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Yahoo! TV Goverage: Feature Story

"Babylon" Ends; Now, the "Grusade"
TNT-Babylon 5: A Call to Arms

Sunday, January 3rd, 8 to 10 p.m. E.T; repeats at I0 p.m. and at midnight (early Monday), and Monday, Januaryr I lth at midnight (early Tuesday)

By Frank Lovece

Like an old-fashioned diva enamored of applause, the sci-fi series Babylon -l marks one more farewell performance. Yet its latest ind last telefilm, Babylon Sil Catt to Arms, proves less a requiem than an overture-a set-up for the themes and grace notes to be orchestrated in the June 1999 spin-off series, The Babylon Project: Crusade.
With this seemingly final finale, an appreciation seems eamed. Babylon'5-which began in s5mdication iri 1994 and was picked up by TNT for a final season after its year-four cancellation-was, after all, conceived of as a single, novelistic, five-year story arc by its creator, J. Michael Straczlmski, who wrote virtually every episode. And unlike the supposed cohesive back-story solidifying The X-Files, -85's was real: The amount of pinpoint detail and of foreshadowed history and personages weaving through five years of dense intemal consistency is remarkable and in all likelihood unprecedented in American television.

"[]t's gotten a bit refined over time," Straczynski (right) has written. While unplanned changes occurred, the story, he maintained, was "like seeing a mountain from a great distance, then closing in until you can make out the details." Never one to stint on back-patting, Straczynski's also bragged that "I'll have written 3,000 pages all in one universe, primarily telling one story. That's the equivalent of six or seven fullsize novels...."
And even that feat is only about form; Babylon 5 had content like SaJurn's got rings. Unlike most future-set series, it never depended on someone rerouting the ion field to the flux capacitor in order to bypass the whatchamacallit. BJ was about the machinations of politics and how they get twisted in ways good and bad by personal relationships and private agendas. Whereas Star Trekprojects an optimistic future in which human greed, poverty and hunger have been vanquished, and humans touch the better angels of our nature,,B5 predicts the same old human pettiness and pieties at play since the original Bab$on was-built freshening them, in good sci-fi fashion, through a setting far removed from the everyday we take for granted.
The series was set on a five-and-a-half-mile-long space station, Babylon-!, founded in 2257 by Earth's ruling body, Earthgov. Part U.N., part Casablanca, it was initially run by Captain Jeffrey Sinclair (Michael O'Hare), who was succeeded by Captain John Sheridan (Bruce Boxleitner) two years later (at the start of season two). By 2262 (start of season five), there had been'both a civil war on Earth, and a war between Earth and its allies against an ancient, non-corporeal conqueror race called The Shadows. Sheridan had become head of the new Interstellar Alliance; one of his two ex-wives, Capt. Elizabeth

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So is this final B5 telefilm the finale? That depends on your definitions of "finale," "epilogue" and "sequel." The next-to-last episode, "Objects at Rest" (TNT, Jan. 18, 199S) concluded the story proper, dispersing several major characters and finalizing their arcs. The next, and last, episode, "Sleeping in Light" (TNT, Nov. 25, 199S) takes place not quite 20 years later, in228I, and chronicles the final gathering of Sheridan's old friends and colleagues near the diy of his prophesied death. And an earlier episode, the fourthseason finale "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars" (TNT, Oct.27,1997), takes place even later, looking back on events from 100, 500, a thousand and one million ye-rs later.

Further confounding the chronology, four TV rnovies, set in very disparate times, all ran during and around the fifth season. In the Beginning (Jan. 4,1998) flashed back to the Earth-Minbariiffar, the pre-series conflict that led to the creation of space station Babylon 5; Thirdsiace (iuly 19, 1998) flashed back to the middle of ieason four; The River of Souls (Nov. 23 , 1998) took place mrd-2263, shortly after the events of the fifth season; and the new A Call to Arms (Jan. 6, 1999) takes place five years afterward.
series regufars Boxleitner, Scoggins, Jerryr Doyle (left, as'corporate mogul Michael Garibaldi) and Jeff Conaway (as Security Chief 7,ack Allan), Sheridan and Garibaldi are overseeing the covert construction of two Super-powered Alliance battleships. Yet before the vessels are fully ready, Sheridan, master thief Dureena Nafal (Canie Dobro) and Capt. Leonard Anderson (Candyman's Tony Todd) of the Earthgov destroyer Charon each receives a dream-message from a sorcerer-like "techno-mage," Galen (Peter Woodward), prophesying the destruction of Earth. The unlikely trio hrjack the Alliance superships (christened the Excalibur and the Victory) and uncover a massive invasion by the war-vanquished Shadows' ally race, the Drakh-who possess the last known Shadow

InA Call to Arms, starring

doomsday weapon, the Death Cloud.

"Last known" are the key words here. The fast-moving telefilm, while ironically not hugely suspenseful, noneJheless climaxes with an
unexpected last-second development that sets up the premise of Crusadez The quest for a way to undo the gradual yet apocalyptic effects of the Drakh's final action. Dobro (right) and Woodward continue onto Crusade, as does supporting player Marjean Holden (Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, Vampires), a tanned Sandra Bullock lookalike who switches from an unnamed navigator here to biogeneticist Dr. Sarah Chambers in the series. Gary Cole, Daniel Dae Kim, David A. Brooks and Scoggins also star in the new show, built.around the exploits of the Excalibur,

Dramatically satisfying and emotionally cbmplex, the final Babylon 5 telefilm sends one series off with a bang, and sees anolher off, in fine military tradition, with a wing and a prayer.

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