Babylon 5 Returns

TV's smartest sci-fi show gets a fifth-season reprieve and two new TV-movies, starting
with In the Beginning (TNT, Sunday, Jan. 4, 8 to 10 p.m. ET)
By Frank Lovece
On a soundstage, everyone can hear you scream. That's one reason it was so quiet last
spring in a former hot-tub warehouse in Sun Valley, CA, where Babylon 5 is filmed, and
where production seemed about to end after four critically well-received seasons in
syndication.
"They never tell you," declares B5 star Bruce Boxleitner, a TV-series veteran who's
already been through a hit (Scarecrow and Mrs. King) and a flop (Bring 'Em Back Alive).
"You're never 'canceled', you're just not picked up." Every day, as hungry as everyone
else on the set to hear a definitive word, "I would look to [series creator] Joe Straczynski,
who would walk by as solemn as the angel of death. And I," Boxleitner says chuckling,
"all apple-cheeked, would go, 'Hey! Joe! Hear anything? Didja hear anything?' He'd just
look at me and, like, through me, and then just walk away. And I'd go, 'Ohhhhh,'" the
actor adds with a deflating sound.
Such was the situation for the anti-Star Trek known as Babylon 5, a 23rd-century series
about a space station that's part U.N., part Casablanca. Boxleitner, 47, plays station
commander Captain John Sheridan, who succeeded Captain Jeffrey Sinclair (Michael
O'Hare) after the first season. Amid war and uneasy peace, Sheridan has found himself
swimming among such political sharks as Londo Mollari (Peter Jurasik), the ambassador
from, and eventually emperor of, the planet Centauri; G'Kar (Andreas Katsulas), the
reptilian Narn ambassador and covert arms dealer; and Delenn (Mira Furlan), the Minbari
ambassador, a puppet-master of the universe with whom Sheridan falls in love, and
eventually marries.
"As Mira and Bruce, we are those two characters," says Boxleitner with a trace of
astonishment. Breakout star Furlan, a classically trained European theater and film
actress (When Father Was Away on Business) who's often called the Croatian Meryl
Streep, "is definitely from another world than me. I'm this kid she thinks came out of Tom
Sawyer, and she's from this Eastern European-bazaar place that is so foreign to us. One
time we talked about it, and we said there're these great things we love about each other.
But she said I represent America to her, and that she is attracted to it, but she ultimately
fears it." Not that she's a waif or a naf. "We're both very headstrong about what we
believe," says Boxleitner. "I mean, during the Bosnian conflict, she and I were at each
other all the time!"
Babylon 5, unlike the similar but more action-oriented Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, has
emerged as a sort of thinking-alien's series: a single, novelistic story of empire and
frontiers. And while you don't really need to know about the political intrigues of the
Ottoman Empire or the forces leading up to World War I, those are just the kinds of
things that help you better appreciate the series' meticulous, inexorable, allegorical sense
of historical cycles repeating themselves.

Yet Warner Bros., the studio that produces it, seemed to break from historical cycles
when it finally axed the show: Babylon 5 had just won sci-fi's prestigious Hugo Award
and had just seen its ratings jump almost 13 percent from the third to fourth seasons.
Straczynski, who's written virtually every B5 script himself, was stranded four-fifths of
the way into his "novel," and so hurriedly shot a final-chapter episode. Then TNT, which
had acquired the rerun rights, contracted for two B5 telefilms to help draw attention: the
prequel In the Beginning (Sunday, Jan. 4, 8 to 10 p.m. ET), and Thirdspace, scheduled for
spring; plus a reedited, re-scored new edition of the 1993 pilot, The Gathering (Sunday,
Jan. 4, 10 p.m. to midnight ET).
One of the prequel-movie performers turned out to be Michael O'Hare, whom Boxleitner
replaced shortly into the show's run. Partisan fans filled chat rooms and bombarded
Boxleitner with snail-mail. "People really got hateful," Boxleitner marvels, "like I was
personally putting Michael O'Hare out of work. And I thought, 'How could I have
possibly have done that?' I mean, I was offered a job and I took it and I walked in and
was made to feel very comfortable immediately. I was barely aware of the man myself; I
didn't watch the show! By the time we did "War Without End" [the third-season closer, in
which Sinclair's momentous eventual fate is revealed], it was like he was this ten-foot-tall
shining knight, the way fans had built him up."
Fortunately, when the two finally met during that episode's production, they jested rather
than jousted. "I was just wrapping for the day, heading for the makeup trailer to take the
makeup off. In comes this guy with a ball cap on, and he walks right into my face and I
walk right up into him, and there was no one else around, and he says, 'Bruce. Michael
O'Hare.' And I go, 'Michael! How are ya?' And we talked for a few minutes, and any kind
of awkwardness between us went away. When we worked together there was no problem;
Michael and I got along fantastically. But among the fans it was like this war, Sheridan
vs. Sinclair... and I think, 'My God. These people need a life."
The series, at least, got one: Shortly after commissioning the telefilms, TNT ordered up
the long-planned fifth and final season (beginning Wednesday, Jan. 21, 10 to 11 p.m. ET).
Straczynski shelved the previously filmed finale for later. Yet even with this last-second
reprieve from the governor, "There was no party, there was no nothing," remembers
Boxleitner. "Everybody was quite happy, but it was at a point where we were all so
exhausted. We were somewhere toward the end of production of In the Beginning [which
was shot after Thirdspace, though it runs first] when we found out we were gonna be
picked up." When the good news arrived on that set, "There was hardly anybody there.
Everybody went, 'Hooray!' but... there was nobody there that should've been there. There
were a lot of extras and stuff." But then two days before production re-started, Boxleitner
and his wife, actress Melissa Gilbert, threw a party at their home. "And I think that's
when everybody really just let it loose and said 'Hey!' and jumped for joy."
Fans, of course, can do so all this month, what with two Babylon 5 telefilms, a new fifth
season, and reruns of the first four (running weekdays, 7 to 8 p.m. ET, starting Monday,
Jan. 5). And even regular ol' viewers can appreciate the series as well-thought-out

political soap opera. Like any show, B5 can be stilted as often as stately; yet even its
lesser scripts are more thoughtful than most on TV. And whether the old version or the
new, one thing you can say about Babylon 5: It never just babbles on.