Blogs and Ends: Babylon 5 Lives?

Babylon 5 is getting a reboot.

GET BACK IN HERE!!!

Look I understand, that was my reaction too but this time it appears to be greenlit.

Arktoons creator Jon Del Arroz covers this one.

It isn’t hard to make a case for Babylon 5 being the most influential science fiction show of the 1990s.

Babylon 5 was something unique.  It was clearly a product of what had come before it, Star Trek and Star Wars as well as 1980s geekdom in general.  The science wasn’t rock hard but it wasn’t Star Wars bad either.  

The setting took place on a human built space station in neutral space in the wake of a horrendous interplanetary war between Earth and a very advanced race called the Mimbari. The war had started by accident.  The hope was that Babylon 5 could be a neutral place where differences could be worked out. 

It failed.

Babylon 5 had a great cast of characters and each one was well layered with their own story arc. The Narn ambassador started as a bad guy but after his planet was invaded and conquered, he was redeemed by the struggle to free his people into a noble character.  The Centauri was the opposite, generally a likable good-natured, and sympathetic guy until he made Faustian bargain to return his people to their lost glory.  Eventually ending his days as both an emperor and a slave. There was the loyal military officer that was one day forced to rebel against his own government.  And the alien from the ancient race that was transforming into something much more human.  All of this was set against a war where an enemy who was one of the oldest creations in the universe rose from its eons-long slumber to make war against all of the younger races of the galaxy.

The performances were all top notch.  The effects were good in their day but have not stood the test of time.  Truthfully, the effects are a fairly big legacy problem.  Although it was recently remastered, and the effects got some tweaking.

Babylon 5 was the first show (that I know of) to have a five-year story arc.  It had a very identifiable plot structure with an introduction to the setting, a rising tension until it reached its climax.  To be accurate, it did that in four seasons, the fifth was an extended denouement.  Understandable. The show was always under threat of cancelation.  

It was produced for PTEN, which was a Warner Brothers subsidiary that provided content for Non-network affiliated TV stations. Basically UHF TV.  They wanted unaffiliated stations but most of their customers were already affiliated with FOX and its five-night a week schedule, PTEN’s stuff ended up on the weekends. Toward the middle of B5’s run, it was getting increasingly more difficult to watch because FOX programming expanded to seven nights a week.  The local station near Camp Lejeune was running Babylon 5 at 1:00 AM by the third season.  I remember my wife boggling at the commercials for it, they were either 1-900 sex lines or “Mrs. King, the religious and holy woman who healed painful diseases and got rid of all kinds of bad luck.”  That is a real quote by the way.

The show was bought up by TBS and finished it’s fifth season.

I was glad it was able to finish its main story.  It was a very satisfying show taken as a whole.  It’s still worth a watch, I just wish the show was worth reworking the effects.

Sadly, it wasn’t able to capitalize on its nineties popularity.  There were a few spinoffs that never quite got off the ground.

There was Babylon 5 Crusade, which only ran for one season on TBS. In the post-Shadows War world of B5, one of the shadows subject races launches a devastating biological attack on Earth.  Earth quarantines itself, and a starship led by Captain Mathew Gideon goes on a quest that must be completed in 5 years or all life on Earth will die.  

I liked Crusade but yeah it was kind of weird.  There were very blatant fantasy RPG elements to the story. There was a mage called a Techno-Mage, a thief who belonged to a thieves guild and the starship was named Excalibur.  I did like it, but it did have tonal and theming problems, granted so did the first season of B5.  Sadly, it never got a second season.

Babylon 5: Third Space served as a potential pilot.  This one had more cosmic horror elements.  A Cthulhu-oid race older than the Vorlons was trying to break into our universe and to destroy all life and what not.  They failed and were never heard from again.

Babylon 5: River of Souls was a one shot that went nowhere.

Babylon 5: Legend of the Rangers.  This was a 2002 pilot for Sci-Fi Channel.  A five man band fighting, you guessed it, a new race of bad guys.  Sci-Fi was considering it but then Battlestar Galactica rewrote the rule book.

The last project was called Babylon 5: The Lost Tales (2007).  It was intended to be an anthology series of straight-to-DVD movies. In case you missed the year, it was 2007.  When the DVD market crashed so did The Lost Tales.

B5 wandered in the franchise wilderness for the next few 14 years.  The rights were kind of a mess so for a long time the show wasn’t legally available. After the issues expired and the rights to reverted to Warner Brothers, who sent B5 out to Amazon for streaming as part of a basic package.  Where it was discovered that, yes indeed this show was still getting streamed.

During Covid when animated projects were getting greenlit all over the place Babylon 5: The Road Home got a thumbs up.  I knew about it vaguely, but there had been other B5 reboots that were announced and died fairly quickly.  When Zaslav started shutting down all animated productions, I assumed that B5: The Road Home got axed too.  I am honestly surprised and pleased that it’s getting released later this year.