After seeing the news that Christopher Franke will be scoring new Babylon 5 adventures for the first time in nearly five years, I’m looking forward to the upcoming direct-to-DVD anthology Babylon 5: The Lost Tales a little bit more. But something has been nagging in the back of my head about this project almost from the first announcement. And finally, I think I know what it is.
To start off, I’m going to need to see a DVD of brand new B5 in my hot little hands before I believe it. We’ve had a B5 movie that was deep into pre-production get scuttled, we’ve had a new PC game with full-motion, shot-on-the-soundstages footage with Bruce Boxleitner and Mira Furlan get scuttled, we’ve had a pilot for a new series come and go without and order, and we’ve had the crushing disappointment of Crusade getting yanked. Babylon 5 may have dodged bullets left and right during its years on the air, but ever since Sleeping In Light, the attempts to keep the franchise going have resulted in a string of disappointments and near-misses that you could almost make a drinking game out of. So, composers signing on the dotted line or no, I’ll believe The Lost Tales when I see ’em.
But that isn’t even the big thing that’s bugging me.
I put this question to you for discussion: Can new Babylon 5 adventures be relevant in a Battlestar Galactica world?
So much has happened since Babylon 5 was on the air as a series, both on television and off. In its heyday, B5 stole the Star Trek spinoffs’ crown as the quintessential SF TV show exploring the human condition through the lenses of beliefs, politics, philosophies, ethics and current/recent events. I forget if it was Peter David or David Gerrold who said, in Trek’s waning days (i.e. Enterprise), that the Star Trek franchise was no longer telling stories about those things, but was just eating its own tail and telling stories about the minutiae of the Star Trek universe. (I’m almost sure it was Gerrold.) But the problem now is that, unless there are some radical shifts in tone and style, Babylon 5 could become the same thing when it returns.
Besides, if you ask anyone what today’s quintessential SF TV show exploring the human condition through the lenses of beliefs, politics, philosophies, ethics and current/recent events is, I don’t think anyone’s going to even hesitate to say Battlestar Galactica. The whole re-genesis of Galactica was filtered through the post-9/11 mindset from its conception, so it would almost have to try very hard not to be about current events. As some of the best hours of Babylon 5 (and, indeed, the original Star Trek) did, the new Galactica offers no easy answers, and its characters give no ground in the name of Making Them More Palatable To The Audience.
And then there’s the device of the story arc. When Babylon 5 premiered, Warner Bros. execs balked at the notion that an audience would stick with a five-year “television novel” – it had never been done before, and surely it would never work.
These days, we get story arcs so densely layered and unforgivingly inscrutible that Babylon 5, with its frequent “white-flash-to-B&W-footage-from-previous-episodes” flashbacks, almost seems like an uncertain dummy run at a story arc. Babylon 5 would hand big chunks of some pivotal episodes over to flashbacks to help clue viewers in; ever since Buffy and Angel, the standard operating procedure now is to do that at the beginning of the show after someone says “Previously, on…”, and anyone who missed that recap at the beginning of the show is just out of luck. If there’s a recap at all.
And look at the sheer number of densely-plotted story arc shows on the tube these days: Lost, Galactica, The Nine, Prison Break, Heroes, Jericho…the list goes on an on. And those are just the ones that are on the air in the current season, never mind shows like Threshold, Invasion and so on that have fallen by the wayside when their ongoing stories apparently didn’t spark enough interest for audiences to follow them.
So now that its biggest innovations – CGI effects instead of traditional model work, involved story arcs, virtual sets – have become de rigeur not just for SF TV, but for a lot of non-genre TV as well…what can Babylon 5 bring to the table? Straczynski is already making it very clear that he wants to redraw some of the universe’s stylistic boundaries and find a new way to shoot B5. But is that the only place where his well-loved universe will need some tweaking to find an audience today? Or is the direct-to-DVD format of the new stories a hint that a new audience isn’t being sought, and that these Lost Tales are just a new offering to the faithful?
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