Review for Babylon 5: The Legend of the Rangers

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Introduction

David Martell was in line for a cushy command in the Rangers, until the day he retreated in battle under overwhelming opposition. The Ranger code specifies death before retreat, and the Minbari don’t look well on defying the code. He’s about to be expelled, when at the last minute, citizen G’Kar of Narn speaks up in his support. David and his crew of mavericks get a second chance, and a cursed ship to fly on an escort mission. It should be a milk run, but the Interstellar Alliance is facing a new dark threat, and this alien force has David’s diplomatic mission in its sights. And what’s worse, his new ship, the Leandra is haunted...

The Disc

The Legend of the Rangers gets a 1.78:1 anamorphic PAL transfer, with Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo English, French, and Italian soundtracks, with subtitles in these languages and Arabic, Dutch, and Russian. The sound is adequate, the clichéd dialogue is clear, while Christopher Franke’s music doesn’t quite have the same dramatic impact. Made in 2001, The Legend of the Rangers is an outlier in the B5 canon in being a native widescreen production all the way through, including the effects sequences, so no more zoomed in frames. The CGI is certainly a lot better than before, but the story suffers from small, cramped sets, versus grand digital expanses. The production values are definitely on the low side, and you would find fan films of the same quality as Legend of the Rangers on the Internet today. Incidentally, I haven’t seen a “You wouldn’t shimmy a moose” antipiracy trailer in ages. I haven’t missed them. There are no extras on this disc.

Conclusion

When you have a big fan favourite success like Babylon 5, it’s natural to want to continue that success, tell more stories in that universe. Certainly, some of the Babylon 5 spin-off movies kept the flame burning, but when it came to the first spin-off series, Crusade, it didn’t get past its truncated first season, not helped by Firefly levels of incompetence when it came to its scheduling. In 2001, J. Michael Straczynski tried again, with this pilot episode to a Legends of the Rangers series, a feature length episode called ‘To Live and Die in Starlight’. As there is no Legends of the Rangers series, quite obviously this pilot failed and it’s easy to see why.


Crusade did something different, continued the story from where Babylon 5 left off, although the format was hardly new, a five year mission, boldly going, seeking out a cure to a deadly plague. Legend of the Rangers on the other hand is clearly set up in this pilot as Babylon 5 rehashed, with its back story of a war between darkness and light, taking place one billion years previously (a thousand times older than the Vorlon and Shadow war), and a darkness returning to the galaxy, reawakened, preying on the Interstellar Alliance.


The one difference is that this show wouldn’t be set on a space station, rather a run-down and battered spaceship, crewed by a handful of misfits in Rangers garb, an early version of Firefly perhaps. The story itself is fairly entertaining for the pilot, a diplomatic mission gone wrong, the ship barely escaping an ambush, and having to play a cat and mouse game with the ships from the new alien threat to escape, battling foes without and within. The development that the Leandra is a ghost ship is an interesting one, and it might have been fun to see how that developed. But the downside, and probably the crippling one aside from the production values, is that for a crew of misfits, there’s very little character on screen. The pilot doesn’t do a good enough job in developing the cast, bringing out their quirks, and what makes them unique, while the main character, David Martell is cut from the usual, lantern jawed, hero captain cloth.


So, a hackneyed story inside a recycled back-story set-up, low production values, and characters without character, not even the presence of G’Kar could save Legend of the Rangers. At this point it’s hardly worth mentioning how stupid the VR weapons interface on the ship looked. Unintentionally funny is an understatement.

5/10