'Babylon 5: The Road Home' - A Brief Review - TOYG! NewsByte - 19th August, 2023

'Babylon 5: The Road Home' - A Brief Review - TOYG! NewsByte - 19th August, 2023

SPOILERS AHEAD!!

Babylon 5: The Road Home acts as both an animated continuation of classic B5, but also as a reboot for possible future series. Set several years after the Shadow War and during the formative times of the Interstellar Alliance, President John Sheridan and his wife, Delenn, are leaving Babylon 5 for Minbar, where the capital of the Alliance is to be seated. While on Delenn's homeworld, Sheridan opens a new power station that uses tachyons as an infinite power source. Unfortunately, these quantum particles affect Sheridan, due to a previous encounter with time travel, and send him on a whirlwind adventure to other times and alternate realities. We meet old friends and old enemies, some voiced by the original actors, some by new people, as a surprisingly large number of the original B5 cast have, as Delenn might put it, passed beyond the veil.

On his travels, Sheridan learns that he is a critical component to reality, being an observer needed to allow all timelines to progress as they should. His very act of observation in another timeline could dramatically affect how events unfold. In the end, though, we are taken to a new timeline, one where the Shadow War has not happened (yet) and our old friends are all alive and well.

I enjoyed Bablon 5: The Road Home, but it did not wow me.It was nice to be in the B5 universe once more, but it was a rushed affair, flitting from one timeline/reality to the next without allowing us to take a breath. Most of the main characters returned, but there were notable exceptions. Where was Vir? Why was Kosh never seen? Or Lorien? Anna Sheridan never appeared (or was that her voice we heard on Za'Ha'Dum?). We saw Lyta Alexander, but there was no sign of Talia Winters or fan-favourite Alfred Bester. We went down to Epsilon 3 and met versions of Zathras, but there was no sign of Draal, the Minbari guardian of the Great Machine. It would have been nice to catch up with Zack Allan too. I'm sure there are plenty more characters, but I realise there was limited time and we barely had enough room for the characters we did see.

The animation was adequate, even good as far as the space battle scenes go, but it falls short in the character models. Some are easily recognisable, but with one or two, I was surprised when their names were mentioned, as they looked nothing like their real-life counterparts. Some scenes looked very CGI-ish, while others seemed like traditional hand-drawn animation. I am sure this was deliberate, but it was noticeable to me.

J. Michael Straczynski used this animated feature to reboot his series (which was being created for the CW, but seems to have fallen into development hell, for several reasons: the CW's sale, the pandemic and other financial considerations). The movie ends in the new timeline with hopes of new adventures for our popular characters. Straczynski has said he hopes to make two of these animated films a year and I hope he gets the chance to do so, because The Road Home is well worth a watch, even if it doesn't blow your mind.

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