Lost Tales and found appreciation

For some reason – maybe a bit of boredom, admittedly – I watched Babylon 5: The Lost Tales for what has to be…well…frankly…the second time. For some reason I’ve just had B5 on the brain lately, and for some reason it’s been bugging me that I’ve seen, to pull an example out of nowhere, The Fall Of Night probably 20-30 times. I watched The Lost Tales once, on the day I bought it, and I was so put off by what I saw that I never went back for seconds until now.

One vital ingredient to this story that I should also point out: I was folding lots of laundry while I had The Lost Tales on. This is, believe it or not, important, because in some respects I was listening to the first segment (the Lochley/priest/exorcism/devil story) more than watching it, for the most part. For an atheist, JMS crafts some really interesting stories around plot elements of religion and faith, and while this story (I forget if it was, technically, Over Here or Over There) is no Passing Through Gethsemane, it was more interesting that I remembered it being, and I enjoyed it tremendously – it made me think.

At least until I looked up at the screen, saw the crazy dutch camera angles aiming up the cast’s nostrils thanks to JMS’ hamfisted direction of his own perfectly good script, and remembered what had put me off of The Lost Tales in the first place: really, this first segments strikes me as the stronger story, but the visual approach taken to put it on the screen is distracting – the kind of direction that can take even a casual viewer right out of the story. The second story (Sheridan/Centauri prince/Galen), though not really as strong, was given a much more conservative approach visually, and is much more digestible in that sense.

With both stories, I was struck by how much of what was filmed was actually filmed on practical sets – there still seems to be this lingering assumption that the whole thing was green-screened and the sets were virtual. In some cases though, and maybe it’s down to odd choices in terms of lighting, some of these perfectly real sets look a little fake. Maybe this was done to draw attention away from the sets that were virtual. I don’t know. I still haven’t watched the bonus features.

I came away from this first-ever rewatching of The Lost Tales thinking that perhaps things might’ve picked up with a second release, especially with the much-talked-about unfilmed Garibaldi story, but of course, as we know, JMS decided to hold out for a Major Motion Picture. Which I understand as well, though I’m no sooner expecting such a thing to actually happen than I’m expecting a real live Vorlon to show up and sit and watch Curious George and eat banana slices with Evan in the morning.

Going back to virtual sets for a moment, though, I ask again, because this really bugs me especially in light of JMS’ “holding out for a B5 movie deal” announcement: where are the fan films? Where’s Babylon 5: The New Voyages? Because this is a show where one does, in fact, seem to expect everything to be virtual, Babylon 5 could be a playground for fan filmmakers. The 3D models of the ships and so on exist in abundance on the ‘net, as is the fan following itself. I wonder if the roadblock isn’t the perception that JMS is the only writer who should be grafting new limbs onto the B5 story, but what about the side stories waiting in the wings to be told? Is there a sense that Warner Bros. just wouldn’t wear that kind of unauthorized appropriation of its IP as gracefully as Paramount has?

One final note, concerning both the post-series TV movies and The Lost Tales: if there was one singular spectacular failure of Babylon 5’s movie trips into its own past, chronologically speaking, it was the failure to ever revisit the story of Jeffrey Sinclair. I know Sinclair’s transfer to Minbar was covered in comics and novels, but there was so much story invested in that character, and Michael O’Hare’s portrayal so interesting and multi-layered, that Sinclair was ripe for something more than just the re-use of old season 1 episode footage in In The Beginning.