With Doctor Who circling the drain (because you need more than The First Female Doctor to attract fans, you need good writing and less preachiness), the BBC have gone back in their own time machine and hired Russell T. Davies (RTD) to resurrect the show.
Again.
See, RTD ("Rusty" to his fans, of which I count myself, having been underawed by his successors) was the one to resurrect the show way back in 2005 (yes, I know, Angela, there was a Before Time), after it had lain dormant since 1989 (the 1996 TV movie notwithstanding).
So, having successfully rebooted the show in 2005, RTD was called in to reboot the reboot?
Well, not exactly. Nu Who isn't exactly a "reboot" in the sense that Battlestar Galactica (2004) is a reboot of Battlestar Galactica (1979). There, Ron Moore took the basic elements of the original story: the Cylons, with the "help" of a human named Baltar, blew up the 12 colonies of mankind, and the survivors (Adama, Apollo, Starbuck, Tigh, Boomer, Athena) took to space in a (say it with me) rag-tag fugitive fleet, headed by the Battlestar Galactica. Later on in the story, they find another surviving ship, the Pegasus, headed by an officer named Cain. The basic story beats are there. But! Starbuck's a girl, Baltar's an unwitting accomplice who becomes a much more sympathetic figure (B5's Londo Mollari to DS9's Gul Dukat, if you will), Cain is a psychopath, Tigh is a drunk, and Boomer's a Cylon! Oh, yeah, and the Cylons look like us now. Also: new characters such as President Roslin and Six.
Contrast with Doctor Who. Classic Who: the Doctor is an adventurer in time and space, righting wrongs with some trademarkable items such as the TARDIS and a sonic screwdriver, and a pretty young companion is along for the ride to get in trouble and ask "oh, what's that, Doctor?" Nu Who: the Doctor is an adventurer in time and space, righting wrongs etc. What's different is the CGI and the show's format: it's not four 25-minute episodes. Now it's a Buffy-esque "45-minute standalone episodes that turn out to vaguely be tied together at the end of the season."
I'll sum up the difference thusly: the Doctor is still the Doctor, thanks in part to the show's unique conceit. The character played by Peter Davison in the early 80s is the same person as the character played by David Tennant in the late 00s. And since time travel is a thing, they meet. And it's funny. On the other hand, when Richard Hatch (1979's Apollo) turns up on the BSG reboot, he's playing an entirely different character (one who spends most of his time antagonizing the new Apollo, appropriately).
Point is, Doctor Who has never been "rebooted" in the sense that BSG was. Oh yes, it's been "reimagined" from time to time (grounding the TARDIS in the present day for a few years when they switched to color being probably the most famous; what Jon Nathan-Turner did to the show when he took over probably being the most infamous. (Watch this collection of title sequences, and you'll see what I mean. JNT took over in 1980.)
And what Rusty is going to do won't be a reboot either. Nor will it be a retread of what he did in 2005. Why would it be? After all, as another famous science fiction creator observed, in reaction to a fear that it would just be a retread, "I hear this kind of thing a lot, and what baffles me about it is that it assumes the writer has not grown or learned new things in the last 20 years. Yes, the person is the same but in any talented writer the skills improve, and if anything a longing to try something new, not old."
Well said. Wait, twenty years? RTD left Doctor Who only eleven years ago.
JMS, on the other hand, left Babylon 5 (an abortive spinoff or two notwithstanding) in 1998.
Huh. I'd almost call that some trademark JMS foreshadowing, except this is real life, not-
Oh.
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?
Right! Well. That's happening. Obviously it has to be a reboot; of the six characters confirmed to be alive 20 years after the show, five were played by actors who are no longer with us. (Conversely, of the four characters confirmed to have died before the 20-year mark, three of their actors are still alive.)
And Babylon 5 is uniquely ripe for a reboot given the sheer number of things that went wrong behind the scenes on the original show. (The original main character had to be hastily written out because the actor developed severe mental illness, another character got quite a lot of build-up only to be written out at the end of the second season because the actress quit, and the show was hurriedly concluded at the end of its fourth season, then un-canceled and left with not enough plot to fill a final season.)
One thing I thought would be cool is if the show kept Sinclair as the lead this time - he's a distinct character from Sheridan, and there are a lot of things in Season 4 in particular that Sheridan seems to have been roughly shoehorned into (just to name one: the question "do you have anything worth living for?" would mean more for Sinclair, who has survivor's guilt and death-seeker tendencies). But apparently the reboot will focus on Sheridan, with Sinclair's "mysterious past" appended to his character. Okay.
I'm left with two questions: one, will there be newspapers?
And two, will it be wokeshit? Here's what I mean by that, because obviously it's going to get political (ymmv, but I think B5's most blatantly political moment zooms over the heads of modern viewers - it's in 3.10 "Severed Dreams," when Delenn berates a great power for standing by and doing nothing while another civilization collapses into civil war - in her actress's native Yugoslavian accent). When JMS was casting the part of Dr. Franklin, Richard Biggs asked him if the color of his skin was going to matter, and JMS said (paraphrased) no, 200 from now, we're dealing with people with three heads and feathers, nobody's gonna care what color your skin is.
That's the correct answer. And they could do that in 1995. But I don't know if they can do that in 2022, with Critical Race Theory running rampant. We're not allowed to not notice race now. And it's not exactly going to be difficult to turn the fascist, xenophobic President Clark into Orange Man Bad.
Well, it's his show, if he wants to date it worse than the 90s CGI dates the original, that's his call. I hope he won't. I hope it's as brilliant and timeless (crap effects notwithstanding) as the original. I hope lighting strikes twice.
Same for RTD and Who. Best of luck to both of them.
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