SCI FI FLIX 9/96

On a spring night in a remote, industrial corner of Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley, the cast and crew of TV's most intriguing SF series wrapped their last show of the season, the title of which hasn't yet been unveiled. Having generated a buzz everywhere from the Internet to the Pentagon to the Australian Outback, Babylon 5 tells a story that is at times lyrical, at times brutal, but always powerful ­ a tale of the last hope for a galaxy trying to avoid war: a neutral space station where humans and aliens alike can discuss their differences peaceably. But as the action-packed latter half of its third season makes all too clear, the road to hell is paved with peaceful intentions. Earth has declared war on the space station and its inhabitants and anything is possible. Now about to start its fourth year on the air, Babylon 5 the series seems to just be hitting its stride.

"What's thrilling about this show is that it does have a sense of peril," says Bruce Boxleitner, the seasoned actor who stars as Captain Sheridan, ad-hoc leader of the rebellion against the corrupt Earth Alliance. "People will live and people will die. I don't think that in three hundred years we're going to be that much more evolved. We're human beings. We've been around four million years now and we haven't changed a hell of a lot. We're still of the same make-up and we will drag our baggage wherever we go. All of our pioneer forefathers did, whether it was coming across the ocean when they thought our world was flat to crossing the Rocky Mountains in covered wagons ­ all of our prejudices, joys, fears, everything is there."

Claudia Christian, who stars as the straightforward, militaristic Lt. Commander Susan Ivanova, concurs: "I think that Babylon 5 is extraordinary in that we tackle religious and sexual issues by giving voice and credence to both sides. We also show that perhaps in the future we will not have resolved all of our issues such as racism, sexism, and so forth, but we certainly can live together and maybe there's hope for technology. It sends out a nice message. We're not heroes saving the universe every day; we're normal people trying to live each day and making our mistakes ­ major mistakes: substance abuse problems, identity problems. We lose our tempers. We're not P.C. in the least bit. I think that it's a more sympathetic, real message, and that's why fans are really turned on by the show because they identify with the characters. A lot of women identify with me, a lot of them identify with Garibaldi, and so on."

Conceived by creator and co-executive producer J. Michael Straczynski as the first-ever novel in series format, each season of Babylon 5 represents a volume and each episode is a character in the overall five-year story. Newcomers to the fiercely unique show will no doubt be tantalized by this season's spectacular action and visual effects sequences while tried-and-true fans will be treated to the shocking developments of what Straczynski calls the "complications stage" of the overall story. "This season pays off a lot of stuff that was set up in the previous two years," notes Straczynski, whose past credits include the new Twilight Zone; Jake and the Fatman; and Murder, She Wrote, as well as the animated series Captain Power and Real Ghostbusters. "We've been setting up a lot of triggers over the last couple of years, and this season pulls all those triggers. It's actually quite amazing. A fellow was in here a while ago who is doing the new card set from Fleer, and because he has to know what to put in the cards and what to leave out, he had to read the scripts for the rest of the season. He came in a few minutes ago with his eyes poached out and he said, 'You did it. You actually paid off everything you set up in the whole course of the show.' I said, 'Yeah, that's what the job was this season.' So, it's definitely a point of transition for the characters and for the show from the secession from Earth on through to the rest of the season. That's why the overall title for the season is 'Point of No Return.' It's the point where you can't turn back anymore."

Produced by Babylonian Productions and distributed by Warner Bros.' PTEN Network, B5 airs in syndication all over the world. The series is executive-produced by Straczynski and Douglas Netter, with John Copeland serving as producer. Acclaimed science fiction visionary Harlan Ellison is conceptual consultant for the series, or, as Straczynski calls him, a "free-roaming agent of chaos." The Emmy Award-winning maekup team at Optic Nerve studios, headed by Everett Burrell and John Vulich, created more than a hundred alien makeups for the show. John C. Flinn, III, is the director of photography. The series' often-haunting score is composed by Christopher Franke, formerly of Tangerine Dream. Foundation Imaging's Ron Thornton designs the series' Emmy Award-winning visual effects, which are supervised by Ted Rae, with computer imaging produced by Paul Beigle-Bryant.

What started 10 some-odd years ago as an idea for a television experiment grew into Straczynski's vision for B5. He asked himself why a novel for television with a beginning, middle, and end had never been done on American TV, and whether bringing a series from idea to broadcast could be done more efficiently than is the custom in Hollywood. "We're fighting the fight to try and change how television is done," Straczynski says. "We're off the lot. We're way off the lot. We're way up in Sun Valley, which is great to keep the suits away. We are our own self-contained little universe here. You come here in the morning and we bring lunch in for everybody: office staff, producers, writers, crew, extras, stars; we all eat together behind the set. When you're here together you're here for the day. So, the atmosphere tends to be: We're on a mission from God. The crew is very excited about it and the cast is very excited about it. As the show has a sense of mission and importance to it, so too does the behind-the-scenes environment have a same kind of sense of mission. They know that we're doing something very different here and they have a chance to make a piece of history."

Another first for television is Straczynski's unprecedented feat of writing all 22 episodes in the season without a decrease in quality, as attested to by his Hugo Award nomination for "The Coming of Shadows." "It wasn't really my intent to do this," he explains. "I got about two-thirds of the way through and someone said that it's never been done before and I was screwed. They threw a challenge down in front of me and I'm stupid enough that when someone does it I take them up on it. It was physically tiring, but eminently enjoyable. It was great to be able to see the progression more clearly between the past season and what's coming up. I was able to go through and, knowing what went before, in every single episode pay off something and lay threads for next year, so it was a very, very cohesive season overall. No freelancer can be expected to do all that. There is very little in the way of diversions from the heart of the show."

Each season of B5 seems to end with a stomach-prickling set of twists and turns. Toward the end of this season, as war spreads like a cancer to all of the major alien races, viewers saw the murder of Kosh, the mysterious, angelic Vorlon who has advised the rebels as they secretly prepare to go to war with the menacing, equally mysterious Shadows; the resignation of the station's tireless, stim-addicted chief medical officer Dr. Franklin (Richard Biggs), and a love story which blossoms between the station's head (Boxleitner) and its spiritual heart, the Minbari Ambassador Delenn (Mira Furlan), who earlier in the season transformed herself from full Minbari to Minbari/human hybrid. "That relationship is very adolescent in a way," notes Boxleitner. "I said to Joe [Straczynski], 'My God, these lines are like I'm a teenager here. I'm almost 46 years old.' He said, 'Yes, but you're looking at it in human relationship terms.' Minbari are much more advanced than humans in most ways, but in affairs of the heart there's a very innocent type of courtship. She's made a lot of effort to become more humanlike, which has gotten her into a lot of hot water with her former homeworld."

"Most of our characters are going through one form or another of the heroic journey," Straczynski says. "Certainly Delenn has gone through that process from the initiation, the transformation, to having her props knocked out from under her, to rising above that and then being the heroic character. She has gone on that journey and she has yet farther to go on that journey. There's a certain achetypal structure that definitely applies to her and also to Sheridan in a way. He is also on the hero's journey, but is at the beginning of it and will have to go through the same kind of hell of worse that Delenn went through to bring him out on the other side."

An earlier, pivotal episode in the season, entitled "Severed Dreams," featured not only Sheridan's declaration of B5's independence, but Delenn's plea to the Gray Council (the governing body of the Minbari) to take a stand against Earth. For Yugoslavian actress Mira Furlan, the element of psychological truth ran particularly deep. "Mira watched her own country tear itself apart while the world looked on and did nothing," explains Straczynski. "Having her go before the Gray Council as her union back on Babylon 5 was falling apart to berate them for doing nothing was complete and utter psychological manipulation of her on my part. But I knew that in doing so she would give a performance that would burn your eyebrows off, and she did. Her performance had truth behind it. In fact, when I was at lunch the other day after we shot that scene, she walked over and said, 'So, how long were you living in Yugoslavia?'" Straczynski has allowed and thrived on a natural osmosis between the characters they play. "In general I try and, as well as having the character that I define, look in the actors for certain bits and pieces of the characteristics that I can either incorporate, and give the character some verisimilitude, or manipulate and use," he says. "Bruce is the kind of person who can take a set, which may have problems or may not have problems, and unify it in one force, and that's what the character of Sheridan is. Claudia is a force of nature. There's a great stength in her as a person, that I try and tap into for the character of Ivanova. You know there are two folks you don't mess with: one is Claudia, one's Ivanova. Either one will take your head off. They both have a certain wit about them and I try to blend those where possible."

"This season is certainly an improvement over the first season, where I was a glorified parking attendant," notes Christian with the acerbic wit that has become her trademark. "This season I've had comedy to do. I've had a bisexual relationship. I don't get enough time to work with any of the aliens, as far as I'm concerned. It's very frustrating because I see all these actors tearing up the scenery and I'm always at the observation door docking a Bolozian freighter, and I'm saying to myself, 'Come on, man, give me some of that juicy stuff. Let me work with the pros.'"

The character itself and overall quality of the writing initially drew Christian, whose unforgettable, scene-stealing turn in The Hidden, as well as starring roles in the films Clean & Sober and Hexed, catapulted her into the spotlight. "I really believed in it when I read it," she notes. "I thought, this is a character who's really bright and very strong. She's not an armpiece or a 'girlfriend-of.' Even though it's an ensemble cast she's obviously the second lead, which is good for the old ego, and I saw potentially that it would keep improving."

Other cast members have an intriguing affinity with their characters, including Peter Jurasik as Londo, the cynical Centauri Ambassador, and Andreas Katsulus as the passionate, lizard-like Narn representative, G'Kar. "My favorite character is G'Kar," says Boxleitner. "He's also my wife's [actress Melissa Gilbert] favorite character. Most of the women have a real thing for him. Andreas Katsulus is just phenomenal. He wants no one to know anything about him, and good luck if you want to interview him because he won't do it. G'Kar is who he is and you will know nothing about the actor playing him. He's painfully shy and comes out only when he's behind all that rubber and latex."

The ominous developments Straczynski has in store for the end of the season include the reappearance of Babylon 4, the current station's predecessor which mysteriously vanished just prior to going online. It turns out the station was sent back a thousand years to serve as a base of operations whom a legion of races, including the Minbari and Vorlons, first went to war against the Shadows and defeated them. Now, with a new war on the horizon, the highly anticipated two-parter, "War Without End I and II," brings back another figure from the past who has undergone a powerful transformation and has a few startling revelations of his own: the station's first leader, Commander Sinclair (Michael O'Hare).

Another twist revealed in the two-parter presents one of B5's patent time-travel enigmas. As a secret society within B5 known as the Rangers prepares to go to war with the Shadows, an enemy ambush sends Sheridan 18 years in the future. Explains Straczynski: "What the two-parter does is tell the end of the story at the middle of the story because you see what has happened 18 years down the road. Sheridan and Delenn are married. They have a kid. Londo has become Emporer and Centauri Prime has gone to hell because of the debris after the war. They won their war against the Shadows but there are minions and dark allies everywhere that fled Centauri Prime, and here's Londo ruling a shattered world. But yet it leads with hope in the sense that he lets them go at the end of that part of the story with the promise that they will help to restore his world. He admits that he isn't acting under his own volition most of the time. He's being controlled by other forces. So, that scene we've been setting up for the past two years, ever since the first episode, as a matter of fact. And we have a scene with him and G'Kar killing each other."

In typical B5 fashion, however, any vision of the future ­ and the show's three-year run has been studded with them ­ runs an equal chance of being an alternate future. "That's a question that Sheridan asks himself," notes Straczynski. "In the course of the two-parter as Sheridan is yanked back to the present, Delenn grabs him and, knowing where he is going, says 'Listen to me and please understand. You must not go to Z'ha'dum.' And he goes back to the present with this warning still in his head, and the question now becomes: Is this a real future or an alternate future? Did this situation with Centauri Prime happen because they listened to her and didn't go to Z'ha'dum, and if I do go to Z'ha'dum I can prevent this from happening, and this question will loom large in the latter part of the season."

Z'ha'dum, the planet where the Shadows were first discovered by a team that included Sheridan's long-lost wife Anna, is an understandably tantalizing destination for the character, and lends itself to speculation about just what Sheridan will find if he goes there. "I can say that my wife joins me in the last episode, the cliffhanger episode, so to speak," Boxleitner demurs. "In the role that she plays it worked out just right because our characters have a history and we have our own chemistry going. Joe has this thing about cliffhangers and I certainly was in one. Another one was "Fall of Night" when Ambassador Kosh reveals himself to everyone in order to save my life. Fun stuff. That was a very popular episode. My oldest son goes to a Catholic school and the headmaster, Father Allen, a very handsome, distinguished-looking man, introduced himself to me and said, 'I just want you to know that Babylon 5 is my favorite television show. I tape it when I cannot see it. Especially the episode "Fall of NIght." Well, obviously because it had some very religious images. Everyone out in the garden witnessing this, every different race saw Kosh in its own likeness. To the humans he was a guardian angel. Joe made a religious statement there. I find it fascinating that different people who come from all walks of life watch the show."

The epic flavor of the tale lends itself to comparisons with ancient Greek mythology as well, a comparison Straczynski relishes out of respect for what's come before. "There is at times almost an Oedipus quality to this story in the sense that if you try to avoid your destiny, in doing so you create your destiny," notes Straczynski. "Certainly with Londo that's the case. He has a vision of himself on the throne being killed by G'Kar, so he does everything he can to avoid that destiny, and everything that he does only insures that he is further on the path."

Likewise, B5 shares more than a passing resemblance with imagined and historical sagas such as the Arthurian legend ­ with Sheridan as Arthur, Delenn as Guinevere, and the station a space-borne Camelot, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, even the Bible. "It's just great to deal with these mythical terms. We are forming an alliance against darkness," notes Boxleitne r. "That was what attracted me to this project in the first place, I said, 'Man, he's got this thing so spelled out; it's a believable world and none of it exists! The only other thing I can liken it to in entertainment is Star Wars. The world that was built has reverberations of the swashbucklers, knights, princesses, and evil lords. It's really reinspired me as an actor. I would also liken it to Shakespeare with the great themes of love, hate, and jealousy. On the average day in Babylon I'm dealing with galactic events: worlds being destroyed, aliens that I've never dealt with before. What a great adventure to be doing this show. It's opened me up to all the unliminated possibilities of which science fiction is capable."

Thank you Karen H and Claudia!