Director: Michael Vejar
Cast: Bruce Boxleitner, Mira Furlan, Richard Biggs, Andreas Katsulas
Have I Seen it Before: Yes. The Babylon 5 movies were an interesting thing. After the series moved to TNT, we got four full fledged-movies aired over the course of the last year of the series. Although, for my money, the story was pretty much told in the first four years, so everything that aired on TNT felt like wheel spinning. And yet, I can’t help but think of both this movie and Babylon 5 - A Call to Arms (1999)—both aired as New Year’s events—as the first movies released in those formative years in my life.
Did I Like It: The movie has a series of less than enviable tasks. First, it launches a new era for the show which, as I mentioned above, were already behind them. It needs to weave together a complex mythology into an exciting story on its own rights. It also needs to bring in a new audience, so as to justify TNT’s enormous expense.
In case you’re wondering, it succeeds mildly in those earlier tasks, while utterly failing as the list goes on. Built out of a mishmash of flashbacks from previous episodes and some new material, the story never gels into a coherent narrative. There are moments where it transcends its restrictions, mainly surrounding the framing device in the future with Londo Mollari (Peter Jurasik). Still, the productions collective budget on hair dye in pursuit of convincing everyone the story takes place nearly fifteen years prior to the main storyline must have been staggering.
It does launch a new era for the series, but that new era underlines how, when the Prime Time Entertainment Network was collapsing in on itself and the story rushed to its natural and satisfying conclusion a year ahead of schedule. Babylon 5 has not been the same since the end of the fourth season when we saw humans a million years hence reaching their ultimate destiny.
And, too, it failed to pull in a new audience. Utterly, so, as it would turn out. It had no hope of doing so, as bringing in new people to a show whose story is already done appears to have been a fool’s errand in retrospect. The network quickly gave in to buyer’s remorse, and the future this movie promised was done within a year, and the series relegated to DVD sets for all time within another year.