Reply To: Babylon 5 reboot?

[phaidknott 7023xp 2]

I think it would be a lot harder to do a reboot of the series as you’ll never be able to implement the story telling of the overarching plotline.

I remember when it was originally aired, viewers were kept on the edge of their seats waiting for the next clue as to what was happening with the “shadows”. Sometimes you got a chunk of content, sometime just 30 secs. At the time (particularly for the sci-fi genre), everything was more episodic in nature. You could watch episodes out of order and not realise it (Star Trek the next generation was like this for the first few series), but Babylon 5 was different in that nearly every episode usually had two plotlines running at the same time (the normal episodic content and the over arching “shadows” plotline). It was new and innovative at the time, but today it’s more normal to see this happen and even drop the whole episode format in favour of a series just having one continual plotline running for the whole series.

So with the Shadow War plotline known, you’d have to redo things with a whole new overarch to bring back that feature that was the main draw for the viewers (the BIG mystery) at the time. Mind you I always HATED the end of the Shadow Wars with both the Shadows and the Vorlons walking off meekly hand in hand filled with the “wisdom” of Sherridan and the Humans to exile (personally I would have thought they would have demolished everything and given Sherridan a big wedgie on the way out 😀 ).

After the End of the Shadow Wars (and the series going over to the sci-fi channel), the quality of the production values and more importantly the scripts just tanked. and the spin off series Rangers, and particularly Crusade (just who did they employ to do the music scores for Crusade? It sounds like my cat walking across a keyboard 🙁 ) were absolutely awful and should NEVER be watched if you were a fan of the original series.

If you’ve never seen Babylon 5, just watch the first four series (the fourth series does start to tank in quality), avoid the fifth series and destroy any Rangers and Crusade DVDs you should come across. And hope that Agents of Gaming should find a way to relaunch the miniature game and minis again somehow 🙂