TV Babylon 5 is being rebooted - and JMS is involved [Archive]

Corvus

2021-09-28, 07:16 AM

I never thought I'd see this - but Babylon5 is being rebooted (https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/27/22696836/babylon-5-reboot-j-michael-straczynski-warner-bros-the-cw), and the creator of it, JMS, is running the show.

There is little detail so far beyond the initial description;

In a from-the-ground-up reboot of the original series, John Sheridan, an Earthforce officer with a mysterious background, is assigned to Babylon 5, a five-mile-long space station in neutral space, a port of call for travelers, smugglers, corporate explorers and alien diplomats at a time of uneasy peace and the constant threat of war. His arrival triggers a destiny beyond anything he could have imagined, as an exploratory Earth company accidentally triggers a conflict with a civilization a million years ahead of us, putting Sheridan and the rest of the B5 crew in the line of fire as the last, best hope for the survival of the human race.

Fyraltari

2021-09-28, 07:28 AM

Interesting. My first thought was that it might have been an occasion to show the story as originally envisionned (with Sinclair all the way through and the original fifth season) but thinking about it, I think Straczynski is right about not attempting to cross the same river twice. What was fresh back then, wouldn't be today.

I will keep an eye on that one.

Rynjin

2021-09-28, 07:46 AM

Could be interesting. The leaps and bounds in effects alone might make this worthwhile, but the original cast was SO GOOD for the most part I have a hard time envisioning replacements.

AgentofOdd

2021-09-28, 07:57 AM

This one is fairly apprehensive about this. CW reboots (at least the ones I've seen) I've been subpar at best, sci-fi shows generally aren't very popular, and CW loves to cancel shows. Best case scenario, we'll get a terrible show that everyone will ignore. Worst case scenario CW will create an incredible reboot that fans will love... then cancel it after 1-2 seasons.

Dire_Flumph

2021-09-28, 08:57 AM

I found it hard to believe until I saw JMS confirm it on Facebook. Babylon 5 was the last show I was really into in a massively fannish way while it was airing (I'd probably cringe now at my old usenet posts from the time), and while I'm excited, I also remember the decline of quality through Season 5 into Crusade into Legends of the Rangers (Lost Tales was good, but the budget was down to almost nonexistant at that point), so I'm hesitant to get too excited.

It's also a shame it's a complete reboot, but what can you do at this point? I'd love to see the Telepath War, but with so many of the cast passed on it would feel hollow.

And while the CW doesn't have the best track record, where exactly would be a better fit? Put it on Netflix and it's almost a guaranteed 2 season then cancel. HBO Max would likely have sky-high expectations and B5 has never managed more than a small but passionate fanbase. With JMS at the helm at least, the CW might not be a bad place for it.

But I'm still looking forward to seeing what magic JMS might still conjure. In a post Battlestar/Game of Thrones/Mass Effect world, Babylon 5 is no longer as unique as it was, but few series in the US have done long form storytelling as well as B5 did.

Dragonus45

2021-09-28, 09:32 AM

Psyren

2021-09-28, 10:06 AM

And while the CW doesn't have the best track record, where exactly would be a better fit? Put it on Netflix and it's almost a guaranteed 2 season then cancel. HBO Max would likely have sky-high expectations and B5 has never managed more than a small but passionate fanbase. With JMS at the helm at least, the CW might not be a bad place for it.

Given what they did with The Expanse I'd have said Amazon, but they look like they have their hands full.

As it stands, those two cursed letters (CW) make me extremely leery.

Wintermoot

2021-09-28, 10:44 AM

Dire_Flumph

2021-09-28, 11:08 AM

I try not to hold season 5 or crusade against JMS, both in their own way were an excellent example of just how badly a network can actually screw over a show. Crusade especially. I'm really curious what it looks like now that JMS is back to doing show running for network TV but now in a position where his name carries real weight to push back.

While a lot of that is true, his name is on those scripts. He was definitely screwed over by the network, but he also insisted on writing all the scripts for seasons 3, 4 and most of 5 and watching things as they aired, I can tell you, the decline was noticeable at the time. Listening to him on Usenet it was clear he was tired and stretched thin. He needed to find collaborators he could work with, who could turn out scripts he could work with and share the load. And it's not like none were available. I really wish Peter David had been able to do more with the show for example, I remember him expressing an interest in writing more for the show at the time, both of his season 2 episodes were very good, and he ended up writing the excellent Centauri Prime Trilogy as a capstone to the original series, which I would call required reading for B5 fans if it hadn't been out of print for decades now.

I wish I could see the results of a season 4-5 unencumbered by network troubles, and a Crusade that was a fully realized vision. But I also wish I could have seen those things made with a full creative team of writers JMS could share the load with. Later Babylon 5 works had bits of greatness to them, but the writing just is not up to the standards of the earlier show.

Given what they did with The Expanse I'd have said Amazon, but they look like they have their hands full.

As it stands, those two cursed letters (CW) make me extremely leery.

100% agree. Also 100% can't think of a better realistic option. Amazon is killing the Expanse after all without letting it get to where the books will end. Getting a B5 reboot made at all is kind of an out of left field thing at this point. Finding a home that will keep it for a full run of episodes? Maybe the CW isn't a bad option. A moderate hit has at least a decent chance there.

Cikomyr2

2021-09-28, 11:16 AM

While a lot of that is true, his name is on those scripts. He was definitely screwed over by the network, but he also insisted on writing all the scrips for seasons 3, 4 and most of 5 and watching things as they aired, I can tell you, the decline was noticeable at the time. Listening to him on Usenet it was clear he was tired and stretched thin. He needed to find collaborators he could work with, who could turn out scripts he could work with and share the load. And it's not like none were available. I really wish Peter David had been able to do more with the show for example, I remember him expressing an interest in writing more for the show at the time, both of his season 2 episodes were very good, and he ended up writing the excellent Centauri Prime Trilogy as a capstone to the original series, which I would call required reading for B5 fans if it hadn't been out of print for decades now.

I wish I could see the results of a season 4-5 unencumbered by network troubles, and a Crusade that was a fully realized vision. But I also wish I could have seen those things made with a full creative team of writers JMS could share the load with. Later Babylon 5 works had bits of greatness to them, but the writing just is not up to the standards of the earlier show.

Season 2-3-4 were the peak of B5, and that's including season 4 being a cramjob because the network told JMS he wouldn't get a 5th season, so he had to wrap up all the open plot lines.

And then he got told to do a 5th Season. And the story goes he had a lot of leftover plots ready to go, but a cleaning maid lost most of the material he had written for Season 5; with the Telepath rebels plotline being the one surviving. So they went with that to start the 5th season, and by the time they got around to film after the Telepath enclave, JMS had actually managed to recreate his material. And, in my opinion, Season 5's second half got a lot better. The Telepath storyline just plain sucks in a vacuum.

Dire_Flumph

2021-09-28, 11:38 AM

Season 2-3-4 were the peak of B5, and that's including season 4 being a cramjob because the network told JMS he wouldn't get a 5th season, so he had to wrap up all the open plot lines.

And then he got told to do a 5th Season. And the story goes he had a lot of leftover plots ready to go, but a cleaning maid lost most of the material he had written for Season 5; with the Telepath rebels plotline being the one surviving. So they went with that to start the 5th season, and by the time they got around to film after the Telepath enclave, JMS had actually managed to recreate his material. And, in my opinion, Season 5's second half got a lot better. The Telepath storyline just plain sucks in a vacuum.

I'd agree that Seasons 2-4 were the peak certainly. Season 1 had a lot of work doing worldbuilding out of whole cloth, getting production on firm ground, and dealing with a few weak scripts and weaker guest stars. Season 4 was very strong even with the uncertainty of renewal leading to some terrible pacing issues in the back half (I'm especially irritated that we went from "If Garibaldi shows up on the station again I want him shot on sight" to "All is forgiven with no lasting consequences" in the space of an episode or two). I remember watching the end of Season 4 and the distant finale of "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars" and thinking that Season 5 was going to have to be really special to top that as a series finish.

I'm not sure I believe that scripts were lost, that wasn't the story at the time, and Word Processers were a thing in the 90's. Season 5 had other troubles. The momentum ground to a screeching halt at the end of Season 4 since they had to potentially finish the show, and it required building it up again. Claudia Christian left, and it's clear she was supposed to have taken over the station, and been a major presence in the last year (Can you imagine just how much Ivanova could have added to the Telepath storyline? No wonder stuff had to be thrown out and rewritten). Instead they had to create a new character to fill her shoes that never quite gelled with the story. The Telepath plotline was just badly written and realized, somewhat salvaged in my opinion only by Walter Koenig and Patricia Tallman. The second half of the season was better, but given no room to breathe given how big a story they were going for. Just as momentum was building up, everything had to wind down again without a proper resolution (Which at least, as I mentioned, Peter David's books admirably concluded). JMS was in a bad position, but he managed to work around real life difficulties more adroitly in the past, I still think stress and exhaustion from overwork due to the load he placed on himself were major contributors to the show's decline. And that at least was something he could have handled better.

El Dorado

2021-09-28, 11:49 AM

I wonder if Christopher Franke will be doing any of the music. That would be amazing.

Cikomyr2

2021-09-28, 12:03 PM

I'm not sure I believe that scripts were lost, that wasn't the story at the time, and Word Processers were a thing in the 90's. Season 5 had other troubles. The momentum ground to a screeching halt at the end of Season 4 since they had to potentially finish the show, and it required building it up again. Claudia Christian left, and it's clear she was supposed to have taken over the station, and been a major presence in the last year (Can you imagine just how much Ivanova could have added to the Telepath storyline? No wonder stuff had to be thrown out and rewritten). Instead they had to create a new character to fill her shoes that never quite gelled with the story. The Telepath plotline was just badly written and realized, somewhat salvaged in my opinion only by Walter Koenig and Patricia Tallman. The second half of the season was better, but given no room to breathe given how big a story they were going for. Just as momentum was building up, everything had to wind down again without a proper resolution (Which at least, as I mentioned, Peter David's books admirably concluded). JMS was in a bad position, but he managed to work around real life difficulties more adroitly in the past, I still think stress and exhaustion from overwork due to the load he placed on himself were major contributors to the show's decline. And that at least was something he could have handled better.

That's.. no proof that JMS is lying. Just because something exists doesn't mean JMS did use it. Or preferred to use it to carry around his own documents. Or even if he did, that he kept a software copy.

I agree that 5th season if very, very garbled, and I do think that if JMS had its way, we'd only remember season 1 as the odd black sheep, still very essential to the worldbuidling.

I do love that season 1 is.. basically pre-inciting incident. You rarely see that.

Dire_Flumph

2021-09-28, 12:55 PM

That's.. no proof that JMS is lying. Just because something exists doesn't mean JMS did use it. Or preferred to use it to carry around his own documents. Or even if he did, that he kept a software copy.

Whoah, pump the brakes there! I never said he was lying. I've never heard him tell that story, and it doesn't gel with things I have heard him say about the writing process for B5. Do you have a link to where he said that, because it doesn't sound right.

It was pretty clear he didn't have a briefcase full of completed scripts for the series, by his own admission of how the writing process went. He did, however, have a detailed outline with the overall series storyline, and the history of the galaxy in about a few thousand years in either direction, and that was certainly not something that was destroyed in a mishap. There's a pretty large collection of his comments on the writing process in general and for episodes in particular on the Lurker's Guide (http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/eplist.html), which is still up after all these years. There's some good reading in there for any B5 fan if you haven't seen it.

Dragonus45

2021-09-28, 12:56 PM

While a lot of that is true, his name is on those scripts. He was definitely screwed over by the network, but he also insisted on writing all the scripts for seasons 3, 4 and most of 5 and watching things as they aired, I can tell you, the decline was noticeable at the time. Listening to him on Usenet it was clear he was tired and stretched thin. He needed to find collaborators he could work with, who could turn out scripts he could work with and share the load. And it's not like none were available. I really wish Peter David had been able to do more with the show for example, I remember him expressing an interest in writing more for the show at the time, both of his season 2 episodes were very good, and he ended up writing the excellent Centauri Prime Trilogy as a capstone to the original series, which I would call required reading for B5 fans if it hadn't been out of print for decades now.

He isn't totally blameless for the issues in season 4 and 5 but but the networks did give him the business. And Crusade was a case of literal sabotage.

100% agree. Also 100% can't think of a better realistic option. Amazon is killing the Expanse after all without letting it get to where the books will end. Getting a B5 reboot made at all is kind of an out of left field thing at this point. Finding a home that will keep it for a full run of episodes? Maybe the CW isn't a bad option. A moderate hit has at least a decent chance there.

If Amazon had had the Expanse from Day 1 I think it would be a very different situation. As it is, by the time they got a hold of it it really was just to late to right that ship.

What "weight" do you imagine he has exactly? Looking at this credits for the last 20 years I really don't see much of anything. I liked Jermiah and... the first half of Sense8, but both were failures commercially and critically.

The last 20 years? Of being an acclaimed comics writer who also wrote several successful movies, and despite not liking Sense8 at all myself if it had been anywhere but netflix it would still be going right now with a great deal of critical praise and awards heaped on. Jeremiah was also rather successful and it's cancelation is baffling to this day. Plus when you consider his lack of enthusiasm for pushing a reboot of this before then realistically, this isn't happening unless the CW actively wants it from him. Also, and this may be more important then any other factor, he is the executor of Harlan Ellison's estate and I imagine a fair few people wanting to play nice for a chance at getting a hold of some of those stories and IP. To say he has no weight when dealing with ****ty notes or other network shenanigans is kind of off.

Palanan

2021-09-28, 01:02 PM

I liked the original pilot (which had a more diverse and interesting cast) but was unimpressed with the first season, and never came back to it.

So I wouldn’t be naturally drawn to this—but the fact that it’s planned for CW makes it a hard pass with no looking back.

Wintermoot

2021-09-28, 01:22 PM

The last 20 years? Of being an acclaimed comics writer who also wrote several successful movies,

Perhaps I should have said 10-20 years then. Which is a long time in hollywood. But let's talk about "acclaimed comics writer" and "several successful movies"

Movies:

Changeling 2008
Ninja Assassin 2009
Thor 2011
Underworld Awakening 2012
WWZ 2013

And then.... nothing for 8 years? And which of those, other than Thor, would you call a successful movie? Using what metrics? {Scrubbed}And Thor is USUALLY down on the bottom of most people's lists of good marvel movies but it would've succeeded no matter WHO wrote it.

{Scrubbed} All I see, looking down through his bibliography, is a guy who keeps getting fired or leaving jobs over creative differences.

and despite not liking Sense8 at all myself if it had been anywhere but netflix it would still be going right now with a great deal of critical praise and awards heaped on.

{Scrubbed}

Jeremiah was also rather successful and it's cancelation is baffling to this day.

Hey, I for one loved that show{Scrubbed}

Plus when you consider his lack of enthusiasm for pushing a reboot of this before then realistically, this isn't happening unless the CW actively wants it from him.

Funny. Every single quote I've seen here or elsewhere indicates that it was WB who had the lack of enthusiasm. Not JMS.

Also, and this may be more important then any other factor, he is the executor of Harlan Ellison's estate and I imagine a fair few people wanting to play nice for a chance at getting a hold of some of those stories and IP. To say he has no weight when dealing with ****ty notes or other network shenanigans is kind of off.

Ah. Well I didn't know that. But if you are saying JMS's weight comes from his control over the estate of a far better writer you aren't really giving him any credit for his own worth. {Scrubbed} He can cdrtainly use his control over Ellison's estate as leverage to get his way in many arguments. That would be class-a respectable behavior.

Dragonus45

2021-09-28, 02:26 PM

Perhaps I should have said 10-20 years then. Which is a long time in hollywood. But let's talk about "acclaimed comics writer" and "several successful movies"

Movies:

Changeling 2008
Ninja Assassin 2009
Thor 2011
Underworld Awakening 2012
WWZ 2013

And then.... nothing for 8 years? And which of those, other than Thor, would you call a successful movie? Using what metrics? {Scrub the post, scrub the quote}

Changeling was critically liked, has a very high audience rating, was nominated for and won multiple awards, and turned a profit. Sounds successful to me. Ninja Assasin was stupid but fun enough to have an over 50 audience score and turn a profit, I know jack **** about the Underworld franchise but WWZ was also liked by both audiences and critics and turned a profit. There I kept it nice and simple for you.

{Scrub the post, scrub the quote}All I see, looking down through his bibliography, is a guy who keeps getting fired or leaving jobs over creative differences.

Oh no, stay right here buddy. It is admittedly difficult to find some details for sales numbers for indie comics. If you have any numbers for example Rising Stars or Midnight Nation that say they weren't successful go ahead and let me know. Looking at reviews for them both then and now they look pretty acclaimed to me, and that's before you get into an 8 year run at Marvel that included running the Amazing Spiderman for 6 that is highly regarded outside of One More Day, which he was wildly against doing in the first place. Supreme Power was also supposedly pretty good but I have not read it. Then you look over at his time at DC you see three number 1 best seller Superman: Earth One books... yea nothing here worth saying he was acclaimed.

{Scrub the post, scrub the quote}

{Scrubbed}

Hey, I for one loved that show, {Scrub the post, scrub the quote}

Just about every review for it I find from both then and now is glowingly positive and every story about it's cancellation comes down to it being screwed by some combination of back end production issues and not that it failed as a show. Sounds successful to me.

Funny. Every single quote I've seen here or elsewhere indicates that it was WB who had the lack of enthusiasm. Not JMS.

Last we heard about a reboot before this was talks about a movie and barely that and JMS has never seemed super wild about the idea. Warner Bros themselves have been pretty solid on not wanting to bother with the series for ages now. A reboot happening probably comes from the network. CW. Where JMS said specifically mentioned this was happening because of fans over at the network.

Julian84

2021-09-28, 02:55 PM

Supreme Power was also supposedly pretty good but I have not read it.

I dunno who is saying Supreme Power is good, because it's really, really not. Very edgy, only goes for lowest hanging fruit, and shoehorns in a bunch of sexualized material bc it was a MAX imprint and hamfisted sex apparently sells, except when it doesn't. As a JMS fan, I have no idea what he was snorting when he wrote that.

J-H

2021-09-28, 03:03 PM

I think this is a mistake.

I was going to compare it to rebooting Star Trek with new actors for Kirk and Spock, but I guess they did that... and nuTrek was not a great success (no more movies/not as profitable, very paint-by-numbers, not worth a rewatch). That's my opinion so let's not derail on it like it's the Sequel Trilogy (killer of threads).

All of the big plot twists have been revealed, so there will have to be changes made for the sake of being different. Different is not always better. I have heard that the Final Fantasy 7 remake works pretty well, but it's some sort of self-referential thing with timey-wimey shenanigans or future knowledge in play.

The cast of B5 is, frankly, a bit hammy at times (looking at you Bruce Boxleitner), but they worked well together and had a lot of character growth. I think it will be impossible to replicate the Mollari/G'Kar relationship with new actors. Some of the other roles are also so tied to the actor's style that it'll be hard to be equal to the original performance (Garibaldi, Delenn, Marcus, Ivanova).

The way to not make it a mistake would be to make it officially an AU where historical events went differently, and we have different characters in key roles, with some similar plotlines but also some substantial differences that make the arc of history develop in a different direction.... maybe the Narn work with the Shadows; the Psi Corp isn't evil, just misunderstood; the Minbari aren't running "Better Than Everyone" tech; etc.

JadedDM

2021-09-28, 04:06 PM

Wow, who knew there were so many B5 fans in a forum called Giant in the Playground? :smalltongue:

For what it's worth, I am pretty excited about it. JMS went into more detail on Twitter, here (https://twitter.com/straczynski/status/1442621159221043202?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5 Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1442621159221043202%7Ctwgr% 5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.themarysue.com%2Fbabylon-5-getting-reboot-straczynski-the-cw%2F), if you are interested.

Or you can just read it here:

To answer all the questions, yes, it’s true, Babylon 5 is in active development as a series for the CW. We have some serious fans over at the network, and they’re eager to see this show happen. I’m hip deep into writing the pilot now, and will be running the series upon pickup.

The network understands the uniqueness of Babylon 5 and is giving me a great deal of latitude with the storytelling.As noted in the announcement, this is a reboot from the ground up rather than a continuation, for several reasons. Hera****us wrote—

— “You cannot step in the same river twice, for the river has changed, and you have changed.” In the years since B5, I’ve done a ton of other TV shows and movies, adding an equal number of tools to my toolbox, all of which I can bring to bear on one singular question:

if I were creating Babylon 5 today, for the first time, knowing what I now know as a writer, what would it look like? How would it use all the storytelling tools and technological resources available in 2021 that were not on hand then?

How can it be used to reflect the world in which we live, and the questions we are asking and confronting every day? Fans regularly point out how prescient the show was and is of our current world; it would be fun to take a shot at looking further down the road.

So we will not be retelling the same story in the same way because of what Hera****us said about the river. There would be no fun and no surprises. Better to go the way of Westworld or Battlestar Galactica where you take the original elements that are evergreens and —

put them in a blender with a ton of new, challenging ideas, to create something fresh yet familiar. To those asking why not just do a continuation, for a network series like this, it can’t be done because over half our cast are still stubbornly on the other side of the Rim.

How do you telling continuing story of our original Londo without the original Vir? Or G’Kar? How do you tell Sheridan’s story without Delenn? Or the story of B5 without Franklin? Garibaldi? Zack?

The original Babylon 5 was ridiculously innovative: the first to use CGI to create ships and characters, and among the very first to shoot widescreen with a vigorous 5.1 mix. Most of all, for the first time, Babylon 5 introduced viewers accustomed to episodic television to —

— the concept of a five-year arc with a pre-planned beginning, middle and end…creating a brand new paradigm for television storytelling that has subsequently become the norm. That tradition for innovation will continue in this new iteration, and —

— I hope to create additional new forms of storytelling that will further push the television medium to the edge of what’s possible.

Let me conclude by just saying how supportive and enthusiastic everyone at the CW has been and is being with this project. They understand the —

— unique position Babylon 5 occupies both in television and with its legions of fans, and are doing everything they can to ensure the maximum in creative freedom, a new story that will bring in new viewers while honoring all that has come before.

Onward!

LibraryOgre

2021-09-28, 04:25 PM

There is a line that I have consistently hallucinated is in the original for years, and I'd love to see a version in the reboot. That line is

"The Vorlons ask 'Who are you?' The Shadows ask 'What do you want?' The humans have a question as well. They ask 'What the hell is wrong with you people?'"

Pex

2021-09-28, 04:32 PM

To do it over is an injustice against the original. The original was perfect. Everyone has their quibbles of what they didn't like, but no quibble demands the show be redone. A new epic set in the same universe is fine, but they would need to be careful not to make it a Star Trek clone now that the show ended with the creation of the galactic alliance. If they can't do that better to leave it alone and not do anything.

GloatingSwine

2021-09-28, 04:46 PM

Amazon is killing the Expanse after all without letting it get to where the books will end. Getting a B5 reboot made at all is kind of an out of left field thing at this point. Finding a home that will keep it for a full run of episodes? Maybe the CW isn't a bad option. A moderate hit has at least a decent chance there.

I think the books put them in a bit of a bind there. There's a 20 year timeskip between books 6 and 7 and it then follows the same cast but now they're all old and creaky (also I envisaged the characters about 10-15 years older in the books to start with, especially Amos).

I liked the original pilot (which had a more diverse and interesting cast) but was unimpressed with the first season, and never came back to it.

So I wouldn’t be naturally drawn to this—but the fact that it’s planned for CW makes it a hard pass with no looking back.

Every SF series has a bad first season. All the budget gets eaten up by the sets, costumes, and recurring alien prosthetics. But all that stuff doesn't need paying for twice so subsequent seasons end up with more to spend on actual episodes. There are some right stinkers in Season 1 as a result (Infection*, TKO).

There's still some good in there though. Basically all the main arc episodes are good.

* Is episode 4 cursed? Infection is Episode 4, so is Code of Honor on TNG and Emancipation on SG-1, abject pish the lot of them.

Fyraltari

2021-09-28, 05:08 PM

* Is episode 4 cursed? Infection is Episode 4, so is Code of Honor on TNG and Emancipation on SG-1, abject pish the lot of them.

It's a common superstition in Asia to think that 4 is an unlucky number (like 13 in Europe and its colonies) because the Chinese* words for 4 and death sound similar.

*Don't remember if it's in Mandarin or Cantonese or another dialect.

JadedDM

2021-09-28, 05:23 PM

* Is episode 4 cursed? Infection is Episode 4, so is Code of Honor on TNG and Emancipation on SG-1, abject pish the lot of them.

Fun fact: Code of Honor (TNG) and Emancipation (SG1) were both written by the same person.

Rynjin

2021-09-28, 05:38 PM

Fun fact: Code of Honor (TNG) and Emancipation (SG1) were both written by the same person.

Holy ****, really? This is a fact I probably knew since they were both SFDebris Christmas episodes, but I must have forgotten.

It's a common superstition in Asia to think that 4 is an unlucky number (like 13 in Europe and its colonies) because the Chinese* words for 4 and death sound similar.

*Don't remember if it's in Mandarin or Cantonese or another dialect.

I'm not sure what the Chinese equivalence is, but in Japanese they're both "shi".

Spacewolf

2021-09-28, 05:47 PM

So I'm kinda interested kinda not, B5 was good but is this a case of the writer wanting to do it again, or to do something different or did he get a car full of money parked outside his house. If it's the first the Shadow war could probably be fleshed out abit more but the punch is going to be lost, if it's the second why not make a new setting and if it's the third it's probably not going to be any good. So yea not going to get my hopes up.

Palanan

2021-09-28, 05:57 PM

Originally Posted by GloatingSwine
Every SF series has a bad first season.

Firefly. :smalltongue:

Cikomyr2

2021-09-28, 06:18 PM

Firefly. :smalltongue:

Obviously that series's worst season

QED

Mechalich

2021-09-28, 06:37 PM

I'm very leery of this. B5 doesn't need to be rebooted. The original is an excellent show that, aside from technological changes, holds up very well.

It's not like B5 has some unique or brilliant plot. It's actually a fairly standard space opera setup in which a group of mostly humanoid species struggle with their interrelations against the backdrop of the meddling of more powerful precursor species. Even the focus on a central space station is a fairly common element (and in TV it's an obvious move to save on costs). The original was simply executed very well, with a cast that fit their characters well and worked effectively together.

I honestly don't see any real advantage to rebooting B5 versus making a new space-station based space opera show. Sure, B5 has an existing fanbase, but it's not gigantic and it's exactly the kind of passionate group that is more likely to be repelled by a new show that's only mediocre (and as mentioned science fiction historically struggles in season one).

Brother Oni

2021-09-28, 06:44 PM

It's a common superstition in Asia to think that 4 is an unlucky number (like 13 in Europe and its colonies) because the Chinese* words for 4 and death sound similar.

*Don't remember if it's in Mandarin or Cantonese or another dialect.

I'm not sure what the Chinese equivalence is, but in Japanese they're both "shi".

In Japanese, they're homophones (四 - 4 and 死 - death), to the extent that there's a separate word, yon (よん), that's commonly substituted.

Mandarin is the closest with 4 (四 - sì) and death (死 - sǐ) sounding very similar with only a tonal inflection (youtube link (https://youtu.be/QwvlAbisiRc?t=181)).

Cantonese is less similar with 4 (四 - sei) and death (死, séi); that said, 14 and 24 are considered more unlucky because 14 (sahp sei) sounds like "will certainly die" (實死 - saht séi), and 24 (yih sei) sounds like "easy to die" (易死 - yih séi) (youtube link (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6mQyXp2_kw)).

Corvus

2021-09-28, 07:52 PM

Cikomyr2

2021-09-28, 08:00 PM

One thing I would change is having Sinclair the whole way through rather than Sheridan. A war survivor suffering trauma would be a better character than a war hero. Plus they could do the whole character arc properly this time.

No. Better have Sheridan replaced after the end of season 1, replaced by Commander Jeffrey Sinclair

dafrca

2021-09-28, 08:11 PM

I will give it a chance but I am not overly excited they will be retreading the same story over again.

I woudl rather see a new story set in the same universe but that is just me of course. :smallbiggrin:

Dire_Flumph

2021-09-28, 08:18 PM

One thing I would change is having Sinclair the whole way through rather than Sheridan. A war survivor suffering trauma would be a better character than a war hero. Plus they could do the whole character arc properly this time.

I think I'd prefer a new character, new background, new JS name. If JMS is going full reboot, then I'd like him to tread reused ground as little as possible. (Side note, this show is why all my Shepard's in Mass Effect, male or female, have J names)

Rynjin

2021-09-28, 08:46 PM

I think I'd prefer a new character, new background, new JS name. If JMS is going full reboot, then I'd like him to tread reused ground as little as possible. (Side note, this show is why all my Shepard's in Mass Effect, male or female, have J names)

I believe the official names for Shepard are John and Joan, so this is even canon! I believe intentionally, from half-remembered interviews from over a decade ago.

Corvus

2021-09-28, 08:49 PM

I think I'd prefer a new character, new background, new JS name. If JMS is going full reboot, then I'd like him to tread reused ground as little as possible. (Side note, this show is why all my Shepard's in Mass Effect, male or female, have J names)

Mine did too, though I think it was more influenced by Stargate Atlantis.

Willie the Duck

2021-09-28, 08:54 PM

I'm uncertain what I'd really want from this. Other than seeing Susan and Talia get even a full episode of their subtexted daliance, there isn't anything specifically that I think was missing from the original. I simply wish that the budget and network interference and early cancellation/uncancellation and actors not being available at a given time hadn't happened, and thus we had gotten a more perfect implementation of what came to be. Even if this new thing gave us exactly that, it wouldn't retroactively fix the original run of the show.

I'm very leery of this. B5 doesn't need to be rebooted. The original is an excellent show that, aside from technological changes, holds up very well.

It's not like B5 has some unique or brilliant plot. It's actually a fairly standard space opera setup in which a group of mostly humanoid species struggle with their interrelations against the backdrop of the meddling of more powerful precursor species. Even the focus on a central space station is a fairly common element (and in TV it's an obvious move to save on costs). The original was simply executed very well, with a cast that fit their characters well and worked effectively together.

I honestly don't see any real advantage to rebooting B5 versus making a new space-station based space opera show. Sure, B5 has an existing fanbase, but it's not gigantic and it's exactly the kind of passionate group that is more likely to be repelled by a new show that's only mediocre (and as mentioned science fiction historically struggles in season one).

I tend to agree with all of this. B5, Firefly, heck even most successful sitcoms like Friends or Cheers aren't successful because of a perfect premise, but because the cast has talent and chemistry with each other.

Pex

2021-09-28, 11:58 PM

On a depressing note you know fandom would be wanting cameos from the original cast, but so many are gone.

Rodin

2021-09-29, 03:25 AM

I have more hope for this than most reboots. JMS is involved, and has the right idea - don't try to do it the same way, because the original is there. Tell a new version of the story that fits the times (although Babylon 5 was depressingly prophetic in a lot of ways, or perhaps some issues are just timeless) rather than lean into nostalgia.

On the flip side...it's the CW. CW has a certain reputation, and there's a reason I've never watched their superhero shows. The cast chemistry is what made the first show work, and a lot of the charm comes from all the production difficulties. It was also a product of its time, and I'm not convinced a modern version with modern techniques would get the same results.

So...wait and see, I guess? I'm not sure how much availability I have to the CW without a cable subscription here in the UK, but I'm willing to give the show a fair shot. I would love to see an updated version made by someone who cares for the original (and JMS very much does), and if its disastrous anyway I still have my DVDs of the original. They aren't going anywhere, so I don't have a problem with them having a go.

Morgaln

2021-09-29, 04:22 AM

The only way I can really see this succeeding is if it is a mostly new story with completely new characters. If you use the same characters, you'll always have the performance of the new actors being measured against that of the old. Even with the nostalgia lenses taken off, anyone will be hard pressed to measure up to the likes of Jurasik's Londo and Katsulas' G'Kar.
Likewise, if roughly the same story is told, you'll have to compete with the most outstanding episodes of the old show, like "The Long, Twilight Struggle" or "Severed Dreams". Even if they are new characters, you don't want someone deliver an obvious repeat of G'Kar's speech upon the capitulation of Narn, of Londo's response to "What do you want?" or of Delenn warning the Earth Force fleet attacking B5. You need to let the new show make its own way, or it is doomed to fail.

Dragonus45

2021-09-29, 08:42 AM

LibraryOgre

2021-09-29, 01:42 PM

On a depressing note you know fandom would be wanting cameos from the original cast, but so many are gone.

One of his cited reasons for not trying a sequel, in fact.

On Sinclair or Sheridan, I don't have a preference. I somewhat like the idea that they start with the War Hero, then transition to the War Survivor. I just hope they get someone with better chemistry than Michael O'Hare had with the cast.

Willie the Duck

2021-09-29, 03:46 PM

On a depressing note you know fandom would be wanting cameos from the original cast, but so many are gone.

What's really amazing is that two of the few surviving male cast members are the ones we originally met on sci fi properties from the 60s (admittedly the youngest male cast members on each show).

Wintermoot

2021-09-29, 03:49 PM

The entire new series will center around Lt Cmdr Takashimi and Dr. Kyle as they try to figure out the deep dark secrets of the alien races. All the rest of the cast will mysteriously disappear after the pilot never to be seen again.

Cikomyr2

2021-09-29, 08:05 PM

Dire_Flumph

2021-09-29, 09:24 PM

They are joined after season 1 by Jeffrey Sinclair

And the mysterious Ancient Race turn out to be the ZOG!!! guys.

Cikomyr2

2021-09-30, 08:14 AM

And the mysterious Ancient Race turn out to be the ZOG!!! guys.

You know, one of the most disappointing aspect of the overall story and how it all relates is how Earthforce/the Clark Administration turned out to having been doing the Shadow's bidding and getting perks from them.

I'd say the story would have been better if it was revealed the Clark Administration had actually been propped up by the Vorlons, and they were behind the aggressive pro-Psi Corp surges of control. Would have made the entire "we are dependent on the Vorlons" more doubtful, and might actually have cast in a new light the Vorlon/Shadow conflict.

LibraryOgre

2021-09-30, 09:43 AM

You know, one of the most disappointing aspect of the overall story and how it all relates is how Earthforce/the Clark Administration turned out to having been doing the Shadow's bidding and getting perks from them.

I'd say the story would have been better if it was revealed the Clark Administration had actually been propped up by the Vorlons, and they were behind the aggressive pro-Psi Corp surges of control. Would have made the entire "we are dependent on the Vorlons" more doubtful, and might actually have cast in a new light the Vorlon/Shadow conflict.

I'd also say that the increased tightening of restrictions on everyone would fit more into the Vorlon philosophy than the Shadow philosophy.

So, to D&D this up a little bit:

The conflict of the Elder Races (notably, Vorlons and Shadows) was one of Lawful v. Chaotic. Vorlons were Lawful, and their question was one of "putting you in the correct place"... "Who are you" goes to categorizing and placing someone. Shadows are Chaotic, and "what do you want" categorizes you by your personal desires, rather than your place in society.

But with the younger races, humans especially, the conflict becomes one of Good v. Evil. The Centauri aren't wrong because they're self-oriented (even if that self is at the level of the Centauri people, but we also see that their individual leaders are self-oriented), but because they inflict harm upon others. And, though it's my ongoing hallucination, the Human question of "What the hell is wrong with you people" plays into this... it's not as much about Means (lawful v. chaotic) as it is about ends (good v. evil; weal v. woe).

The Minbari are kind of a median race... they have a lot of conflict about means (a very structured and lawful society), but many of their living people, especially those with a lot of human contact, are motivated by good v. evil, leading to the change in Minbari society where those with a lot of people (the worker's caste) are given more influence.

Fyraltari

2021-09-30, 10:09 AM

Dire_Flumph

2021-09-30, 10:15 AM

The Vorlons being just as bad as the Shadows did kind of come out from nowhere, didn't it?.

Did it? They were going to blow up the station in the first episode.

Fyraltari

2021-09-30, 10:18 AM

Did it? They were going to blow up the station in the first episode.

The first episode is about Narns attacking a Centauri colony, not Vorlons.

Dire_Flumph

2021-09-30, 10:19 AM

The first episode is about Narns attacking a Centauri colony, not Vorlons.

"The Gathering" was the first episode, not "Midnight on the Firing Line".

Fyraltari

2021-09-30, 10:26 AM

"The Gathering" was the first episode, not "Midnight on the Firing Line".
I've got the dvd boxsets of all five seasons and there isn't any episode before the Narn and Centauri one.

Dire_Flumph

2021-09-30, 10:32 AM

I've got the dvd boxsets of all five seasons and there isn't any episode before the Narn and Centauri one.

The Gathering was the first episode aired, originally as a TV movie released over a year before the series started in full. It is not included in the first season box set because the first DVD released for the series contained both "The Gathering" and "In the Beginning", making it redundant. When the full season sets finished it was released as part of the Movie Collection DVD set. "The Gathering" is also included in the full DVD collection box set released later, and it is listed as the first episode when playing on HBO Max currently.

Regardless, I watched the series as it aired, and I can guarantee you, "The Gathering" is the first episode.

EDIT (Addendum): Finally found the quote I was looking for to your original point. It was actually JMS intention to portray the Vorlons as the "Good guys" and the Shadows as the "Bad Guys" regardless of their actions to give viewers the impression that the Vorlons were on "our side" when they weren't really. It was one of the writing quirks of the show I liked, that it subverted expectations about the Vorlons by writing to make us think they were a lot more noble than they really were.

One lovely thing about "Signs and Portents," which you picked up on, is something I like to play with; implying one thing while saying the opposite. Look at all the shadow's main representative, Morden, does: he asks people what they want; he gets tossed out of Delenn's quarters; he is pleasant in his demeanor at all times, never yells, always smiles, and is courteous; he takes an action which saves one of our main characters, Londo, from disgrace and resignation, and helps in the process of scragging the bad guys in the episode.
And yet everyone walks away thinking that the shadows are bad. Which was of course the intent...by the way in which they did "good."

Kosh prevents humanity from achieving immortality, scares the hell out of Talia (cf. "Deathwalker",) never gives anyone a straight answer, doesn't seem to mind it if people fear him...and we walk away with the presumption that he is good, by virtue of the way in which he did things that were "bad."

[...] This is something I do a lot in my scripts, which I don't generally see a lot of other people doing. You *really* have to construct the script very carefully to pull something like this off...a little game between me and the audience.

I'd also add the Vorlons manipulating younger races for millennia, both to produce Telepaths to make them weapons against the Shadows, and conditioning us to recognize them as literally angellic beings when seen fully so we'd be predisposed to trust them.

LibraryOgre

2021-09-30, 12:11 PM

We're all ignoring the most important question:

Will there be Zathrus?

Morgaln

2021-09-30, 12:47 PM

We're all ignoring the most important question:

Will there be Zathrus?

Unfortunately, Tim Choate is one of the actors who went beyond the Rim already, so he won't be available to reprise the role. Following in his footsteps will be a difficult undertaking.

Rodin

2021-09-30, 06:19 PM

The Gathering was the first episode aired, originally as a TV movie released over a year before the series started in full. It is not included in the first season box set because the first DVD released for the series contained both "The Gathering" and "In the Beginning", making it redundant. When the full season sets finished it was released as part of the Movie Collection DVD set. "The Gathering" is also included in the full DVD collection box set released later, and it is listed as the first episode when playing on HBO Max currently.

Regardless, I watched the series as it aired, and I can guarantee you, "The Gathering" is the first episode.

EDIT (Addendum): Finally found the quote I was looking for to your original point. It was actually JMS intention to portray the Vorlons as the "Good guys" and the Shadows as the "Bad Guys" regardless of their actions to give viewers the impression that the Vorlons were on "our side" when they weren't really. It was one of the writing quirks of the show I liked, that it subverted expectations about the Vorlons by writing to make us think they were a lot more noble than they really were.

I'd also add the Vorlons manipulating younger races for millennia, both to produce Telepaths to make them weapons against the Shadows, and conditioning us to recognize them as literally angellic beings when seen fully so we'd be predisposed to trust them.

The Vorlons were one of the biggest casualties of the shortened Season 4. For the first three seasons our interactions with the Vorlons come almost entirely from Kosh, who appears to have been a genuinely good person. He had grown from his time on Babylon 5 just like all the other ambassadors, we just don't see it because we never got to see other members of his species. Then we get the shock of Kosh 2, a much nastier Vorlon who doesn't have the same level of caring for the younger races.

If you give that an entire season to percolate you can slowly reveal the Vorlons as less altruistic than they appeared and really highlight that Kosh was the exception and not the rule. However, season 4 was fitting in two seasons worth of content, so the Vorlons are full evil within half a dozen episodes and the whiplash feels out of place.

Cikomyr2

2021-09-30, 07:20 PM

The Vorlons were one of the biggest casualties of the shortened Season 4. For the first three seasons our interactions with the Vorlons come almost entirely from Kosh, who appears to have been a genuinely good person. He had grown from his time on Babylon 5 just like all the other ambassadors, we just don't see it because we never got to see other members of his species. Then we get the shock of Kosh 2, a much nastier Vorlon who doesn't have the same level of caring for the younger races.

If you give that an entire season to percolate you can slowly reveal the Vorlons as less altruistic than they appeared and really highlight that Kosh was the exception and not the rule. However, season 4 was fitting in two seasons worth of content, so the Vorlons are full evil within half a dozen episodes and the whiplash feels out of place.

I was thinking, actually, that Kosh2 (Ulkesh) could have been the Vorlon responsible for dealing with the Clark government. A moar evil version of Kosh.

B5 was always about Law vs Chaos, but where Law managed to genetically/socially engineer their appearance so that they appear Good, and cast their fight as "Good vs Evil"

Lawful, but manipulative

Rodin

2021-10-01, 02:53 AM

I was thinking, actually, that Kosh2 (Ulkesh) could have been the Vorlon responsible for dealing with the Clark government. A moar evil version of Kosh.

B5 was always about Law vs Chaos, but where Law managed to genetically/socially engineer their appearance so that they appear Good, and cast their fight as "Good vs Evil"

Lawful, but manipulative

That would have been very cool for sure. Wasn't the Earth Civil War story originally supposed to take place before the end of the Shadow War? They could have set up the Earth as looking like it was being manipulated by the Shadows (with Morden's appearance at the beginning of season 3) only to reveal towards the end of the Civil War that the Vorlons were doing the manipulating. In fact, I know the perfect time to do it - when the elite Clark ships are revealed. Turns out they were made with Vorlon tech, not Shadow. DUN DUN DUN! Then we get a full season of the Shadows v. Vorlons.

Fyraltari

2021-10-01, 09:01 AM

The Gathering was the first episode aired, originally as a TV movie released over a year before the series started in full. It is not included in the first season box set because the first DVD released for the series contained both "The Gathering" and "In the Beginning", making it redundant. When the full season sets finished it was released as part of the Movie Collection DVD set. "The Gathering" is also included in the full DVD collection box set released later, and it is listed as the first episode when playing on HBO Max currently.

Regardless, I watched the series as it aired, and I can guarantee you, "The Gathering" is the first episode.
That's... A really bad decision. There really isn't any reason not to include the first episode of a show in the first season's DVD boxset unless it's a non-canon pilot.

EDIT (Addendum): Finally found the quote I was looking for to your original point. It was actually JMS intention to portray the Vorlons as the "Good guys" and the Shadows as the "Bad Guys" regardless of their actions to give viewers the impression that the Vorlons were on "our side" when they weren't really. It was one of the writing quirks of the show I liked, that it subverted expectations about the Vorlons by writing to make us think they were a lot more noble than they really were.

I'd also add the Vorlons manipulating younger races for millennia, both to produce Telepaths to make them weapons against the Shadows, and conditioning us to recognize them as literally angellic beings when seen fully so we'd be predisposed to trust them.

Subverting expectations isn't a bad thing but it has to be done right. As is the framing of the Vorlons in general (and, as importantly, the opinion of the characters on them) goes from "benevolent more advanced specie acting in mysterious ways" to "genocidal fanatics" so fast you might get whiplash. Especially since the opposition between Kosh I and II can be interpreted (until that point) as II being the unusual vorlon instead of I whereas the Shadows are entirely monolithic. Also JMS's breakdown of Kosh's bad actions is a bit laughable. With the exception of preventing people from reaching immortality (which remember, would be achieved through mass-murder), it's all rather mild.

warty goblin

2021-10-01, 09:19 AM

The reason not to include the pilot is that the pilot is, frankly, bad. Just on a very basic technical level quite a few props look completely different, nobody is at all at home in their characters yet (understandable, still not great to watch), and it just doesn't feel very B5 to me. The first season is already rough, the Gathering is like that, squared.

Leaving it out by contrast doesn't really cost the story anything. Not that much important happens in the pilot, so a few lines of explanation works fine. Having a bit of unseen recent history also helps to build that sense of a larger, ongoing history and universe that B5 does so well.

Morgaln

2021-10-01, 09:54 AM

Wintermoot

2021-10-01, 10:20 AM

The Gathering isn't an episode and isn't part of any season. It's a standalone pilot. They did quite a bit of changes between the pilot and the first season (cast, music, costumes and prosthetics...) because they recognized just how bad it was.
Since it isn't an episode of any season, it doesn't get added to the first season boxed set, just as Thirdspace isn't part of season 4 and River of Souls isn't part of season 5. "Midnight on the Firing Line" is the first episode of season one.

Eh. Normally when they do this: "reshoot the pilot" the pilot is treated as if it never happened. In this case the events of the Gathering are referenced in Midnight on the Firing Line and its treated as if the Gathering was a true episode before Midnight.

I think it should've been included on the first season box set. I'm surprised it wasn't.

Cikomyr2

2021-10-01, 11:23 AM

That's... A really bad decision. There really isn't any reason not to include the first episode of a show in the first season's DVD boxset unless it's a non-canon pilot.

Subverting expectations isn't a bad thing but it has to be done right. As is the framing of the Vorlons in general (and, as importantly, the opinion of the characters on them) goes from "benevolent more advanced specie acting in mysterious ways" to "genocidal fanatics" so fast you might get whiplash. Especially since the opposition between Kosh I and II can be interpreted (until that point) as II being the unusual vorlon instead of I whereas the Shadows are entirely monolithic. Also JMS's breakdown of Kosh's bad actions is a bit laughable. With the exception of preventing people from reaching immortality (which remember, would be achieved through mass-murder), it's all rather mild.

You have to look at the Vorlons like if you were a bug and they are bug enthusiasts. They will try to step around you and whatnot, but if you show in their kitchen or if they are trying to deal with a crisis, you will get annihilated, on purpose or not.

A bug enthusiast isn't going to take care not to kill his favourite beetle when trying to stop a fire. He can always get more beetles

The Vorlons can always get more young races.

Fyraltari

2021-10-01, 11:29 AM

You have to look at the Vorlons like if you were a bug and they are bug enthusiasts. They will try to step around you and whatnot, but if you show in their kitchen or if they are trying to deal with a crisis, you will get annihilated, on purpose or not.

A bug enthusiast isn't going to take care not to kill his favourite beetle when trying to stop a fire. He can always get more beetles

The Vorlons can always get more young races.
I know that.

I am talking about the way the show communicated that.

Dire_Flumph

2021-10-01, 11:30 AM

That's... A really bad decision. There really isn't any reason not to include the first episode of a show in the first season's DVD boxset unless it's a non-canon pilot.

I don't disagree, but this was just when TV seasons were starting to be released on DVD. TV on VHS had generally been done on a 1-2 Episodes per tape deal and the idea of season sets were just being tried out at this point. At the time including the gathering on the season 1 set would have meant adding another disc, increasing the cost, and forcing fans to repurchase what they'd already bought earlier (the Gathering/In the Beginning having just been released some time earlier as a test to gauge interest).

It was just the reality of the time it was released unfortunately. That and Babylon 5 was never much of a priority for Warner Bros.

Subverting expectations isn't a bad thing but it has to be done right. As is the framing of the Vorlons in general (and, as importantly, the opinion of the characters on them) goes from "benevolent more advanced specie acting in mysterious ways" to "genocidal fanatics" so fast you might get whiplash. Especially since the opposition between Kosh I and II can be interpreted (until that point) as II being the unusual vorlon instead of I whereas the Shadows are entirely monolithic. Also JMS's breakdown of Kosh's bad actions is a bit laughable. With the exception of preventing people from reaching immortality (which remember, would be achieved through mass-murder), it's all rather mild.

I think you're reading the Vorlons as far more benevolent than their actions dictated. What benevolence did they bestow in the first few seasons? They saved Sheridan in Season 2 sure, dispensed fortune cookie wisdom and granted the "Man in the Middle" vision which were of somewhat dubious value. Kosh was instrumental in G'Kar's character development, sure, that was a good thing. One of the biggest things the Vorlons did was dole out some tech to aid in the White Star Fleet creation, but again, that was to further their own agenda.

But on the other hand, they were seconds away from blowing up Babylon 5 in "The Gathering" (which in my view kills the "benevolent protectors" angle right there), Kosh had Talia mentally violated by Abbut and had a backup (or something) made of her mind without consent, responds to Sheridan noting the other races fear Kosh by responding "Good", advocates just letting the Narn and Centauri kill each other in "Midnight on the Firing Line", responds to Sheridan's pressing him about Vorlon support by attacking him and near Force-choking him Vader style, has an agent torture and nearly kill Delenn, we find out that the Vorlons have been genetically manipulating several races for milennia and conditioning them to see Vorlons as figures from their religions.

Viewed in total, the Vorlons can best be viewed as "Sit down, do what we tell you, and if you get out of line you get the switch". And then Ulkesh turns up and we find out Kosh was the nice one.

I'm not saying you're totally wrong. The Vorlons were always written to come off to the audience as the mysterious benevolent protector race. I'm just saying if you look at their actual actions, the Vorlon's true goals revealed in Season 4 don't come out of nowhere.

As for the Shadows being monolithic, yeah, that's a problem. We never really meet an individual Shadow to talk with, we have to infer what they are like through Morden, and later Anna, Justin and Lorien. I think the only time we ever even hear a Shadow talk directly is in their last appearance.

Dragonus45

2021-10-01, 03:39 PM

I don't disagree, but this was just when TV seasons were starting to be released on DVD. TV on VHS had generally been done on a 1-2 Episodes per tape deal and the idea of season sets were just being tried out at this point. At the time including the gathering on the season 1 set would have meant adding another disc, increasing the cost, and forcing fans to repurchase what they'd already bought earlier (the Gathering/In the Beginning having just been released some time earlier as a test to gauge interest).

It was just the reality of the time it was released unfortunately. That and Babylon 5 was never much of a priority for Warner Bros.

I think you're reading the Vorlons as far more benevolent than their actions dictated. What benevolence did they bestow in the first few seasons? They saved Sheridan in Season 2 sure, dispensed fortune cookie wisdom and granted the "Man in the Middle" vision which were of somewhat dubious value. Kosh was instrumental in G'Kar's character development, sure, that was a good thing. One of the biggest things the Vorlons did was dole out some tech to aid in the White Star Fleet creation, but again, that was to further their own agenda.

But on the other hand, they were seconds away from blowing up Babylon 5 in "The Gathering" (which in my view kills the "benevolent protectors" angle right there), Kosh had Talia mentally violated by Abbut and had a backup (or something) made of her mind without consent, responds to Sheridan noting the other races fear Kosh by responding "Good", advocates just letting the Narn and Centauri kill each other in "Midnight on the Firing Line", responds to Sheridan's pressing him about Vorlon support by attacking him and near Force-choking him Vader style, has an agent torture and nearly kill Delenn, we find out that the Vorlons have been genetically manipulating several races for milennia and conditioning them to see Vorlons as figures from their religions.

Viewed in total, the Vorlons can best be viewed as "Sit down, do what we tell you, and if you get out of line you get the switch". And then Ulkesh turns up and we find out Kosh was the nice one.

I'm not saying you're totally wrong. The Vorlons were always written to come off to the audience as the mysterious benevolent protector race. I'm just saying if you look at their actual actions, the Vorlon's true goals revealed in Season 4 don't come out of nowhere.

As for the Shadows being monolithic, yeah, that's a problem. We never really meet an individual Shadow to talk with, we have to infer what they are like through Morden, and later Anna, Justin and Lorien. I think the only time we ever even hear a Shadow talk directly is in their last appearance.

The main issue here I always felt was that the Shadows were so one dimensionally awful that even the shady manipulative Vorlons seemed like they were benevolent just by comparison.

Cikomyr2

2021-10-01, 04:47 PM

The main issue here I always felt was that the Shadows were so one dimensionally awful that even the shady manipulative Vorlons seemed like they were benevolent just by comparison.

This very argument, but with Clark and Lochley during season 5 is why I just can't stand her.

She was proud of staying loyal to a president who bombed his citizens.

Rodin

2021-10-02, 02:32 AM

All of this discussion is why I really want to see a reboot. Babylon 5 isn't like the remakes I've been against happening, like the Disney live-action versions. There is no way in hell you're improving Beauty and the Beast, the Lion King, or Aladdin. They're excellent, timeless movies and there's no benefit to remaking them.

Babylon 5 doesn't meet that criteria. As good as it was, it was a deeply flawed production and not just from executive meddling. It had budget issues, special effects issues, plot issues. It ran half off JMS's vision and half off old rejected Star Trek scripts* Two seasons were crammed into one. Audiences weren't trusted to understand shades of grey scripts, so we got deeply evil Shadows instead of "they might have a point" Shadows. Plot points were dropped, plot points were repurposed.

Babylon 5 is my favorite show of all time and is likely to remain so. However, there is a heck of a lot wrong with it. Just bringing it forward into the modern age with a modern TV and special effects budget would be massive. Modern writing techniques and ways of telling story arcs. Not designing the scripts around commercial breaks. Looking at the original and fixing the flaws in the plots and improving the pacing.

There are many reasons to be skeptical. We've gone over most of them in this thread, and I'm sure there are more we haven't. But I'm supporting the reboot regardless. If it fails, it fails. My DVDs of the original aren't going anywhere. But if there's a chance it's good...it deserves that chance.

*I have no evidence for this, but come on. Some of those scripts had to have been written for Star Trek, or just been bouncing around the Sci-Fi Hollywood community for ages. They had nothing to do with Babylon 5, they were just "generic Sci-Fi TV episode".

GloatingSwine

2021-10-02, 01:43 PM

*I have no evidence for this, but come on. Some of those scripts had to have been written for Star Trek, or just been bouncing around the Sci-Fi Hollywood community for ages. They had nothing to do with Babylon 5, they were just "generic Sci-Fi TV episode".

Yeah a lot of the episodes are just episodic SF TV, because, well, TV was different then. TV then was episodic. You didn't have an ongoing chronological story, you didn't have arcs, you might have the odd two parter but you didn't have the ongoing metaplot.

Babylon 5 was pretty much unique in going into the series with the intent of having an overarching 5 season narrative. (The X-Files which was at pretty much the same time sort of stumbled into a story arc as it went but it wasn't part of the plan to start with.)

So a lot of the episodes could quite happily have been dropped into Star Trek because, well, episodic sci-fi TV is episodic sci-fi TV you just fiddle around with how characters react to the specifics of the ones you're dealing with (and quite a lot of writers and actors worked on both, sometimes even playing characters with suspiciously similar names).

Cikomyr2

2021-10-02, 02:14 PM

So JMS did approach paramount to do a Space Station spin-off for Star trek. He did named it Deep space Nine, and a lot of superficial elements are in the original series Bible submitted that made it to the final DS9 show.

Stuff like having a character named Dukat. Having a wormhole near the station to allow far travel. Having two alien species in antagonism, one having occupied the other until recently. Having a cop character. Having a doctor character. Having a fiesty female first officer.

However, anyone who knows DS9 and B5 understand that these superficial similarities are.. Superficial. It's clear the Paramount execs thrown the DS9 Bible at Behr and Wolf so they come up with their own storylines, but B/W obviously explore these same superficial themes in completely different manners. Only uptight individuals would claim the DS9 writers stole JMS work.

Paramount execs clearly did try to steal JMS, but this has nothing to do with whether or not DS9 was a good show, since they went a completely different way.

Rodin

2021-10-02, 05:08 PM

Oh, I'm not trying to claim that anyone was stealing anything. It's just that the group of writers who were doing Sci-Fi writing around that time were a relatively small group who were all influencing one another and jumping between shows and writing scripts that were deliberately vague enough that you could file the serial numbers off and slot them into whatever show happened to pick them up.

You see this with some of the early episodes of DS9 and Babylon 5. The episodes are suspiciously similar, yet if you look at the production dates it's impossible for one show or the other to have stolen or copied from the other. It's just like-minded authors coming up with the same core script, because there's only so many stock monster-of-the-week/negative-space-wedgie-of-the-week storylines you can do.

In the streaming age that's less likely. Scripts (or at least outlines) for entire seasons are made in one go, and its generally the same team of writers doing it. A rebooted Babylon 5 would be very different even if you somehow pulled the same cast forward in time. The means of creating shows has changed.

Dire_Flumph

2021-10-02, 05:45 PM

warty goblin

2021-10-02, 06:42 PM

I quite liked B5's combination of episodic and ongoing plot arc; it gave this sense of lots disparate of things going on in the world and gave the longterm plot stuff room to breathe. One if the things I find burns me out with super tightly plotted modern TV is that they're all written so each episode is constantly raising the stakes and maximally dramatic, and if you actually take a moment to think about the arc of a couple episodes it just collapses into nonsense. By cutting the big epic episodes with more episodic stuff, B5 actually stayed overall pretty sensible, and a person could have some sense of what people did and what life was like in that universe.

russdm

2021-10-04, 07:16 PM

I think my entire reaction consists of the following feeling.

"Oh Dear GOD! Not Again!"

"I would sell my soul to dark powers for JMS to drop this entire project and let the Babylon 5 Reboot not happen

The original Babylon 5 was not really actually all that good. So much of it is based on Nostalgia and how much the show went in directions that weren't current in Scifi TV at the time.

Precure

2021-10-04, 07:31 PM

B5 was supposed to be episodic? Never noticed it.

russdm

2021-10-04, 07:37 PM

B5 was supposed to be episodic? Never noticed it.

It was totally episodic. Some episodes moved the meta-plot forward (Narn-Centauri Conflict {Which is was interesting and I cared about some} or Vorlon-Shadow Conflict {Which I think got lost in just about every way possible & I didn't care about any}, but the show was not any different than how TNG ended up being.

Morgaln

2021-10-05, 09:11 AM

It was totally episodic. Some episodes moved the meta-plot forward (Narn-Centauri Conflict {Which is was interesting and I cared about some} or Vorlon-Shadow Conflict {Which I think got lost in just about every way possible & I didn't care about any}, but the show was not any different than how TNG ended up being.

That's not true. B5 started off mostly episodic in season 1, but by season 3, most episodes were part of the overarching plot and season 4 is pretty much pure ongoing plot. That gradual increase was intentional, by the way. It's also specifically different from TNG in that what happens to a character in one episode is likely to have lasting consequences and changes to the character further down the road, something that TNG definitely didn't do.

Also, B5 has more of a direct sociocritical component. Especially the Nightwatch subplot and the portrayal of media in the show are more relevant than ever, considering certain developments in western countries over the last 10-20 years.

truemane

2021-10-05, 09:24 AM

This was actually a big problem in the last two seasons as you could see burnout setting in.
The main issue with the last two season was that JMS was told the series was cancelled a year earlier than he'd planned. So Season 4 was basically two seasons of narrative jammed into one. And then he wound up getting a 5th season after all. So season 5 was basically a long denouement. Interesting, but anticlimactic.

GloatingSwine

2021-10-06, 07:42 AM

The main issue with the last two season was that JMS was told the series was cancelled a year earlier than he'd planned. So Season 4 was basically two seasons of narrative jammed into one. And then he wound up getting a 5th season after all. So season 5 was basically a long denouement. Interesting, but anticlimactic.

Season 4 would originally have ended with Intersections in Real Time, with the climax of the Earth civil war coming roughly as far into season 5 as the climax of the Shadow war did in season 4.

The change meant that the content that should have formed about 3/4 of the final season had to form the whole of it, and the earth civil war was truncated. That meant that we had to have a lot more of Byron, the universe's most annoying man.

The other thing was the contract kerfuffle with Claudia Christian which meant that Ivanova disappeared from the show and a new character had to be squeezed into an Ivanova sized hole in the rest of the show but without 4 seasons of accumulated empathy for that character.

Precure

2021-10-06, 01:47 PM

It's important to note that themmain reason behind B5's betrayal/rebellion against the Clark regime is Earth's secret alliance with Centauri and Shadows.

Cikomyr2

2021-10-06, 01:52 PM

It's important to note that themmain reason behind B5's betrayal/rebellion against the Clark regime is Earth's secret alliance with Centauri and Shadows.

Was it?

I thought the main reason behind B5's betrayal was the Clark government's policies toward dissidence and authoritarianism.

Precure

2021-10-06, 02:20 PM

Was it?

I thought the main reason behind B5's betrayal was the Clark government's policies toward dissidence and authoritarianism.

Not really. It was more like a casus belli and pretext.

Cikomyr2

2021-10-06, 02:36 PM

Not really. It was more like a casus belli and pretext.

Except the B5 crew started conspiring before they learned of the alliance with the Shadows.

J-H

2021-10-06, 02:47 PM

The change meant that the content that should have formed about 3/4 of the final season had to form the whole of it, and the earth civil war was truncated. That meant that we had to have a lot more of Byron, the universe's most annoying man.

Thank you, yes, I agree. I'd rather have Neelix or Jar-Jar.

Morgaln

2021-10-06, 02:51 PM

It's important to note that themmain reason behind B5's betrayal/rebellion against the Clark regime is Earth's secret alliance with Centauri and Shadows.

B5 doesn't even know Clark is colluding with the Shadows until after they declare independence; they find out when they intercept the ship carrying telepaths intended as cores for the shadow vessels. That is several episodes after they declare independence. Also, there isn't an alliance between Earth and Centauri Prime, just a non-aggression pact that lets the Centauri wage war against their neighbors without Earth's interference.

What does make B5 oppose Clark is that they know he assassinated president Santiago to become president himself; they don't have proof until early in season 3, but they've known ever since the end of season 1 since Garibaldi uncovered the plot. What makes them declare independence is when Clark dissolves the senate and declares martial law, turning himself into a dictator.

Wintermoot

2021-10-06, 04:30 PM

Thank you, yes, I agree. I'd rather have Neelix or Jar-Jar.

Neelix's body and sideburns, Jar Jar's head and Byron's luxurious hair.

russdm

2021-10-06, 06:53 PM

for any remake or reboot of Babylon 5, i would want some things:

1) The Narn - Centauri conflict given a bigger emphasis and focus. More episodes following plot events relating to this war and the effect it has on neighboring species. Emphasis on attempts to gain sympathy for the Narn or Centauri

2) Morden, Morden, Morden -- I want more Morden and more of him going around to different groups to offer what services his masters have. More emphasis on Morden stirring the pot of activities in the background, working to advance different goals for the Shadows. Have Morden be there more

3) Make the Shadows make opaque -- I really didn't like how silly the original Babylon 5 made the Shadows. So much ominous from Deleen and so much a sense of their being built up as more than they turned out to be. The Shadows can't get hyped up as being such a big threat and then be shown to be moonlighting as idiots. You really need to decide what kind of portrayal they get (Dangerous always or Whimsically frightening) and stick to it. No build up of threat with sappy pay off

4) Vir -- Our characters need more focus in why they exist in the show and what purpose they serve and make it happen. Vir was a great character.

5) Dr. Franklin -- I don't care that Scifi shows before always had a Doctor character, because if you can't figure out what to with said character and make them worth paying attention to, then you need to axe them. Dr. Franklin was probably the most least interesting characters in the series.

6) No Game of Thrones anything -- Game of Thrones is a big show, but nothing about it really tells how to tell any great story beyond Game of Thrones is possible from it. No Sexposition, No Boobs, no dumb time travel, no dumb travel times. Shows don't need the Game of Thrones treatment, because Game of Thrones is a terrible TV show.

7) No Game of Thrones Bad Guys Sue Balls -- Game of Thrones really gave the Bad Guys the benefit on pretty much everything and rarely extracted a price out of them. The Bad guys kept being able to win and win easily with almost no in story consequences. Then the writers dumped plots in to most beneficial for the Bad Guys but screwed everyone else over, every time they possibly could.

While watching the Lannisters play their whatevers, make sure to reflect the real consequences of their Decisions. If Cersei decides to blow up a bunch of people, don't have most of the realm still willing to pay attention to her or trust her any. Don't make some faction betray another that they loyally served for years just because some Lannister flashes some tits or cash. They should have remembered what that moron (cersei) did and act based on that information

8) No Game of Thrones Faction Farting -- Factions that have no reasons to trust another should not suddenly be jumping sides just cause. No factions should be acting because you want to complicate some point. Factions should act for their benefit or cause, not because some Lannister flashed some tits or cash.

9) No Game of Thrones Random Events & Game-iness -- The results of some person's actions or some group's actions should have realistic results in the story you made. We don't need some actions pretty much disappear because the plot works better if you lump some action to some event. If a Lannister murders some dude and it is known about, don't have the friends or family of that Dude suddenly decide that they can trust that Lannister person,, just because it works for the plot.

10) Basically, you should not be ever using the Game of Thrones Playbook for making Plotlines. The show completely wrecked Dorne, completely wrecked later conflicts, and pretty much gave everyone else an idiot ball and made everybody totally chill with working with Cersei after she went nuts, or had some group drop some loyalty they had over incrediably dumb reasons (Looking at the guy who betrayed that family who had the grain the Lannisters needed)

11) The Bad Guys need to be shown to fight for their victories and have some part shown of how they got those victories. The Prequels of Star Wars failed to show anything about how good Palps actually was, and so it made his winning come across as cheap and dumb and stupid. Don't randomly head the Good Guys the Idiot ball. Don't give the villains any Villain Sue-ness. Don't make the Villains come across as always winning because everyone else is made of stupid. That was Game or Thrones Major Schtick, and you definitely should not copy it.

(Yes, I happen to despise Game of Thrones, and the Book Series it is based on. I am Team Wight/Other. Kill all those humans!)

JadedDM

2021-10-06, 07:14 PM

I think we're all making a lot of assumptions at this point here. At this point, we don't know what the show is even going to be about, or whether it will have the same characters and same plotlines. JMS himself said, "we will not be retelling the same story in the same way." There might not even be a Shadow War or a Mars Rebellion. There will likely be a space station named Babylon 5, and it will likely have a commander, but it may not necessarily be Sinclair or Sheridan. At this point, we just don't know.

LibraryOgre

2021-10-06, 08:12 PM

Neelix's body and sideburns, Jar Jar's head and Byron's luxurious hair.

Instead of Tuvix, you would have Nejaron?

Wintermoot

2021-10-07, 08:55 AM

Instead of Tuvix, you would have Nejaron?

"Do yousah know what mesah has to do in order to avoid picking up stray thoughts? Mesah have to kick down mesah natural abilities, run rhymes and wee bitty songs through Mesah head 'round and 'round. All that to keep from picking up what Yousah send-thinking BIIIG loud to be heard halfway down the hall. Yousah one of those people who rehearses everything, Mr. Vulcan. Yousah never enter a situation until you've gone over it and over a hunnit time, worked out what yousah will say and what them-else will say, how yousah respond. It's BIIIG remarkable and extreme saddening. That little personality quirk must have cost yousah more than a few friend-things. Yousah want us to fill our heads with noise and babble so we won't hear what Yousah shouting at the top of your minds. Now here. Eat this V'llerrian Egg Stew"

Nejaron

LibraryOgre

2021-10-07, 09:34 AM

"Do yousah know what mesah has to do in order to avoid picking up stray thoughts? Mesah have to kick down mesah natural abilities, run rhymes and wee bitty songs through Mesah head 'round and 'round. All that to keep from picking up what Yousah send-thinking BIIIG loud to be heard halfway down the hall. Yousah one of those people who rehearses everything, Mr. Vulcan. Yousah never enter a situation until you've gone over it and over a hunnit time, worked out what yousah will say and what them-else will say, how yousah respond. It's BIIIG remarkable and extreme saddening. That little personality quirk must have cost yousah more than a few friend-things. Yousah want us to fill our heads with noise and babble so we won't hear what Yousah shouting at the top of your minds. Now here. Eat this V'llerrian Egg Stew"

Nejaron

If there is a Hell, you deserve to be in it.

If there is not a Hell, one should be created for you.

:smallbiggrin: