David Bassom

Written during the middle of Season 3, Creating Babylon 5 is an interesting, if hagiographic take on the show, and the work of the effects departments, actors, and above all JMS' vision and organizational talents. There's nothing here that hardcore fans won't already know 20 years after the series ended, but this book is a pleasant journey back in time, with a few interesting tidbits.

First impressions: Battlestar fans deserved more.

My feelings about this book in TAGS: excited, disappointed, cheated, philosophical, annoyed,

I am excited by the subject matter, but disappointed by the books low production value - and what's with this weird size (bigger than a pocket book, but not quite shelf sized either). If they wanted to do something special then the obvious thing to do would have been clipping the corners off! Actually, that attention to detail would have gone a long show more way to appeasing the fans. In fact, I'm going to deduct 1 star for that fraking reason alone!
The choice to use black and white photograph seems obviously to do with keeping costs down rather than anything to do with artistic choice. Then the 16 beautifully produced quality colour plates towards the back are thrown in to try and cover the fact that the rest of the book was skimped on. Now factor in the cover price of £14.99 (in 2005) and it becomes clear that once again the publishers Titan/Universal Studios are just interested in bleeding fans of their money while giving them only the bare minimum back. Greed, greed, greed!

Now, I get why the four companion books were bought out over a period of four years - so that fans wouldn't have to wait for the entire series to end before they could enjoy the companion guides, but at the end of the run it would have also made sense to combine all four into one lavishly produced mock-leatherbound tome, with cut corners (keeping with the shows visual style) and perhaps a couple of artefacts thrown into a pocket in the back - to help justify the cost or give those who already own the original books the reason why they had to own this one too (sometimes we fans short of space or spare cash need a reason even if it's not a good one). A good example is what they did with Firefly. After all Battlestar actually made it without getting cancelled!
I'd also have expected to see a bit more production visuals, concept art, prop close-ups, and behind the scenes photographs.

I still bought the books, knowing their limitations; but not because I was totally happy with them, rather that I had little choice.
It is probably too late (now almost ten years after the series has ended) to expect a luxury omnibus, collectors book to be produced. Not that I wouldn't flip open my wallet if it did materialise.
In the mean time my thoughts are still that this was a missed opportunity for the show and a loss for the fans.

The book itself is split fairly evenly down the middle:

Following the chapter Battle Plan (about how this series came to be made), the first half of the book consists of a 4 page synopsis of the two part miniseries, as well as each of the 13 episodes of season one:

33
Water
Bastille Day
Act of Contrition
You Can't Go Home Again
Litmus
Six Degrees of Separation
Flesh and Bone
Tigh me up, Tigh me down
The Hand of God
Colonial Day
Kobol's Last Gleaming (Part 1 & 2)

...followed by individual character profiles for the 7 main characters + supporting characters. Behind The Scenes chapters on:
Production Design
Visual Effects
Music show less

Even though this book was created during the early stages of Season 3, it is still filled with enough goodies and cast/crew interactions/ dialogues to keep me entertained.

Although there were only a few minor things I was not already aware of, reading through this book was an absolute joy as I reveled in the memories of the series as a whole and individual episodes as they came up.

It really put me in the mood to get all the disks out of my DVD tower and back into rotation!

Reasonably interesting insights into the episodes and characters of Battlestar Galactica. I wish they'd taken the time and money to make it larger and with more color photos, but it's overall worth looking at.