Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

So I just discovered it was announced back in September that there are plans for a Babylon 5 reboot.

I'd really love to see a show where Straczynski gets a chance to create the show he intended, instead of having to fight the network every step of the way, which is the reason the 5th season was so lame, he thought he had to wrap up everything in the 4th since they were going to cancel it. But if they let him do his thing from start to finish it should be really good.

However, I simply can't image Babylon 5 without Sinclair, Delenn, G'kar, Zach, Garibaldi, Vir, Zathras, Franklin and other actors that have passed away (interestingly, watching Picard where pretty much the entire TNG crew are still around, it seems the life expectancy of B5 actors was significantly limited)

Which is why it's a reboot and not a continuation, he's going to start over from scratch. And this kind of multi-year storytelling is no longer so foreign to networks, they might let him really do it right.

But still...is it B5 without G'kar x Londo? :)

If it's a reboot, the I assume the characters will be the same, but with new actors. So we may still get G'Kar and Londo, but not with Andreas Katsulas and Peter Jurasik - even though Jurasik is still with us, I think they will need a younger actor for the role. As long as whoever they choose can deliver the line "moon-faced assassin of joy" with the same panache 😁

If they reboot B5 like they did Battlestar Galactica it should be awesome.

I wasn't crazy about all the things they did with Battlestar Galactica.

If Straczynski is in charge, it will be worth watching. But not otherwise.

In my humble opinion BSG's downfall came from a lack of long term creative direction coupled with a vague desire to inject mysticism into an otherwise hard sci-fi show.

B5 had way more potential to go mystic, (they even had "the one") but kept things grounded because they DID have a plan, and that plan involved an explicit time loop.

If Straczynski hands off a multi-season plot I'm sure there are any number of writers who could pull off something really special (and in line with BSG). I'd be very interested to see how they re-imagine season 1 actually as breaking out of the monster-of-the-week dynamic was one thing B5 could have done better (though it isn't its fault, that was the style at the time).

BSG felt like it didn't have a planned direction. I heard B5 is going to use different characters, so it looks more like a story in the same universe than a retelling. But that could be wrong.

I am always wary of rebooting something for many reasons. For every Battlestar Galactica there is a dozen Knight Riders. I will suspend judgement until I actually see something but I don't have high hopes. It's way too easy to screw something like this up.

Exactly.