show said fine, but then her agent I think it was or someone needed it to be in writing, rather than just this casual "Yeah, we can totally work around her off-B5 shooting, no biggie" verbal agreement they had. And once they needed it set in stone in writing then it all fell apart, because now if she's actually officially absent for a couple of episodes then suddenly she's making more per episode than she should be, so they wanted/needed her to take a pay cut so the other actors wouldn't be going "What the hell, dude? She's making $xxx in 20 episodes instead of 22 (or whatever the numbers were)?"
And so then it kind of became this renegotiating-her-contract thing (which again was iirc complicated by the fact that no one else was getting their contracts renegotiated, what the hell), and there was all this question of whether or not they could do it in a way that was fair to all the other actors too, and they were running out of time for figuring it out, and so then finally they just had to go, "We can't make this work" and not renew her. Which is a real shame.
Iiif I recall things correctly, a lot of the fault lies with the network for not deciding until the very last minute whether or not it was going to pick B5 up for that fifth season, because of course no matter how much you want it to be there and to be able to work on it again, you gotta eat, so you can't really turn away the bird in the hand, if you know what I mean. So not knowing if there even was gonna be a fifth season, and all indications looking like there wasn't, Claudia took the movie job. And then tried to just get a few episodes off so she could meet that obligation...
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Claudia wanted to be able to take a couple of episodes off, as you said, and the show said fine, but then her agent I think it was or someone needed it to be in writing, rather than just this casual "Yeah, we can totally work around her off-B5 shooting, no biggie" verbal agreement they had. And once they needed it set in stone in writing then it all fell apart, because now if she's actually officially absent for a couple of episodes then suddenly she's making more per episode than she should be, so they wanted/needed her to take a pay cut so the other actors wouldn't be going "What the hell, dude? She's making $xxx in 20 episodes instead of 22 (or whatever the numbers were)?"
And so then it kind of became this renegotiating-her-contract thing (which again was iirc complicated by the fact that no one else was getting their contracts renegotiated, what the hell), and there was all this question of whether or not they could do it in a way that was fair to all the other actors too, and they were running out of time for figuring it out, and so then finally they just had to go, "We can't make this work" and not renew her. Which is a real shame.
Iiif I recall things correctly, a lot of the fault lies with the network for not deciding until the very last minute whether or not it was going to pick B5 up for that fifth season, because of course no matter how much you want it to be there and to be able to work on it again, you gotta eat, so you can't really turn away the bird in the hand, if you know what I mean. So not knowing if there even was gonna be a fifth season, and all indications looking like there wasn't, Claudia took the movie job. And then tried to just get a few episodes off so she could meet that obligation...