Fans will have to wait a while longer still for the hotly-anticipated Babylon 5 reboot series, as The CW pushes J. Michael Straczynski’s project back to the next development season.

As we wrote in September last year when news first broke of plans for a “from-the-ground-up reboot” of the beloved 1990s series, the new series will centre on John Sheridan, an Earthforce officer with a mysterious and complicated background who is assigned to Babylon 5, a space station designed as neutral ground for galactic diplomacy and trade in the aftermath of several major inter-species wars.  Set during a subsequent and uneasy peacetime, Sheridan’s arrival “triggers a destiny beyond anything he could have imagined, as an exploratory Earth company accidentally triggers a conflict with a civilisation a million years ahead of us, putting Sheridan and the rest of the B5 crew in the line of fire as the last, best hope for the survival of the human race”.

While the Babylon 5 reboot was intended for release this coming autumn, Straczynski updated the series status on his Patreon with some (temporarily) unfortunate news. As Deadline relays, the showrunner explained that the series concept was not being picked up: “99.999% of the time, that’s the end of the road for the project.”

However, the creator also explained that The CW’s CEO, Mark Pedowitz, is a “long-time fan of B5… Calling the [reboot] pilot ‘a damned fine script,’ he said he was taking the highly unusual step of rolling the project and the pilot script into next year, keeping B5 in active development while the dust settles on the [prospective] sale of the CW.”