Third Age Thursday 11

"It was the dawn of the third age of mankind, ten years after the Earth-Minbari War. The Babylon Project was a dream given form. Its goal: to prevent another war by creating a place where humans and aliens could work out their differences peacefully. It's a port of call, home away from home for diplomats, hustlers, entrepreneurs, and wanderers. Humans and aliens wrapped in two million, five hundred thousand tons of spinning metal, all alone in the night."   - Jeffrey Sinclair

I know that Third Age Thursday has taken a semi-hiatus as one co-author (me) has been dealing with some health issues and the other one (the handsome and talented Ensley F. Guffey, whose blog about this project can be found over here) has had his hands full dealing with co-author 1. Fortunately, the tests have borne fruit and we're closer to an answer and an answer brings us closer to a plan. The whole unexpected, occasionally painful, and certainly an annoyance of an issue has put us behind where we hoped to be by December, but we've got plenty of time to make our deadline. Remember, we're creating a guide (not merely an episode recap - Ensley's blog explains the scope of the project very well) to not just the five seasons of Babylon 5, but the auxiliary shows such as Crusade, canonical novels and comics, and so on. JMS created a complex universe for his stories and material about all of that hasn't been collected in a single place. It's a yeoman's job and yes, we're up to it. Our goal is to create a companion guide that will be useful for the die-hard fan who has seen every episode multiple times as well as the new fan who is just getting into Babylon 5 ahead of the rumored big-screen movie which is scheduled to begin production in 2016. That's a wide audience, but we think we can do it - and we've accepted that there will be a few fans who will be disappointed that their favorite episode/character/ship/quip didn't get more page-time. But unless we want to create an expensive treatise covering absolutely every instance of everything (which our publisher would balk at), cuts have to be made. We've done this before - really, you should buy copies of Wanna Cook? The Complete, Unofficial Companion to Breaking Bad as holiday gifts to see our approach - and remember that show had about half the number of episodes as Babylon 5! - and it hurt to cut favorite quotes to make room for really important themes that came back later in the show, but it had to be done. Ensley and I are C&C on this mission and our goal is to get everyone to their destination in one piece.

In the meantime, entertain yourself with two very different fan mashups of the brilliant show Breaking Bad. The first is Narvinek's gorgeous recap of the show set to the spaghetti Western classic "Ecstasy of Gold" and blows me away each time I see it.

The second, by Rhett & Link, who have made a stunningly funny series of local commercials, is Breaking Bad re-imagined as a middle school musical. The thing that always leaves me gape-mouthed is that both of these, different as they are, WORK.

Back later with Babylon 5.  Promise.

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