It was a fan favorite that never quite caught the popular imagination. The ratings were low, and the show was constantly fighting off cancellation. In its final season, the cast and crew did the best they could with less money and time as budgets and shooting schedules shrank. The final episode stank.

I'm talking about Star Trek, of course, not Babylon 5. But the only tip-off is the final episode ("Turnabout Intruder" was the original Trek's shudder-inducing television curtain call) -- and even that's debatable. Some B5 fans think "Sleeping in Light" stinks too.

The long night, the short Saturday morning
Some might argue that the abortive B5 spinoff Crusade was just that, a failed attempt at a Next Generation. There's some merit to this argument. Like ST:TNG, Crusade had a new cast, a new ship, and a new perspective on its universe.

However, another way to fit Crusade into the picture invokes a now relatively obscure bit of science fiction TV trivia. Star Trek's first comeback was a series of animated episodes running from September 1973 to August 1975. The length of its two-year run is deceptive -- there were only 22 half-hour episodes, or 11 hours of screen time to Crusade's 13.

The animated Star Trek was at best a mixed success. The original cast and some of the writers returned for the cartoon version, but the show's potential was mostly sabotaged by the decision to make it a kiddie series.

Significantly, the animated series -- network-crippled creature that it was -- was produced "because the fans demanded it," much like Crusade. Despite that, both shows ended up as little more than a few weeks' work for the actors involved.

The animated series should have been the end of Star Trek. Reviving television shows was almost unheard of then -- when a show was dead, it stayed dead. A few shows tried to leap to variety formats -- fortunately, The Brady Bunch Hour was quickly put out of viewers' misery -- but the only successful "revivals" were stars like Lucille Ball, who brought her I Love Lucy persona to The Lucy Show and Here's Lucy in the 1960s and 1970s. Even then, Ball didn't bring her Lucy Ricardo character -- it was her comedy style and onscreen manner that provided the continuity.

Star Trek should have faded away. The reasons it didn't are well-documented. Its core fan base kept interest alive with conventions, fan fiction, and the constant drumbeat of "Star Trek Lives!" Between syndicated reruns and James Blish's popular prose work, the Star Trek universe steadily gained converts, and by the late 1970s the series was snaring the imaginations of kids who weren't even born when "Turnabout Intruder" aired.

We know that Star Trek made its golden comeback, and how. Can Babylon 5 reproduce it?

Dreams torn asunder
While Babylon 5 seems to be roughly where Star Trek was 30 years ago, the world has changed radically over the decades. Some of these changes make the idea of a revival more likely. Most make it less likely.

The biggest change in Babylon 5's favor is the Internet. E-mail, newsgroups and web pages have replaced the mimeograph and the hektograph, and I've never heard anyone who's done battle with the old machines complain. Science fiction fans are wired to each other. News spreads like wildfire, and activism has never been easier.

Babylon 5 fandom began online, where it was expressly encouraged by series creator J. Michael Strazcynski's direct interaction with fans in the SF interest groups of Compuserve and GEnie. Were fans to organize a revival movement, the Internet would be their most powerful communications tool.

Unfortunately, other changes make that movement unlikely. The most important is that television science fiction is so much bigger than it was in 1970.

Episodic SF was a dire proposition in the 1970s, at least in the United States. In the ten years after Star Trek ended, only a handful of shows set in space appeared on U.S. network TV: Battlestar Galactica and Quark. Neither lasted long. In syndication, Space: 1999 fared only slightly better.

There wasn't much non-space SF on television either -- Logan's Run and Mork & Mindy were high points. In 1971 and 1976, there wasn't even enough worthwhile SF television and film to merit a Hugo Award for "Best Dramatic Presentation". The early Trekkies had the world of media fandom to themselves. There wasn't anything else worth being a fan of.

Modern fandom has fragmented into dozens of splinter groups. Nobody can participate in everything, but almost everybody is interested in more than one title or franchise. This makes for a pleasantly energetic state of anarchy, but it makes it hard to organize a movement large enough to stand out from the crowd and get some real media attention.

The explosion in science fiction television has also made it hard for Babylon 5 to keep a foothold on the schedule. The growth of the Fox, UPN and WB networks has compressed once-thriving syndication markets to a fraction of their former size, in the process destroying the "Prime Time Entertainment Network" consortium that originally aired Babylon 5. The death of PTEN drove B5 straight into the arms of cable channel TNT, which buried the show in an early Saturday morning time slot.

Star Trek built its audience with aching slowness over years of syndication repeats. Stations across the country aired it after school or during the dinner hour, where it worked its way into the subconscious of an entire generation. That's not happening with Babylon 5, and it won't happen as long as TNT retains control of it.

Even when TNT's contract expires, the rights to Babylon 5 are likely to be bought by the Sci-Fi Channel or a similar network, which would treat the program as a crown jewel, airing episodes in prime time with full promotional fanfare.

The trouble with prime time
The trouble with prime time, though, is that that's where niche programming competes with all the other prime time shows. Like Star Trek, Babylon 5's best home might be the dinner hour, where it can quietly slip into the hearts and minds of young America. It's unlikely to get that chance.

As a member of the Star Trek Welcommittee, one of the first Trek fan clubs, Shirley Maiewski saw the movement to revive Star Trek from the inside through her work organizing many of the first Trek conventions.

Today, she thinks the early Trek conventions were crucial in bringing back the show. The face-to-face contact kept enthusiasm fresh, she says, "letting people know that the interest is still there."

Maiewski sees big differences between yesterday's amateur-run cons and the professional conventions that make up the majority of today's media-fandom gatherings. The fan-run cons were simply mass get-togethers, with formal and informal activities frequently running late into the night. Professional conventions, on the other hand, are organized as shows, with presentations ending in the late afternoon and a focus on selling merchandise. There's little opportunity to create a community when everyone goes home so quickly.

The early fan-run conventions were also more affordable, making them easier to attend.

"In 1973," Maiewski remembers, "hotel rooms were only about $25 per night!"

Still, Maiewski insists that while fiction and the release of "Star Wars: A New Hope" did their part in bringing Star Trek back, the most important factor was the dogged persistence of the fans.

"Star Trek people never gave up on Paramount," she says, adding that she thinks Babylon 5 fans should do the same.

Tell us so, Joe
Of course, all the persistence in the world may not do any good without Joe Straczynski, Babylon 5's executive producer, creator and primary writer. While Warner Brothers owns the series and can create a new series anytime it wants to, it's hard to imagine a show in the B5 universe without his involvement.

(New projects are a good thing, of course, but we fans are a greedy bunch. We want new projects and more Babylon 5 too.)

Straczynski has also taken a very different approach to his old project than Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry took toward his. While Roddenberry used convention appearances to encourage fans and actively campaign for a revival, Straczynski shut down the B5 fan club and at present seems uninterested in working on or campaigning for a movie or a new series.

It may be that the "Great Maker" Straczynski is simply getting some a much-needed rest, but if he decides to return to the universe he created, he may find that shutting down its support mechanisms has made relaunching the property significantly more difficult.

Do we really need more Babylon 5?
Meanwhile, Babylon 5 is almost unique in U.S. television in having completed the story it set out to tell, in a way that a purely episodic series like Star Trek never even imagined. Straczynski succeeded at his goal of creating a "novel for television" and while the five-year mission of Babylon 5 is far from perfect, it's a grand yarn, and we can sit down with the tapes anytime we want.

It's too bad Crusade never really got off the ground, but it doesn't spoil what came before. And we certainly can't complain about the size of our feast. Even Star Wars fans had to survive on six hours of movies, print adaptations and that Wookiee Christmas special for 20 years. We have over 100 hours of Babylon 5 to watch and re-watch.

Still, there are so many more stories to be told about Babylon 5 and its universe that, like children, fans can't resist asking, "And then what happened?"

Just one more story before bedtime, Joe? To get us through the hour of the wolf? Please?