STILL ALONE IN THE NIGHT

AS BABYLON 5 RETURNS IN THE ROAD HOME, ITS CREATOR AND STARS TELL SFX ABOUT THE SHOW THAT WAS, THE NEW ANIMATED MOVIE THAT IS, AND THE LIVE-ACTION REBOOT THAT (HOPEFULLY) WILL BE

- RICHARD EDWARDS

THE BABYLON PROJECT WAS A dream given form. A five-year form, to be precise, as Babylon 5 creator J Michael Straczynski mapped out an epic story of the eponymous five-mile space station, writing 92 of its 110 episodes himself.

The show may have been a contemporary of Jean-Luc Picard, Benjamin Sisko and Kathryn Janeway's adventures on the final frontier, but it took an altogether less idealistic view of humanity's future - light years from the cosiness of the Federation, Earth found itself under the control of a dictator for much of B5's run, while the cast of alien races tended to spend more time squabbling than getting along.

It also broke the mould with its famous five-year plan as Straczynski (aka JMS; the J stands for Joseph) shepherded the show through a complex, (mostly) pre-planned arc in an era when TV serialisation was minimal, and the viewing public was in thrall to stories-of-the-week.

"When I first told Warner what I wanted to do they looked at me in the way a cat looks at a doorknob - they're not quite sure what it does, or how to operate it," Straczynski tells SFX. "No one had done a specific five-year arc with a beginning, middle and end, and I had to sort of figure out how that worked as I went. Damon Lindelof, when he did Lost, asked how we did it, and I also heard from Battlestar Galactica and gave them some advice. Then, when those two took off with this arc structure, it just blew up, and it's become ubiquitous in television programming. It's deeply gratifying, slightly puzzling and really rewarding."

Now, 30 years after Babylon 5's debut, the dream has been given a new form. There had been signs and portents of a live-action reboot for a while (more on that later), but Straczynski took fans by surprise earlier this year when he confirmed that an all-new animated movie was lurking in hyperspace, preparing for release this summer.