Babylon 5: In Memory Still Bright

Tomorrow, after nearly a decade away, Babylon 5 returns. But it does so something less than it was.

You see, Richard Biggs and Andreas Katsulas are gone.

Any television series that loses actors, either through dispute or death, can suffer. But this is different. Babylon 5 completed its story in the late 1990s--the novel finished, the author’s pen retired--so the two actors’ work still stands, complete and whole.

About a year ago, Warner Brothers approached Babylon 5’s Great Maker, J. Michael Straczynski, about finally creating a feature film, something that he always wanted to do for the cast.

He couldn’t do it. Not without Richard and Andreas. Not yet.

Instead, Warners Bros. is releasing Babylon 5: The Lost Tales on DVD, the first of a proposed series of anthology stories that work within the show’s universe. The initial two-part volume, Voices in the Dark, features the return of Bruce Boxleitner as John Sheridan and Tracey Scoggins as Captain Elizabeth Lochley, as well as Peter Woodward as Galen, a refugee from the aborted Babylon 5 spin-off Crusade. Future installments should feature Garibaldi, Delenn, Londo Mollari, and other characters long missed. A feature film still may come after that, but only when Straczynski can write it without Dr. Stephen Franklin and Citizen G’Kar.

That is a task both herculean and saddening.

Babylon 5 is the story of a turning point in humanity's future, told from the fulcrum of that chaos—a well-intentioned space station designed for universal peace but regarded as an ill-fated albatross. The human crew deals with squabbling alien races salivating for war, while an ancient threat begins to slowly grow to engulf everyone. Dr. Franklin (Richard Biggs) is the station’s chief medical officer, a xenobiology expert whose morality nearly drives him to his own destruction. Meanwhile, then-Ambassador G’Kar of the Narn plots his government’s latest incursions against their former masters the Centauri, personified by fun-loving and heavy drinking Ambassador Londo Mollari (Peter Jurasik).

Although fans rarely cited Dr. Franklin as a favorite character, Biggs created a flawed but humane man, a seeming anchor in the midst of turmoil. Biggs’ brightest moment came in the 3rd season, when Franklin, always pushing himself too hard to run the overrun sick bay, becomes addicted to stimulants. Finally realizing what has happened, he leaves his job and goes on “walkabout,” hoping to meet the man he used to be:

As a Foundationist, I was always taught that if you’re not careful you can lose yourself in the world. You get to busy with things and not busy enough with yourself. You spend your days and nights fighting someone else’s battles, living someone else’s agendas, doing the work you’re supposed to do, and every day there’s less and less of you in it all. Then, one day, you come to a fork in the road . . . and because you’re distracted, not thinking, you lose yourself. You turn right, and the rest of you, the really important part of you, turns left. You don’t even know you’ve done it, until finally you realize you have no idea who you are when you’re not doing all those things . . . .

I realized I had no idea who I was when I wasn’t being a doctor. I think I was using the stims to avoid facing that. So now I have to fix it.

When Franklin finally comes full circle, on the brink of death, the answer he gets isn’t one he expects to hear. That episode, that experience, was born out of Straczynski’s own life, written into a fictional character’s story arc without realizing until after it happened. It remains one of the most powerful moments of the series, not because of any originality but because of honesty, as well as Richard Biggs’ very real performance.

In his tribute to Biggs in his Babylon 5 script book, Straczynski said Richard had a “perpetual light” about him, and everyone expected him to outlive them all. But on May 22, 2004, Biggs felt tired and went to bed, never to awake again. His passing was sudden and shocking, and his funeral brought everyone together again, no matter what disputes had grown between them. Biggs loved everyone, and that feeling was returned in kind.

The loss of Andreas, however, is in many ways harder to take. Those who had the chance to meet this private man always were flattened by his dignity, laughter, and warmth, and those who grew to know him loved him dearly. For most fans, the complex dance between G’Kar and Londo is the heart of the series, and the two’s journey is dramatically, unexpectedly natural, filled with great crimes and quiet triumphs. Katsulas brought a soul to an alien persona that shone through whatever make-up and headpieces he had. Andreas claimed, however, that the costume actually helped--it made him feel sexy, allowing him to easily disappear into one of modern science fiction’s greatest characters.

A little more than a month after Katsulas’s death in 2006 after a brave fight with lung cancer, Straczynski and some of the cast of Babylon 5 attended an industry launch for In2TV, an online broadcast service through AOL. The gathering was held at the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills, and as they entered, Straczynski stopped at the sight of something that hit him “with the force of a hammer to the chest.”

Just inside the entrance stood G’Kar’s costume--the uniform, the boots, the gloves and gauntlets, the sash--everything but Andreas. It was on a mannequin that ended at the shoulders, so that the costume “seemed to stand alone, and empty.”

Without Andreas, there is no G’Kar. Without Richard, there is no Stephen Franklin. Neither role can be recast; the actors gave everything to these characters, creating friends out of fiction and telling a story with more than just dialogue and plot device.

After both actors passed away, a former crew member created tribute videos for each, using only clips from their performances on Babylon 5. With the Lost Tales promising more Babylon 5 in the future, it’s good to witness the past and how two men enlivened it. They are in character, in the midst of a grand epic tale, but the actor behind glows through. When one loves their role, he can’t help but commit to it fully, wrapping his own personality round the fiction. When roles come to life, they are not birthed from a void; they become an extension of the player, and they become as vital as the breathing.

Thank you, Richard. Bless you, Andreas. We miss you.

So It Goes

One regret I’ll never dispel is that I never got to meet Kurt Vonnegut.

Like many people, I first encountered Vonnegut’s writing in high school, where his surreal storytelling seemed to make a lot of sense to an embryonic adult. The first novel I read was the mostly forgotten Jailbird, but it was good enough for me to seek out the granfalloons, artificial families, Tralfamadorians, and Kilgore Trout. My literary gluttony only ended when I grew sick with influenza; trapped to a bed, I was in the midst of Player Piano, Vonnegut’s first novel about a dystopian society where punch-card computers dehumanize the human worker. I had just reached the point where the story’s hero, the nervous and gentle Paul Proteus, finally rebelled and began running from the authorities. My fever was hot, and I began to hallucinate--suddenly, I was Paul, and I needed to get away. Right. Now.

No, I never finished the book. An absurdity that Vonnegut would appreciate.

I’m sure many will call him the modern Mark Twain; heck, they even looked like each other, especially late in life, when despondency overtook both. Vonnegut, however, was his own writer, a unique narrator who brought a fantastical brevity to modern literature, and a prose that turned a cynical but humorous eye to humanity’s foibles. Lord knows we need it.

War, as with other writers, shaped most of Vonnegut’s work, not just his penultimate novel, Slaughterhouse Five. As a prisoner, he survived the Allied bombing of the German civilian city Dresden, an event that the American government denied for years, yet fully demonstrated man’s inhumanity to man. A lesson like that cannot be forgotten, and Vonnegut struggled to write about it for two decades.

Despite that experience, or perhaps because of it, Vonnegut never lost his own love of humanity. The villains in his stories usually weren’t individuals but characters representing corporations, the science community, the military, even society itself, all twisting good intentions into bizzare contortions. In his most famous short story, “Harrison Bergeron,” people of talent and intelligence are purposely handicapped by the government so that everyone is equal--idealism run rampant. His heroes tended to be the meek, the Billy Pilgrims, Rabo Karabekians, and Eliot Rosewaters, who, for one reason or another, find themselves in the convolution of ridiculous tragedy brought on by a blinded adherence to a higher ideal.

For Vonnegut, humanity was forever building the tower of Babel, never realizing that the blueprints were in gibberish.

Still, the best of his stories, even dark satire like Mother Night, contain more than biting deconstruction of the human condition. Whenever I think of Vonnegut, Buster Keaton somehow slips in. The Great Stone Face persona was a myth--Buster’s characters weren’t emotional automatons going through the motions of comedic timing. He perhaps was the most subtle actor of the silents; joy, fear, nervousness, and frustration all were conveyed through his eyes, quick expressions, and body movement. What Keaton never did do was smile--no matter what chance or fate threw at him, Buster’s characters doggedly persevered, usually to the unheard laugher of his audience. Vonnegut fully understood Keaton’s art. One of my favorite Vonnegut novels is Slapstick, considered to be one of his lesser works. Flawed it may be, but the narrative is Vonnegut unfettered. His hero is a gifted freak who recounts his sad life from the shambles of Manhattan, of how his own well-meaning mistakes helped push away those close to him as the world slowly frayed. But the story is not a tragedy because the storyteller is not tragic; his telling is lighthearted despite itself, and a helpless hope still clings.

That is the essence of slapstick. And that is the essence of Vonnegut.

This week, we lost a voice for humanity, one that loved us enough to gently poke at our own grotesque grandiose. Vonnegut understood us, perhaps too well, and his stories will forever remind us that while we are still human, we sometimes forget the humanity of others. A lasting image of Slapstick is that of the hero’s pregnant granddaughter, crossing the Midwest with nothing but a shopping cart to find the grandfather who doesn't even know she exists. It’s an image that is both lovely and sad. And that’s Vonnegut’s gift to us: loving sadness.

I think I’ll finish reading Player Piano now.

Richard Jeni

It was a tough week for B-entertainment.

First, Andy Sidaris, television sports pioneer and silicon-movie maven, succumbed to throat cancer and probably happily joined a gaggle of buxom Valkyries in Vahalla. The next day, John Inman--known best for his role of Mr. "I'm Free!" Humphries on the classic British comedy series "Are You Being Served"--passed on at age 71.

But the one that hurts the most was comedian Richard Jeni, who took his own life last Sunday at age 45.

According to Jeni's family, Richard suffered from "severe clinical depression coupled with bouts of psychotic paranoia." I've had friends who suffer from mental illness, and it's more than a hard thing to live with. As Jeni's tragedy painfully demonstrated, it can take your life.

Sometimes, the ones who make us laugh are the ones with the most pain.

Richard Jeni first came to fame during the stand-up saturation of the early 1990s, when you couldn't find a channel without a comedian dishing some routine. What made Jeni stand above most, however, was his delivery. Nobody was better. If you listened to his jokes, they weren't funny by themselves. Until Richard told 'em. He didn't do anything fancy--he didn't have props, gimmicks, or catchphrases. He simply was your drinking buddy, telling you a funny story while you're watching a boring game with beer and wings. If he had a "gimmick," that was it: he was your friend. Just sit back, listen, and laugh.

Rest in piece, Richard. And thank you.