Before There's More B5
J. Michael Straczynski states there may be no more Babylon 5 projects if they can't be done right--and that means far bigger budgets.
I'd go further. There should be no more B5 projects, and there never should have been. The whole point of the original series was that we were watching a special period that changed everything. Any side stories, or offshoots, no matter how well done, take away from the uniqueness of the experience.
Something like Star Trek can be strung out to as many episodes as you want, as long as you have a good crew and exciting tales. Babylon 5 should have been a one-time experience. JMS should just walk away.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:03 AM
1 Comments:
This certainly is good news.
I thought that Season Five of B5B5 was a real drop in quality, with a handful of great bits in it (the intrigue on Centauri Prime, for example). Babylon 5: Crusade had about two good episodes in a run of thirteen. The three stand-alone TV movies were not very good, but the posthumous stand-alone TV movie Babylon 5: Legend of the Rangers was unbelievably awful.
A couple years ago I bought Babylon 5: The Lost Tales which was direct-to-video. It included two of the B5 actors and one of the Crusade actors. It's still in its shrink-wrap. I plan to watch it someday. I also plan to watch Star Trek X: Nemesis someday.
Straczynski has been writing The Amazing Spider-Man for almost a decade now, but his recent TV projects have simply not worked.
So even though I'm more willing than LA Guy, in principle, to watch new B5 shows, I am no longer looking forward to them.
Still, I do think that the Telepath War is a story that is worth telling. At the end of the five-year B5 story, the telepath power grab had failed, and the attempt by Efrem Zimbalist Jr on Mars to exterminate the telepaths had failed... but it still felt to me that a showdown was looming on the horizon. Then Crusade is set a decade later, apparently after some kind of conflict or war. It felt as if JMS might be reserving that story to be told later. If they made it as a big-screen movie, I'd certainly see it!
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