The Legends of the Rangers had its faults, but it also had plenty of potential to develop into a strong continuation of the B5 universe.
What Is It?
This television movie acted as a new chapter in the Babylon 5 story that was designed to launch an ongoing series. It takes place at the end of the Shadow War (which concluded in Season 4 of B5) as the Rangers work together with the Interstellar Alliance to keep the peace among the worlds impacted by the war. Ranger David Martell is given command of the old and damaged Minbari ship Liandra (considered by many to be cursed) as a disciplinary action for his failure to follow orders. He and his ragtag crew are then sent on a mission to escort another Minbari ship carrying diplomats to a secret location. When they arrive at their destination, they come in contact and do battle with an ancient alien force known as The Hand, and they come to realize that it presents a grave threat to a galaxy still recovering from a devastating war.
Aired: The Sci Fi Channel, January 19, 2002
Starring: Dylan Neal, Andreas Katsulas, Alex Zahara, Myriam Sirois, Dean Marshall, Warren Takeuchi
Created By: J. Michael Straczynski
Why Didn’t It Fly?
When this pilot aired, Babylon 5 was only a few years removed from its acclaimed five-year run, and the original series presented many opportunities to expand the universe in new directions. Crusade had sadly been cancelled after only one season, but J. Michael Straczynski decided to take another shot at continuing the B5 story and presented The Legend of the Rangers to The Sci Fi Channel. And this one certainly seemed like a good fit for the network that was already airing Farscape and Stargate: SG-1 at that time and would soon launch the Battlestar: Galactica reboot. But for reasons unknown, the network execs did little to give The Legends of the Rangers much of a chance. They aired it on a Sunday evening against the NFL playoffs, and the ratings were not very good for the pilot. The network then decided to pass on the series and ended the second attempt by JMS to continue the story of Babylon 5 beyond the original series.
Would the Series Have Worked?
Yes. Sure, the pilot had some warts and some of the characters and concepts needed to be ironed out better. But go back and look at the rather clunky launch of B5 with “The Gathering” and compare that to the much superior series that followed. The Legends of the Rangers offered plenty of potential to expand on the B5 universe and to explore the legacy of the Rangers themselves. It appeared that JMS was setting up G’Kar as a recurring character in the new series, and other regulars from the show would have likely made appearances as well (and perhaps we would have learned the fate of Lennier at some point). This show had its own five-year arc planned and it could have also delved into storylines previously introduced in B5 while possibly merging in part of the Crusade story-arc down the line to give that show some sort of resolution (the pilot takes place prior to the events of that series). But sadly, The Sci Fi Channel decided not to greenlight the show, cutting off what could have been another great space-based entry for that network (though they did at least give us Stargate: Atlantis two years later). JMS would make one more attempt to extend the B5 franchise with The Lost Tales which was planned as a direct-to-DVD anthology. But only one installment of that was released.
Where Can You Watch It?
The movie was released on DVD, though that has since gone out of print. You can still find it for sale at a reasonable price. It was not included in the DVD collection of the B5 movies, though you can buy it VOD for only $1.99 at places like Amazon.com. HBO Max currently has the original series available for streaming, though I don’t know if that includes The Legends of the Rangers.
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And I can’t say I agree with Jon on that: It wasn’t really all that bad a pilot, I’ve seen plenty of shaky pilots work out alright after a show finds its stride, and not all of them were better than this one. I would suggest that the biggest obstacle this show faced was that it had a heck of a hard act to follow in the show it was spinning off from, on top of a lot of fans burning out on Babylon 5 after so many years: I could feel a lot of that setting in for the final season of Babylon 5, after the show had struggled for a couple years against threats of cancellation at the height of its popularity and success, with several carefully-planned plot arcs getting shaken up by trying to wrap them up too early, and other arcs getting shaken up by cast changes: I remember the last season of Babylon 5 feeling a bit weird and aimless at times, with the spin-offs feeling like a bit more than anyone was ready to invest in.
As for things like CGI and VR, I think that highlights another hurdle this pilot was facing: sci-fi fans are extremely difficult to please. Flaky special effects come with the territory of Space Opera television shows and movies: if you can’t handle a little CGI, zippers visible on the backs of rubber-suit monsters, goofy rubber-forehead makeup, and that sort of thing, then science fiction television just isn’t for you: special effects failure has been all part of the “charm” of such TV shows from the beginning, and is part of what has made even well-loved shows like the original Star Trek, Twilight Zone, Lost in Space, Doctor Who, Space: 1999, The Outer Limits, and countless others – even Babylon 5 – fun and entertaining.
The “impossible to defeat enemy” thing? What else would the writers and producers do instead… set up a lengthy set of story arcs built around easy-to-defeat enemies? Of course they replaced one wrapped-up difficult challenge with a new one: “impossible to defeat” enemies are kind of the bread-and-butter of space opera, science fiction, and fantasy: it’s kind of hard to build a drama without them. It’s one of the reasons that Doctor Who, for example, keeps dragging the Daleks and Cyberman back out on a pretty regular basis, in spite of the fact that those villains have been completely exterminated nearly as many times as they’ve been brought back: less memorable, challenging and convincing villains really don’t keep the audience tuning in. Lots of science fiction franchises have struggled with what to do when their most popular “impossible to defeat” villains have been defeated at last: some do a more graceful job of replacing their villains than others. (When the Star Wars sequels and prequels and TV shows weren’t propping up The Empire with yet another new “impossible to defeat” Death Star, for example, it was trying, with varying levels of success, to replace the Empire with some new villains…. Star Trek’s spin-offs tried a few replacements for their popular tough-to-beat Klingon villains, before striking gold with The Borg, which they seem to have had a hard time finding a replacement for ever since…. Maybe a take-away here is “never kill off your best villains unless you’re sure you’ve got an even better replacement” – arguably, “The Hand” might not have looked like a promising replacement for The Shadows, Vorlons, and other First Ones, though it was hard to tell from a pilot episode alone – but here, the writers are being criticized for even trying to replace their villains, and it apparently doesn’t matter whether the replacement villain worked or not! It seems that after the original series concluded its story arc by defeating its major villains, there was absolutely nothing they could have done right in the spin-off to set up a new villain.)
And the VR gimmick isn’t any sillier than a lot of the other conventions of sci-fi television that most of us handwave pretty routinely as all part of the show (why send people out there at all, when drones and ships programmed with artificial intelligence can do the whole thing much faster and more accurately? Why use beam weapons and mass drivers in space combat, when the fact that you have faster-than-light travel or hyperspace capability implies that you have access to far more destructive and efficient firepower, considering the vast power requirements of traveling faster than the speed of light, or manipulating the geometry of higher dimensions? Why use VR – or buttons or triggers, for that matter – when an organic computer – say, a vat-grown human brain – wired directly into the ship’s weaponry by remote control can get the job done faster, without all the baggage of a human body, a human face, human emotions, etc.? A “realistic” sci-fi show would have about as much emotional investment as watching “Battle Bots” without a live audience or commentary: it would be a lot of artificial intelligence and faceless machines or biomechanical nightmares blowing things up on a very large scale faster than you can keep up with as an audience….) Military sci-fi “tropes” like space navies, laser pistols, light sabers, dogfights, human-operated gun turrets, and yes, even the goofy VR-thing – much like the way that such sci-fi crosses over with sword-and-sorcery, western, detective, and pirate pulp fiction conventions – help to add a “human element” for audiences to get latch onto. Some of these gimmicks have been around for so long, few people stop to question them… others stand out because they’re new, and haven’t really had time to get absorbed into the background yet, and modern sci-fi audiences just don’t seem to be interested in giving any of the new gimmicks a fair handwave….
Which brings us to the Sci-Fi/SyFy Channel: in retrospect, the people who were running that network then – and now – just aren’t really invested in science fiction, and it seem to be largely because science fiction just doesn’t draw much of a loyal audience. “Normies” aren’t particularly interested in new sci-fi shows, and sci-fi fans REALLY aren’t interested. (I gave up on trying to convince sci-fi television fans to give a chance to anything but endless Star Trek and Star Wars spin-offs a long time ago! And even those bland stalwarts of sci-fi geekdom are apparently struggling to keep audiences these days….)
Seriously, I could easily name a half-dozen perfectly decent science fiction shows that were killed off by the SyFy channel since the days of “The Legend of the Rangers”, and I’d only get a bunch of replies from science fiction “fans” who will only give me reasons that nobody should like any of those shows, and you’d be hard pressed to find a single science fiction show that doesn’t get complaints: nobody dislikes science fiction shows more than science fiction “fans”! I don’t think that depressing truth was lost on the Sci-Fi/SyFy Channel!
So, you’ll find that the Sci-Fi/SyFy Channel gives sci-fi shows VERY little investment, and tosses them overboard before they ever get a chance to build an audience by word-of-mouth, but “reality” TV shows, wrestling, late-night “stoner” entertainment like “Sharknado vs. Zombie Snakes on a Train VII”, and urban fantasy/horror like “Wynona Earp” and “Z-Naton” seem to have gotten a lot more support from the network: the Sci-Fi/SyFy channel was abandoning the hard-to-please science fiction audience – and expensive sci-fi television shows – for audiences who were considerably less picky, and more forgiving of the less expensive “reality’, wrestling, stoner, and Urban Gothic Fantasy material other audiences tune in to.
So, it’s really no surprise to me that the Sci-Fi/SyFy Channel dumped the Babylon 5 franchise like a hot potato at the time, just like it’s dumped just about all of its other science fiction programming since then: good, bad, mediocre, or ugly, a Babylon 5 Spin-off just wasn’t in the cards, because the audience’s heart just wasn’t into investing in a Babylon 5 spin-off, and the Sci-Fi Channel wasn’t interested in investing in a science fiction show, or in science a fiction audience.
Sure, we were probably lucky we got a Stargate spin-off at the time (and even that only lasted until the Sci-Fi Channel killed it, too), and the Battlestar Galactica reboot (and I’ll admit to being surprised that the Sci-Fi Channel actually supported Galactica: I’m afraid I didn’t watch Battlestar Galactica at the time, being rather burned out on the whole space-opera thing after having a couple shows pulled out from under me already after Babylon 5, so I was taken by surprise later on by the unexpected success of Galactica, as well as being surprised that Firefly, which I did watch years later in reruns, was much better than I expected…. Firefly, of course, got killed off by the other butcher of promising sci-fi television: Fox, which never really seemed to know what to do with science fiction after discovering that The X-Files was a success, apparently trying to repeat that success many times, but giving up too easily before any new science fiction show could catch on, apparently under pressure of a management that really hated science fiction and sci-fi fans….)
These two responses are representative of the contrast in reaction I have seen to Legend of the Rangers since it first debuted. People either forgave it its faults and had a lot of hope in it or they hated it. I fall into the former camp, though I admit the pilot had plenty of faults. Another galactic threat like The Hand did seem like a redo of the Shadows, but I was willing to give JMS some leeway to see what he would do with it. And I’m one that like the VR tech and thought it was an interesting twist on “just pushing the button”. But many people did hate that. I would still like to see this pilot revived, but it seems highly unlikely that will ever happen.
Ugh, Fox cancelled Dark Angel two days after telling them they were renewed for a third season, put Firefly in its slot, and then cancelled that too, before its first season was even fully made. Such shenanigans.
Legend of the Rangers aired on my birthday, and I was really looking forward to the rest of the series and bummed not to get more of the B5 universe. I found the whole movie entertaining. It was great to see G’Kar again, too. One of my favorite characters in genre fiction.
Another Syfy travesty: cancelling Dark Matter after its third season. Especially after the network forced the writers to kill off One in season two against their will in violation of the original plan, not for any creative reason but just arbitrarily because his actor’s name was first in the credits and the execs thought it would be neat to pull a Ned Stark (fortunately the writers say he faked his death, which would have been shown if we’d gotten to Season 4). And then cancelled it anyway. No wonder Syfy is the most insidiously evil organization on Stargate & Dark Matter showrunner Joe Mallozzi’s list now: https://josephmallozzi.com/2018/06/26/june-26-2018-13-of-the-most-insidiously-evil-organizations/
Not to mention cancelling Caprica after the first season, before its storyline leading up to the First Cylon War and BSG was even finished. That just shouldn’t be legal.
I think networks should be run only by people interested in creative fiction for its own sake.
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I can’t say I agree Johnny. I thought it was just terrible, and I say that as a massive B5 fan. As far as I’m concerned it was canon-breaking nonsense. The whole idea of introducing another all powerful antagonist (The Hand) just didn’t work. We already had an all powerful antagonist, the Shadows. The whole B5 thing was about defeating an almost impossible to defeat enemy, and winning against all odds. You can’t just make another one.
And as for the battle scenes, were do we even begin.. awful CGI and a ship that when fire upon requires Sarah Cantrell to literally run into a room to get into some VR bullshit rather that just pressing a button to shoot back.
The whole thing was awful. Just bad, really bad.