Feature: Babylon 5: Lost Tales

Back to B5…

It’s five years after the end of Babylon 5, and Elizabeth Lochley is still running the space station. Actress Tracy Scoggins brings us up to date...

Since joining Babylon 5 in its last, fifth, season, Tracy Scoggins, who began her career with small roles in shows such as Dukes of Hazzard and Dynasty spin-of The Colbys is now working on the Supernatural series Dante’s Cove, where she is the 200-year-old witch Grace Neville. “I play her English – and you can make fun of me, that’s okay – but it just made her more interesting for me, to make her not like the others. She’s the witch in Dante’s Cove, and she’s been betrayed by the love of her life, and let’s just say things don’t go well for anyone in the cove. It’s a lot of fun, and I kind of call myself somewhere between Joan Collins and Barnabus Collins.”

Before Dante’s Cove, Tracy Scoggins found her Cult TV niche entering the Babylon 5 universe as Captain Elizabeth Lochley, a recovering alcoholic from some years ago who is more settled and confident in her position on the space station. “She’s not only more confident, but I relate to her in that… I think she may even have a line where she says, ‘My friends wonder why I’m not commanding, why I’m not out in the fight, why not a comfy desk job?’, and she says, ‘But this is where my heart is‘, and I know why she feels that way. She still doesn’t suffer fools readily. Her patience level is never… there’s always been room for improvement there!”

Now Scoggins has reprised her role, slipping back into her uniform (which, she proudly comments, actually had to be taken in, seven years on), for Voices in the Dark, the first in a planned series of direct-to-DVD anthologies called the Lost Tales. It might be the same uniform, but everything else is different. Whereas Babylon 5 was shot in a specially-converted facility near Hollywood, the new production is based in Science Fiction’s home from home, Vancouver. “Shooting in Canada was definitely a different experience,” Scoggins comments. “I’m sure you’re completely familiar with where we shot the series, the original – it was not a studio, it was a converted Jacuzzi factory or something, so we really had our own little universe, and we always lunched together and we all parked next to each other, and we all lived together like we were really on a space station. And there wasn’t any of that ‘studio’ mentality where people go, ‘Oh, let’s get the best table’, and ‘your parking space is better than mine’. No, whoever got there at the earliest call got the best parking space. It was a real family feel, so it was a bit different going up to Vancouver, and you know, the green screen combined with a different country and different crew. It was an adjustment. I’m not saying there was anything bad about it; it was just different. Let’s just say as a little girl in a small town in Texas I didn’t dream of running away to Vancouver.

“There goes any chance of working in Vancouver!” she laughs.

by James Phllips

Read the full interview in
TV Zone #217

Photo ©
Feature © Visual Imagination 2007. Not for reproduction

Taken from

TV Zone #217
July 2007
ships from Jun 27 2007
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UK £3.99 / US $7.99

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