Story: This book chronicles the making of the second season of J. Michael Straczynski’s groundbreaking SFTV series Babylon 5, which was also the last season to feature scripts written by anyone other than Straczynski for over two years. Interviews with actors, writers, directors and JMS himself run throughout the book, with a special section on how the show managed to stay on budget and a great deal of focus on the arrival of new leading man Bruce Boxleitner.
Review: One of the things I’ve always been curious about when it comes to Babylon 5 is: when did J. Michael Straczynski receive the divine inspiration (or head trauma) that told him that he needed to write damn near every episode for the rest of the show’s run? And whatever happened to story editor Larry DiTillio, who was Straczynski’s right-hand man in the Captain Power days but disappeared after B5’s second year on the air?
Though no answer is spelled out here, it’s easy to find one between the lines. In two specific places, Straczynski mentions in interviews that he didn’t like story elements that DiTillio was trying to graft onto the B5 mythos. One of these was the conspiratorial Bureau 13 (which DiTillio, in retrospect, says would’ve been responsible for the Knights in And The Sky Full Of Stars, but was affiliated with neither Psi Corps nor Clark’s renegade government), and the other was the alien life form glimpsed in Knives, which apparently had some connection to the lost Babylon 4 station. Though these stories both made it in the air, comments from Straczynski indicate a bit of irritation – Bureau 13 was “one conspiracy too many,” and the alien entity was a little too much of a typical SF staple that could have been done on any other show.
The other big focus of the book is the arrival of Bruce Boxleitner as Captain John Sheridan. If you’re looking for someone who has a beef with Boxleitner, you won’t find it in this book – his co-stars laud his performance and his good humor and even temper on the set. We also find out at what point Bill Mumy and JMS conspired to give Lennier a bit of a crush on Delenn, when G’Kar had at least one of his epiphanies, and why Warren Keffer didn’t make it out of season 2 alive.
Killick’s choice of interviews and quotes gives the book some meat, and seldom does she fall into what I call the Allan Asherman Syndrome (for the author of the otherwise excellent “Star Trek Compendium”, which always annoyed me a bit by interpreting episodes for the readers and telling them what they should be feeling during a given scene). The second season of B5 was truly a moment of transition (a phrase that seems to crop up often in the series) – the moment that J. Michael Straczynski decided that no one else could tell a story in his universe but himself. I’ve always been curious as to how, when and why that happened, and this book helped to satisfy that curiosity.
Year: Jane Killick
Author: Jane Killick
Publisher: Del Rey
Pages: 179 pages