Babylon 5

... Why?

Because have grimdark endings like Infinity War are the epitome of storytelling.

I recently watched all of the show and I got to be honest: I found the Arc Fatigue involving Garibaldi being a mind controlled butthole was worst than the Telepath Colony stuff. You can tell that something is up with him but you're just waiting for when he breaks out of it but him being a prick is so dominant during most of season 4. At least I did not know where the Telepath Colony was going.

It's an emotional sense of the fact that I don't want to see the same story again but also the kind of visceral reaction I have to the Vorlons impersonating religious figures and manipulating the Younger Races by pretending to be the good guys hits harder than the Shadows and their pseudo-anarchist philosophy.

It was a great twist to reveal it was not Black-and-White Morality the first time around but the Vorlons still came came off as A Lighter Shade of Black. I'd like the Shadows to get some more shades of grey this time around.

The Shadows have their flaws but they are 100% correct the Vorlons are horrible Abusive Precursors wrapping themselves in the images of angels while demonizing (literally) them.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Sep 27th 2021 at 4:15:46 AM

They were both manipulative abusive precursors. The Vorlons generally preferred to not get involved directly in the fighting, but the Shadows fought the younger races directly and directly genetically engineered a bunch of client species and have to be responsible for at least a few direct genocides.

Like...they're both completely terrible, they just generally used different approaches to it. The Shadows having a planet-killer they were perfectly happy to deploy when they decided to attack the Vorlon ideology is a great example of that.

They maybe started off less horrible than the Vorlons, but the fact that the Minbari are apparently the only younger space-faring species from the time of the First Shadow War to still be active is pretty damning.

And yeah, while the Shadows are right about the Vorlons, they're still pretty goddamn horrible to everyone else. Their ideological approach doesn't justify the sheer amount of damage they were willing to cause to make a point, because they never once attacked the Vorlons directly, they just went after the Younger Races.

In terms of the reboot, JMS has talked about rebooting the show a few times, and one of the consistent elements is that he doesn't want to just retell the same story again. It'll probably be more of a remix than a reboot.

Edited by Zendervai on Sep 27th 2021 at 7:58:54 AM

Technically, so are the Drakh but they're the Poor Man's Substitute for the Shadows.

Some comments from JMS on Twitter.

Why reboot it?

While JMS created it, Babylon 5 is owned by Warner Brothers - I'm a little concerned that it's being rebooted by the CW tho...

...but with JMS writing for it, at least he can keep the series on tract and avoid the "subverting expectations" crap out.

Well, for one, the first time around it didn't go so well at the end, due to a season being cancelled and then uncancelled, which led to a rushed season 4 and the telepath plot mess in season 5.

One of the reasons JMS has offered up for wanting to do a reboot is that he's a different person now than he was in the 1990s and he just feels like it would be interesting to see what kind of story he writes this time around using that setting.

Another one is that he just doesn't see how he can do a continuation of the original series with so many of the original cast having passed away. It honestly sounds like he wants to reengage with the setting without having to write around real-life losses which are pretty close to home for him.

As for the question of "Why not do something new instead" (I don't think anyone here said it, but I've seen it elsewhere): He's done plenty of other stuff over the past few decades. You should check it out. If you think he's just been living off of Babylon 5 royalty checks since the 1990s, you're missing out on a bunch of shows, comics, movies, books, etc.

Yeah, it's hard to see how to do a reboot without G'Kar or Delenn. We may see a very old Londo, though.

I could be wrong but I believe that he barely got a penny from B5.

When B5 airs on any WB owned network, JMS's royalty/residual checks are low, because in true "Hollywood Accounting" fashion, WB is "selling the show to itself''.

When that happened with Murder She Wrote (JMS was a writer and producer), his first check from USA Networks (owned by the studio that produced the series) was a whopping $0.97.

He's brought up his suspicions about this occasionally, but it's pretty obvious that Babylon 5 actually made quite a lot of money for WB. I mean, they greenlit three attempts at follow-ups and they put the effort in to do that remastering of it (even if it was very low-effort compared to the ones CBS did for Star Trek TOS and TNG), and they've kept the DV Ds in print this whole time. That's a very odd thing to do for a property their accountants insist was a net money sink and that never made any profit at all. Not to mention that while it aired, it spent three years being the only thing that kept P-TEN alive.

The DVD thing especially. Yeah, WB never wants to let go of anything, but a lot of older sci-fi shows (that aren't Star Trek) went out of print from their production company pretty quickly and companies like Mill Creek grab the distribution rights later on. WB sometimes just lets things sit out of print for decades. WB keeping the B5 DV Ds in print in house indicates that they pretty consistently made money. There was also the time Sci-Fi tried to get the broadcast rights and TNT demanded a ridiculous price for them, a very obvious sign that the show was profitable. (The whole Crusade morass seems to have been entirely unrelated to potential profitability).

I don't think this is a conspiracy, it's relatively standard Hollywood accounting, exacerbated by Babylon 5 not being a huge established brand and being relatively obscure.

Edited by Zendervai on Sep 28th 2021 at 12:38:00 PM

I wonder if JMS was a writer guild’s strike supporter. He seems he has every reason to do so.

Of course, the reboot would undoubtedly recast everyone since they’re all old now or even worse, dead. Considering the limitations JMS had on Babylon 5 due to constantly switching actors and the network cancelling the franchise several times over. I can actually see the CW demanding more from JMS if the reboot is not going to appeal to whatever demographic they have.

Executives are so detached from the world and are so controlling, I wonder if the First Ones are an allegory for them.

Edited by M1gamiTensei on Sep 28th 2021 at 9:52:55 AM

Well, it may be a conspiracy in the sense of shorting the creator on pay. Most conspiracies are not very exciting, but can be just as damaging.

Reading the synopsis for the Reboot, I wonder if Sinclair will be Adapted Out, considering that B5 was originally going to have just a single protagonist all the way through?

Plot twist, Sheridan leaves after the first season and Sinclar has to take his place.

It seems like JMS wants to merge Sinclair's plot with Sheridan's character. It also looks like things will play out differently with the Vorlons.

Well Sinclair/Sheridan, Lyta/Tallia, Ivanova/Lockley, Garibaldi/Zack Allan, were all recasting issues.

Wasn't Zack's actor hired because he was friends with JMS and was going through a rough patch? He sort of replaced Garibaldi's initial job on B5, but Jerry Doyle was in all but one episode of the show, it's not a Talia/Lyta situation.

Edited by Zendervai on Sep 28th 2021 at 11:39:46 AM

From what I remember of the notes it was also the fact that Zach was there to pick up Garibaldi's crush on Talia with Lyta.

Because he thought it would be weird for Garibaldi to lust after two separate telepaths.

Zack is, if anything, a replacement for Lou Welch, who just sort of quietly disappeared partway into the second season. Come to think of it, most likely because Zack filled that same role and bumped him out.

Anyways, my prediction is that Sheridan goes into a Chrysalis and comes out as Jeffrey Sinclair.

Edited by AFP on Sep 29th 2021 at 1:32:34 AM

According to Deadline, the reboot is still on the table. However, it's been pushed to the next development season of 2023-2024.

After the announcement of the CW sale, there were a bunch of really clickbaity youtubers and websites that were stumbling all over each other to announce that the reboot was cancelled because the announcement included a line about how some in development projects weren't going forward.

Despite them immediately, as in, before all the clickbait, saying that B5 is still going ahead.

(Check the next page for a new update)

Edited by XMenMutant22 on May 19th 2022 at 2:13:30 PM