This month’s “What Could Have Been” is brought to you by special request (a while ago, actually, but I wanted to cover Odyssey 5 in a Primer first). As it turns out, Odyssey 5 doesn’t have a whole lot of information out there on how it would’ve progressed; Manny Coto, the show’s creator, has been fairly tight-lipped about his plans and still has a fervent belief that he may be able to resurrect or remake the show some day. It’s hard to argue with the idea that the show would likely be far more successful if it were made today than it was at the time, although ratings weren’t behind its cancellation. Almost everything I’ve found comes from one source: the DVD commentary for episode 1. However, there’s still enough tantalizing tidbits here that we can reconstruct some of the series’ plot and eventual resolution. Let’s look at the plans for Odyssey 5 Season 2 and beyond.

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A few weeks ago, we discussed some of the lesser known spinoffs of more popular parent shows. This week, we’ll continue the descent into obscurity with 4 spinoffs that never even made it that far, having died before they even managed to… uh, spin(?) at all, by picking up in the vein of “What Could Have Been.” As they all come from major franchises, it’s interesting to imagine what the consequences of their success might have been. Let’s explore, shall we?

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With Babylon 5 standing as one of the crowning achievements of serialized television in the 90’s, it’s no surprise that it eventually got a spinoff. And Joe Michael Straczynski (henceforth, JMS) had plans that were just as big–a full five season arc, just like Babylon 5 had. Babylon 5 always painted itself as the “anti-Star Trek,” so I think many people were surprised to see it branching out into spinoffs in the same way as that franchise. Unfortunately, TNT executives had little patience or understanding as to what they’d signed up for and didn’t give the show a chance to finish, killing it after only 13 episodes (heck, before they’d even aired). So once again we’re left to examine what could have been: Crusade season 2.

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This month’s edition returns to a show that had its moment in the Obscure Sci-Fi Primer spotlight just a few months ago. Like so many other Fox shows, Space: Above & Beyond was canceled before it had a chance, after being yanked around by the network for a few months. From the start, the creators had hoped the show would last at least 5 seasons, which in and of itself is a pretty common desire for showrunners (5 seasons times 22 episodes equals 110 total, enough to secure syndication, which in the 90s is where the big money came from). And while this show is hardly a well-planned out 5 year arc like Babylon 5, the creators, James Wong and Glen Morgan, did have some plans for Space: Above & Beyond season 2 sketched out before the show was canceled (and even discussed the possibility of a theatrical continuation). So let’s dig in and find out where this very military show might have headed had it continued.

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The Terminator franchise has always been a bit scattered, to say the least. Each new installment tends to take what it wants from what came before, and ignore the rest, something that it was uniquely capable of due to the mechanics of time travel it used. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was one of these, drawing from the first two films while ignoring all but a few select points (like Sarah’s cancer) from the third. It also ended up in the particularly strange situation of having a film come out during its run that subsequently ignored its continuity AND most of Terminator 3‘s. The show actually got off to a great start, with high ratings and critical praise, until it had the bad luck of getting caught up in the 2008 Writer’s Strike. The first season was abbreviated, but fans were reassured that it would return for season 2. And it did, but without Fox’s confidence this time. Finding itself in the Friday Night Death Slot after the mid-season hiatus, it languished there until cancellation. While the showrunner, Josh Friedman, has absolutely refused to give any clues as to how the show would’ve ended or where it would have gone after that agonizing cliffhanger it signed off with, other people involved in the show have been willing to share what they knew. From these threads, let’s piece together The Sarah Connor Chronicles season 3 that could have been.

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Last month, I decided to introduce the new “Obscure SF Primer” instead of doing a “What Could Have Been“; I had one planned, but ran into a snag with the research and had to delay it. So this month, we’ll be getting back to the regular pattern by picking up where both left off–a look at what Charlie Jade season 2, the focus of that first Obscure SF Primer, might have contained.

Spoilers for Charlie Jade‘s first season, obviously. Read more

On here, one of my most popular topics is “What Could Have Been,” where I go over the now-public plans for seasons and shows that never developed. But what about those times when these major losses were narrowly averted? Once in a while, things align just right, and looking back, it’s hard to imagine how the show could have continued without this one aspect. And yet, there were many moments of serendipity that ended up playing a huge part in these shows’ success. So today, we honor just a few of those close calls by looking at “What Almost Wasn’t,” with 4 near misses from the annals of Sci-fi history, focusing today on casting and characters.

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It’s been exactly 4 years since Syfy announced that Caprica, a Battlestar Galactica prequel series, was canceled. It was a show that ran alongside Stargate Universe, which suffered a similar fate. The show’s ratings struggled, but one has to wonder just how much of it was caused by the quality of these shows, and how much of it was caused by putting basic cable genre shows up against the broadcast networks’ primetime lineups in the fall. Defiance has managed to hang on, and most other Syfy shows have done well in that same summer premiere, when there’s less competition for viewers. And incidentally, Defiance features the same showrunner, Kevin Murphy, that Caprica had. The shows even have similar themes, featuring lots of gay characters (along with many other sexualities too, and even a rare mostly-positive portrayal of polyamory) and both explore wholly created cultures in a sci-fi setting. But be it because it was too soap opera-esque, or because it had a tough timeslot, or just a general lack of interest in the background of that world, Caprica was canceled only halfway through its first season. Still, there were plans set up for the future already, and Kevin Murphy has been open with fans about what they were. So let’s get ready to explore the world of Caprica season 2.

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Seeing how popular the Stargate Atlantis article was last month, I thought we’d continue on this trend by taking a look at the lost future of its younger brother, Stargate Universe. Much like Atlantis, it was canceled prematurely, but unfortunately it wasn’t really given a satisfying ending. The producers tried to pull out the wrap up movie technique for this also, so we once again have two different possibilities that the show could have taken to continue on. There’s a lot less solid info for this one, given that it’s more recent, and part of it is still being withheld from the public on the vague hopes that the story may still be finished in some form, be it television or otherwise. Let’s push forward into inevitably depressing territory with vanished potential of Stargate Universe Season 3.

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The demise of Stargate Atlantis has long been a point of contention in the Stargate fandom. While the story of how it ended has changed over the years, the commonly believed version is that Atlantis was canceled to make room for Stargate Universe, which aimed to take the franchise in new (not necessarily fan-approved) directions. The truth is a bit more complex, but even at the end of its run, Atlantis was popular, with solid ratings, an active fanbase, and growing good will for accepting and addressing some of the more common criticisms of the show. Whether its cancellation was deserved or not, we have to face the fact that with the reboot in the works, there’s no going back to Atlantis. With that in mind, the show’s writers have been uncommonly open about their plans, particularly Joe Mallozzi, who posted in great detail what he felt he could share about Stargate Atlantis season 6. There’s a lot to dig through, however, so I’m going to try to condense it all in one place.

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