Babylon 5 Creator Pitches Trek

pdawerks writes "According to Sci-Fi Wire, Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski told fans on a B5 Usenet group that he and Dark Skies creator Bryce Zabel have put together an idea for a new Star Trek series, which he said would revive the ailing franchise. 'I got together [with Zabel] and wrote a treatment earlier this year that specified how to save [Star Trek] and develop a series that would restore the series in a big way,' Straczynski wrote. 'I actually think it could be a hell of a show. Whether that ever goes anywhere with Paramount, who knows?'"

Deja Vu?

[LittleGuy]

Didn't Joe pitch a Star Trek series to TPTB before [startrek.com]?

He is...

[jedijacket]

"One oddity...constant readers will remember a while back when I was asked what TMoS was, and I provided a list of things it *wasn't*. The aforementioned oddity is...one of those things has come up as an adjunct to TMoS."

Other clues he's posted tell us this is "The Memory of Shadows" a possible movie/miniseries/something.

1 of the relevant JMS News postings [jmsnews.com]

Also mentioned is info on Crusade DVDs and a new book series.

Re:Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor not a scriptwriter!

[ackthpt]

During the course of events, it becomes clear that a high-ranking Starfleet official is using the paranoia surronding the possibility of 'changling' terrorist attacks to repeal rights and declare martial law on earth.

Similar to one of the Orig. Star Trek movies, the one where effectively a cabal of military and diplomats try to keep the Klingon - Federation rivalry going.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Re:JMS doing trek

[ajs]

Having read the posting, I would not hold my breath for this. I did find some of the other comments interesting:

* He was asked to EP Enterprise, but turned it down
* He is accepting an EP role on *something*
* He's going to be in the UK for a while
* It's not Dr. Who

Those last 3 are all of a set. My theory is that JMS doesn't get this excited about anything from the UK more than Prisoner and Blake's 7... if it's not something new, it just has to be one of those.

Personally, I just want more Supreme Power, Rising Stars and Amazing Spider Man out of him. Those have been amazingly good (though Spider Man slipped into a sort of slow patch for a bit in the middle). I don't need the big screen or tee-vee, in fact I think JMS does better in comics.

Re:Can we finally have a Star Trek topic icon now?

[IronMagnus]

Correct me if I'm wrong.. but isn't that alien head Balok from TOS? http://www.startrek.com/startrek/mediaview?id=2102 152

Re:What Star Trek needs

[Deathlizard]

I'm not sure it needs a rest as much as it needs a new vision. Pretty much, Star Trek as of late has three Primary Scripts that it uses.

1) "Aww! It's a cute little space alien!! Wook at the cute wittle space alien! Let me pet it and stroke it and help it and dont screw up the Primary Directive and...."
2) "Oh no! It's a Rift!! Quick! get the "How to use the Deflector to fix a rip in the space-time continuium" manual and fix it before it destroys the universe! It's under the "What to do when the Holodeck Goes self aware and traps the crew" manual!"
3) "Oops! We Traveled Through Time!! Lets get out of here before we screw up histo...Wait a Second, WE ALREADY SCREWED IT UP! OH NO! WE GOT TO FIX IT!!

Anything new that doesn't revole around these three things would be refreshing.

Personally I would like to see a war break out between the Federation and something else. It doesn't matter who the "Something Else" is, as long as it Lasts for the majority of the series. They could have focused on the war that the Enterprise C was involved in and run with it, or either Focus on a war in the Future timeline, or something, but at the very least drop the Peaceful stuff for awile and show some interesting battles, technology and space warfare tactics.

JMS

[Thieron]

I wonder how well that might have worked though. I love B5 and almost everything JMS has written since. However, good or bad, when he doesn't get his way, he will walk away from a project. He likes to be in full creative control.

After Crusade was killed by TNT's influence, I think JMS took a lesson from that. He had a great comic series called Rising Stars. He said in the same place as the above comments, that the final issues would be finally out later this year. It took so long because he and Top Cow were having contract and money issues and he wouldn't finish until it was settled.

He also recently left Showtime's Jeremiah over creative differences.

Fortunately, he has been happy with Marvel and now the B5 movie (TMOS or The Memory of Shadows) is being made.

I would have loved to be a fly on that wall though when Paramount came to him to help. I wonder if they talked ideas, etc. Interesting that Enterprise chose to do a season long story arc for this season. Something B5 did with lots of success (hell, it was a 5 season long arc, well 4).

Re:What Star Trek needs

[Short Circuit]

I wasn't sure what this episode was about (I don't know them by name), so I looked it up. Here ya go [deepspace93.com], folks.

Re:let me try to remember

[obby.net]

Anyone who's watched DS9 and B5 in its entirety can vouch for the amount of severe "borrwowing" DS9 engaged in. I mean c'mon....

wormhole = jumpgate
wormhole aliens = vorlons
pah wraiths = shadows
defiant = whitestar
bjorans = narns
cardassians = centauri

And let's not get started on the similarities between the final episodes of both shows.

Oh, and JMS pitched Babylon5 in its entirety to Paramount in 1989:

http://www.jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-14028

Re:An idea for the pilot...

[SuiteSisterMary]

Basically, and very metaphorically, it was revealed that the whole time, Sam was choosing not to go home, as he wanted to be able to help people. Once he realized that, he could have gone home if he wanted to, but chose to continue leaping, in order to help people.

Re:Just what I've been saying for ages

[fiannaFailMan]

Babylon 5 suffered from having the axe constantly hovering over it. That's why season 4 seemed a bit rushed. The Shadow war and the Earth Alliance civil war were both compressed into this season with the telepath problem and introduction of the Drakh being used to pad out season 5. It would have been better to take more time to flesh out the Shadow war in all of season 4 and sort out the Earth problem in season 5, but JMS had to tie up those arcs in season 4 or risk them being unresolved if they didn't get a 5th season. Pity, that.

Re:What Star Trek needs

[Emperor Shaddam IV]

The Terrorism idea has already been worn out on Star Trek too. Remember the Bajorans from DS9? Or how about the Marquis from Voyager? Both groups used terrorism. Not to count several episodes of TNG that also had terrorism. In fact, one could argue the Bajorans are supposed to be the "Palestinians" of the Gamma Quadrant.

Almost every good idea has been written about 2 times or more, so all the new episodes are just like wiping your ass with the same toliet paper you used yesterday. I can't even take "Enterprise". I suffered through several episodes and felt like I had dated my ex-girlfriend from years ago, and she wasn't attractive anymore. Besides, my logical Brain has a problem watching a show that is supposed to pre-date Star Trek, where all the tech seems 100 years beyond the orginal Star Trek and the ideas are 100 years beyond the orginal Star Trek. And the ship looks like a Ferrari next to the old NCC-1701. They could have make things look a "little" less sophisticated.

I think it needs a rest as well.

Re:Open Letter to Rick Berman...

[AndroidCat]

That's not a Babylon 5 sound site. Now, this [uwyo.edu] is a Babylon 5 sound site! (Wow! Check the bloopers too.) A zipped "death incarnate" [uwyo.edu]

Terrorism and WWII

[Chris Burke]

This is basically what the Axis did in WWII. It's also cropped up in fictional works like 1984, Aeon Flux, Equilibrium, etc.

Um, no. Hilter took power in Germany by leveraging nationalist and racist fervor, and working popular anger about unfair WW1 reparations treaties.

Um, yes. The burning of the Reichstag [wikipedia.org] was a critical point in the rise of the Third Reich. A shocking, sudden terrorist action was used as a pretext for abolishing civil liberties provided by the Constitution of the Weimar Republic. All in the name of "defense of the Fatherland", you understand.

It is simply unacceptable that in a post-9/11, post-PATRIOT world that citizens of the U.S. would be unaware of how fear of terrorism can and has been used to strip people of their rights.

Re:Finally! Someone with skill

[CaptainAvatar]

Yes, really. About the Thule Society, I can do no better than quote Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, who literally wrote the book on it (his The Occult Roots of Nazism was the first scholarly work in this area). In his most recent book, Black Sun (pp. 116-7), he says: "This sensational image of the Thule Society and its members is almost entirely a fictional invention. Hitler never attended a single meeting of the Thule Society ... Far from growing in importance as an occult group behind the Nazi Party, the Thule Society was politically insignificant by 1920 and lapsed into complete inactivity after 1925." Even then, a diary of their meetings between 1918 and 1925 shows only two lectures on occult topics. The Nazis didn't revert to the monarchist flag and symbol precisely because they were not a monarchist party, as the fact they did not reinstate the Kaiser (or any Kaiser) should tell you; the old system had failed its sternest test, the Great War, and the Third Reich was not meant to be its rebirth but its replacement. Hitler committed suicide at about 3.30pm on 30 April, which as far as I can tell was before walpurgis night (in Germany, the night of 30 April to 1 May according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] (and walpurgis day itself is actually the following day, 1 May). He chose this time because otherwise he risked capture by the Soviets, who in fact reached the bunker on 2 May. (If, as you claim, Hitler did choose the date of his suicide because it was walpurgis night, then it was very kind of the Soviets to time their assault to suit him.) See, eg, the definitive biography by Ian Kershaw, Hitler, Nemesis: 1936-1945.

I'd be interested to know what your sources are, but I suspect they are not scholarly, well-referenced works by professional historians. In which case, you should take their "findings" with a very large grain of salt, and at the very least should check more conventional historiography for a second opinion.

PS I'm Australian, not American. But every country has its nutty conspiracy theories and apparently we are no exception [martyrsofrevelation.com].