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Babylon 5 Creator Pitches Trek
pdawerks writes "According to Sci-Fi Wire, Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski told fans on a B5 Usenet group that he and Dark Skies creator Bryce Zabel have put together an idea for a new Star Trek series, which he said would revive the ailing franchise. 'I got together [with Zabel] and wrote a treatment earlier this year that specified how to save [Star Trek] and develop a series that would restore the series in a big way,' Straczynski wrote. 'I actually think it could be a hell of a show. Whether that ever goes anywhere with Paramount, who knows?'"
Bab5 guy first went to Star Trek guys with the idea of Babylon 5. But they didn't accept the "space station" suggestion at that time, so Bab5 was born independently.
Later Star Trek guys came up with DS9. (no comments here)
Now, I wonder what will be different.
On the topic of timliness of Trek, I'm reminded of a two-parter DS9 that seemed almost prophetic.
It's after the Dominion has started to make in-roads to the alpha quadrant that Cisco and Odo go back to earth to head up security.
During the course of events, it becomes clear that a high-ranking Starfleet official is using the paranoia surronding the possibility of 'changling' terrorist attacks to repeal rights and declare martial law on earth.
Seeing it on SpikeTV a month or so ago, it really struck a nerve with the current state of affairs and the 'Patriot' Act.
BEEP! Wrong!
Think back to when ST:TNG came out. It was slick to look at, but the stories were very tame and seemed to dwell heavily on gizmos and soap opera moments. Time did the show no favors. After the first season I gave up on following it regularly, and checking in from time to time found it getting scarcely better (about 20 minutes of material stretched into 1 hour show most of the time.)
It needs to get back to its roots. Let the characters have flaws, let them make mistakes. Put irony and humor into it in difficult situations. Make the leaders make difficult choices. Make it interesting again with good stories, not practically perfect people and a lot of references to Shakespeare.
Heck, Klingons were a cold-war type adversary -- make up some nasty race like Al Qaeda and have the characters discuss how the federation got into a mess with them and try to find a way out of it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Well, there's a limit to how much I'm going to build up the myth of Roddenberry. After all, his insistence that there were no sane villians or informed disagreements -- Roddenberry insisted all conflict was caused by insanity or ignorance -- meant that Next Generation was pretty dull in the first two seasons.
This belief of his is also why Star Trek is chock full of evil madmen, but has few interesting large scale conflicts.
It was only as Roddenberry gave up control of the series that the show became more dramatic. Roddenberry was deeply uncomfortable with the idea of the Borg, and presumably he would have hated the way Deep Space Nine went once the Dominion War began.
I've always thought it would be great if there were a Federation Civil War. After all, the Federation appears to have an incredibly weak central government (that Prime Directive has actually been invoked to describe why the central government can't interfere with a member planet) and the Federation is spread over a large area, with only slow travel between the edges (apparently, it would take years to cross the Federation).
But because of Roddenberry's guiding principles, that'll probably never happen. "Enlightened people of the future will never fight each other."
Yawn.
Check out my blog: My Galaxy is Milky Way Adjacent
How many stories are there, really, that will fit into a one-hour TV slot? The universe may or may not be finite, but plot possibilities certainly are.
Which is why new shows seem like such dreadful, bloodless retreads of old ones. We've seen all the characters and pretty much every idea you could ever squeeze onto the deck of a starship.
There's nothing really *wrong* with ST. It's just played-out.
If ST could learn one thing from Babylon 5, it would be plot and character development. In the original series, the fact that Kirk and the others were flying through space was somewhat incidental. We might have enjoyed it just as much if the same actors had been set in a western.
Perhaps ST could move toward the sort of long-term plot arcs we saw in Babylon 5, and have come to expect from series like the Sopranos. Freed from the format of episodic drama -- and the crushing weight of our expectations -- Star Trek might be free to again explore the Undiscovered Country.
That would be kinda nice.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
I think a great movie, if not series, would be all about the Borg. How the first nanobytes took control of the first specieis (species 001) and how the collective was created. No Federeation, no Vulcans, etc.. just BORG.
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
um, i think they tried it on ENT: they're called, coincidentally enough, the suliban: a bunch of not understood hostiles who attack in unpredictable ways, and whose literal physical flexibillity makes them tough adversaries.
ed
You're raising an interesting issue about how many of the things about B5 that are interesting is the contrast between B5 society, which is far from utopic, and the current "we fixed all of humanity;'s problems" view of the universe in Star Trek(at least from TNG onwards). Roddenberry's idealism inspired him to try to make a sci-fi utopia abd kinda blinded him to the fact that good stories aren't written about happy people who never have problems between themselves. B5 is quite the opposite, being dark and gloomy even during parties, yet it's enjoyable on a different level. We live problems, small and great ones every day, and can identify with such characters better than with Jean-Luc Picard, Captain of the Federation Flagship.
Not that he was a bad character, I always thought the Picard-Q fight was the brightest point in the series, Picard's humanity being a perfect foil to Q's view of humans as worthless. It's just that there's a whole bunch of humans, and only one Captain(Admiral Selectee) Picard of the Federation Starship Enterprise. Contrast that with the characters on B5, and we're talking doctors, policemen, Ambassadors and Politicians too, but the doctors and soldiers and policemen and "Joe Random Aliens" usually lead the show, with the bigwigs just trying to balance the politics out so war doesn't break out.
Some of the early movies had great material to start with(the Klingons joining the federation could have been a great movie), yet turned out to be not as good as they could be, mostly to leave more room for special effects and fight scenes. The problem is that the Star Fleet/Federation of Planets gimmick means that fight scenes shouldn't be that common, except for the villain of the week, and few things kill a story as fast as a villain of the week. Q was a great villain, he kept coming back, we could defeat him, but never kill him and he went away only when he wanted to. He kept making humans be as human as they could be, only to prove him wrong, and that usually makes for a great story. Few B5 characters needed help in being more human, except maybe for the Vorlons(and with such help, they were downright interesting), and that's probably a design decision on their part(a good one in fact).
Babylon 5 is/was so superior to anything in the StarTrek universe that comparisons are meaningless.
Easily the best 5 years of SCI FI on television ever. Ok maybe 4, season one was iffy.
"The problem is with the writing, not the franchise. Its just not interesting anymore - and this latest travesty (Enterprise) is just adding insult to injury. Blue alien nazis? Someone get these clowns outta here :)"
What's wrong with that? Many people have written that Hitler claimed that he himself was receiving orders from "The Old Ones." And then we have the social anomaly with the Third Reich. Many people speculate that such totalitarian societies should not produce such brilliant scientific breakthroughs (in terms of weaponry for them) as the Nazis did. Look at their helmets from that era and then look at what the US military uses today. Look at the B2 and look back to the Nazi flying wing designs. The Panzer tanks, the V1 and V2 rockets, jet fighters, saucer designed aircraft, and the atom bomb they would've had if their own scientific team didn't sabotage the results. Then you have Hitler's (and many other Nazis) obsession with the occult. So that leads to much speculation for a writer with imagination, with or without a tin foil hat.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
It is not without irony that the best ST series (DS9) was based upon JMS' pitch for Babylon 5 to the Trek folks.
Personally, I think JMS should take that Trek idea and run with it in a new Universe, the way they did with Babylon 5. Bab-5 is by far one of the best Sci-Fi series ever produced, and it came from a rejected Star Trek idea pitch.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
This was a strong theme running through Babylon 5 Seasons Two and Three, which culminated in the secession of Babylon 5 from Earth.
Seriously, all the good aspects that people rave about in DS9, B5 did first. DS9 was just a Paramount copy of B5, quite frankly -- almost to the point of lawsuit.
I don't think JMS and trek would be a good combination. One of the things that's hrting trek now is that Berman/Braga and their cabal of writers are locked in and running the whole show. Part of the reason TNG and DS(, and even TOS suceeded is that they had a multitude of writers with different styles.
...and depsite the holy reverence that many scifi fans place on b5, it was not without its flaws. The overall story arc was very ambitious and well thought-out, but many parts of the story - the dialogue was heavy-handed, foreshadowing (no pun intended) was overused as a plot device and frankly dind't always need a riddle-talking alien to be accomplished, etc. b5 was good TV, and certainly surpasses Voyager and most of TNG in quality, but I can't really see JMS helming a show whose canon, universe, and fanbase he can't entirely control. Nor can I see his particular philosophy working especially well with the established continuity. If JMS were going to "Save" trek he'd have to let go of some of teh creative control to allow people to fill in where he's weak, and his track record on such things isn't the best.
Meanwhile, JMS wrote nearly all of b5. And that was in fact one of the things that I felt worked to its detriment. The wrtier's flaws quickly become the show's flaws, and that's one of the things killing trek right now.
----
"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
To me, you are describing Stargate-SG1. That show is a comedy/drama/scifi with a crew you just gotta love.
Rick Anderson is fantastic in that show. Amanda Tapping is damn cute. Sometimes they smooch!
B5 needed better comedic timing, SG1 has it. Anderson brings that, but the writers are actually good, too. See "The Other Guys." Hilarious!
It was the first series in a long time that I actually looked forward to seeing.
(there goes my karma!)
...or maybe not.
Well, it's Garrick the taylor who performs the murder, but yeah, that's a brilliant episode, especially since it's told from the position of Sisko, confessing everything in his captan's log (which he later deletes).
How about the one where the Maquis are poisoning Cardassian planets with a chemical that isn't toxic to non-Cardassians...so Sisko poisons THEIR planets. Actually fires missiles full of poison gas onto them, with the whole crew of the Defiant looking at him like "whoa, dude! way out of line!" The look on O'Brian's face...and the fact that Dax actually refuses the order at first...made this an awesome episode, one that changed your opinion of the captain.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Hey, they're "fresh" and "creative."
And alien nazis (just say it out loud, with a smile in your voice--and remember that, by the 'trek cronology, we're all slaves to Khan right about now)
Where was I? Oh, yes.
The alien nazi (singluar, remember) is a great example of the subtle fact that Enterprise brings into the central focus a topic that goes hand-in-hand with FTL travel and has been only tangentially mentioned in previous Star Treks: Time Travel.
Enterprise is ALL about time travel--it's not set "before Kirk", it's set long after Janeway, after the Federation has won and perfected time travel. It's just told from the story of a ship that blew up in the history that Kirk knew, and only launched because of an incident that never happened to Kirk's historical Johnathan Archer.
I'm of the "Star Trek needs a good long rest" persuasion, myself, but if anyone can revitalize and ailing franchise, it's probably Joe. He has the talent, the background, and the credentials.
It's ironic, though. When Joe first came up with Babylon 5, he pitched it to Paramount. Paramount turned thumbs down on it. Joe pitched elsewhere. What does Paramount come up with next? Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a show about a space station located on the borders of several competing interstellar powers. Coincidence?
Joe reportdly hit the roof, but was careful *not* to blame Rick Berman and the other folks directly involved in ST production. Paramount wished to protect the Trek franchise at all costs, and wasn't about to compete with itself by backing a non-Trek SF show. Whether it decided to sucker punch a possible competitor by bringing out the same idea first remains unknowable.
The problem is that Paramount got a successful franchise largely by accident. Star Trek: TOS was originally cancelled part way through, and brought back through fan pressure. It seems likely that Paramount never really understood *why* it was popular, so successive Star Trek: Whatever's have trod the same old ground, in apparent fear that any actual new ideas would kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.
Personally, I was around when the original series was being aired. It was the best SF on TV at the time, but hasn't aged terribly well.
ST:TNG had some good moments, especially when it worked through the backlog of unproduced scripts bought for the original series and started buying new material. There was at least some attempt to deal with adult themes, even if there were embarassing clunkers.
DS9 had moments as well, especially when they introduced the war with the Dominion. Trek always had a schizophrenic attitude toward Star Fleet. Pointing out that the Enterprise was a capital ship, and if there *was* a war, Star Fleet would fight it produced hand-waving and denial from a lot of folks.
Voyager was simply excreble. I think I managed to watch one episode before giving up in disgust.
I had hopes for Enterprise. A show set early in the chronolgy of the series, detailing the early days of the Federation had promise. Promise that, unsurprisingly, has not been fulfilled. I've avoided it, too.
I have a problem with television that makes an implicit assumption that I'm dumb, and that any show with a few SF tropes and some FX will get me to watch. Dramatic story lines, meaningful characters, interesting plots, good writing? Who needs them? It's got the Trek name on it. It will sell...
Well, not to me, buddy.
Joe might actually be able to create a Trek series worth watching again. I'd love to see it. I'd lay long odds against Paramount saying yes.
______
Dennis