You Look Like a Pak'ma'ra Just Ate Your Cat

After hunting through three stores, I finally found Babylon 5: The Lost Tales (or, depending on what part of the label you're reading, Voices in the Dark).

Hunh. Five years since the last B5 project, and this is what he came up with. Well, let's take it apart bit by bit:

*The DVD presentation is as artifacty as the show was, except without the excuse that the show was filmed between ten and fifteen years ago. Many scenes just look like you're watching them on YouTube. This is a shame, because the CG work is, while fairly unambitious compared to the peaks of the series, quite lovely.

*JMS has still not learned to write human dialogue. Not a fatal problem when you're telling little pieces of a huge, action-packed saga, but a bit of an issue when you're telling two very short stories that mainly involve...people talking.

*Of those stories, one involves the hijinks that ensue when a maintenance worker is possessed by the devil and Lochley calls in an exorcist. Yes, that's exactly what she does.

*The generally superior second story is still a ripoff of Harlan Ellison's "City on the Edge of Forever" Star Trek: TOS episode, except with a cop-out at the end. JMS did not use to do cop-outs.

*The three returning cast members--Bruce Boxleitner, Tracy Scoggins, Peter Woodward--give performances that are much as we remember them. Make of that what you will. I didn't care for most of the guest actors, with the exception of Teryl Rothery as a particularly slithery ISN reporter.

*There are some decent continuity references and sweet nods in the script to Richard Biggs and Andreas Katsulas. But addicts are going to be disappointed that more characters and story events aren't name-checked; these two stories are entirely self-contained and not enormously interesting. Again, both raise the question: why bring the B5 universe back for something that really isn't worth doing?

The actors aren't getting any younger, and there are important stories that have been hinted at but not fleshed out--the telepath war, the Drakh plague, etc. The fans really want those to be dealt with on screen. To come back after all these years only to tell stories that aren't worth telling...well, that's wasting our time and testing our loyalty.