Babylon 5 has had a rough road with revivals and spinoffs. The original five-year series seemed to complete the telling of its story by the skin of its teeth, and got a few TV movie victory laps as a treat. And then… it didn’t go so well. Crusade, a spinoff intended for its own 5-year story arc, was DOA by the time it premiered. The Legend of the Rangers, a further spinoff piloted at Sci-Fi Channel, repeatedly lived for the One, died for the One, and racked up a mere one in the ratings. In the 21st century, a direct-to-home-video relaunch with hints of promise fizzled. In the meantime, the original Babylon 5 cast was losing key players at an alarming rate, making any further reunions increasingly unlikely.
Unless you do it in animation. But even that is a fraught proposition, when the original run of live-action Babylon 5 brought together stage-seasoned performers with amazingly distinctive voices. As tantalizing as the prospect of new Babylon 5 adventures unconstrained by the realities of physical production sounded, my initial reaction to the news of The Road Home quickly landed on “So…you’re just going to recast Mira Furlan and Andreas Katsulas?” Subsequent press releases made clear that they were going to do precisely that. No small amount of skepticism set in very quickly.
The end result exceeds most expectations, falls short of a few others, and thumbs its nose at a lot more. For starters, the animation is unsurprisingly beautiful; Warner Bros. Animation has been producing original animated features for the direct-to-video market for years now, most of it bringing to life DC Comics storylines that, in some cases, were also being done in live action in the interconnected Arrowverse shows on the CW, leaving the animated movies to languish in small-audience obscurity. The astounding thing is that, according to the commentary by B5 creator/writer J. Michael Straczynski, Warner approached him about doing an animated project to mark the 30th anniversary of the show. (It has become known that, for many years, any further discussion of reviving Babylon 5 as an intellectual property were squelched by one Warner executive with an axe to grind, but that executive has now moved on.) While internet debate over a potential Straczynski-written live-action reboot sucked all of the oxygen out of the room, The Road Home snuck in the back door and was better than expected.
It’s sillier than expected. The station’s self-destruct system pauses to ask Sheridan if he’s just having a bad day. The cavernous Great Machine of Epsilon 3 is swarming with copies of Zathras. There are a few moments where the whole thing threatens to turn into Babylon 5: Lower Decks. But you know what? That’s okay. It doesn’t break the universe or break the rules of the show. Even live-action Babylon 5 gave us silliness like Marcus serenading Dr. Franklin with Gilbert & Sullivan, and Commander Ivanova sealing a diplomatic deal with an improvised dance number whose lyrics included “boom-shaka-laka”. All of the light-hearted moments that seem like they’re a threat to the structural integrity of the fourth wall are very much in the tradition of what the show always was.
And so is The Road Home‘s heart-on-its-sleeve, sentimental core. With new voice actors joining the handful of the surviving cast to revive characters that haven’t been heard from in years, the movie – and its writer – is obviously reveling in having old friends come by to play once more. Is the voice casting perfect? In some cases, it’s absolutely spot-on – Anthony Hansen’s take on Michael Garibaldi is close enough to make you think Jerry Doyle walked into the studio. Paul Guyet does double duty as both Commander Jeffrey Sinclair (the live-action show’s original lead for its first season) and Zathras, and does justice to both of them, whose original actors are long gone. I’m a big Phil LaMarr fan, and his Dr. Franklin is certainly passable, though we simply don’t get to hear much from him.
But recasting Mira Furlan as Delenn and Andreas Katsulas as G’Kar? We’re just doing this? Yes – and both have fairly major roles here, so their voices are subject to more scrutiny. Rebecca Riedy comes achingly close to Mira Furlan’s Yugoslavian-accented English, though Delenn’s role in this story is, perhaps frustratingly, very much in the mold of the character’s later live-action treatment, which is more hushed gasps of “John!” and less of the steely, determined Delenn of the show’s early years. It would be interesting to hear Riedy in an animated story that revisits that Delenn, but the show’s creator/almost-sole-writer seems to have forgotten that he once gave Delenn the line “Never forget who I was, what I am, or what I can do.” So more “John!” it is, and it’s done well here.
The weak link, unfortunately, is Andrew Morgado’s take on G’Kar, though it’s also tantalizingly close. If there are any further animated B5 features, I’d love to hear Morgado grow into the character. He’s so close, and yet somehow just a little bit off the mark of Katsulas’ painstaking enunciation and quiet power. However, the G’Kar was see in this story is frequently – and let’s find a way to say this without completely spoiling things – something else speaking through G’Kar, and so I’m able to headcanon my way past the difference in the voices, as if it’s the product of a driver behind the wheel of a car they don’t drive very often. I’d like to think that repeat exposure to the character, and further study of the original performance, would reveal that even here, we’ve got the right actor for the job. He just needs more time to find the character and vice versa.
The bonus features of the Blu-Ray are a short featurette, “Babylon 5 Forever”, and a commentary with Straczynski, Bruce Boxleitner (seeing the finished product for the first time and reacting with wonderment), and supervising producer Rick Morales. The featurette points up the fact that the remaining original cast members were consulted ahead of production to make sure that they were on board with their fallen castmates being recast. If anyone had said no, the project would’ve been dead. The new cast members get face time during their recording sessions, along with interviews conducted with the surviving original cast. The commentary has more time to cover more territory, though sometimes it exposes things that frustrated me in the show. There’s an unnamed ace Starfury pilot who single-handedly takes out a number of Shadow fighters in a major battle scene, and Straczynski starts joking about ill-fated season two character Warren Keffer – but why wasn’t this kick-ass pilot character Keffer? If we’re exploring alternate timelines, why not take a chance to redeem that character rather than still raging, decades later, about Keffer being the product of a studio demand for a “hotshot Top Gun pilot character”?
The biggest laugh I got out of the commentary was during the scene of Sheridan “sliding” from reality to reality through the somewhat overused visual of a tunnel through space (with so many Easter eggs and in-jokes already in the show, would it have been too much for Sheridan to wave at a passing SG team, or Jerry O’Connell, or…?), at which point Boxleitner asks “Did you record me when I went on the Tron ride?” (referring to the then-recently-opened light cycle ride at Disneyland). It’s the crossover we didn’t know we needed. Bruce’s fond memories and wonder at how well the animated movie turned out are the highlights of the commentary; I found his sentiments far more engaging than any of the technical talk of writing or animation.
The Road Home is a road we’ve been down before. We’ve already heard “Babylon 5 is back, and it’s direct to video now, so you get to vote on its future with your dollars!” And hey, even at a low ebb in my personal finances, I didn’t hesitate to pre-order the Blu-Ray, because I definitely wanted to cast that vote. I’m not expecting any more from the tantalizing alternate timeline that the movie ends in. I’m not expecting more Babylon 5 to come from this. Been there, done that, I know better. But as with The Lost Tales, The Road Home is a very promising start of something new. Babylon 5’s problem, however, is managing to pull off a continuation with promise. It’s as if the stars aligned for the original series, but only for the original series. It’ll be an unprecedented stroke of luck if anything more comes traveling down The Road Home. That’s a shame, because it seems like whatever it’s trying to initiate, it’s off to a very enjoyable start.