This past Friday, February 22nd marked the 20th anniversary of that little space station that almost couldn’t; Babylon 5. Early 2013 also marked the 20th anniversary of another science fiction show centered on a space station: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. And ever since then, the creators and hardcore fans of both shows have accused one of stealing from the other.
But which came first? The Babylon 5 chicken or the Deep Space Nine egg? Recently, a new piece of information has popped up that inexorably ties together the origins of DS9 and Babylon 5.
Pioneering complex and ongoing story arcs in mainstream science fiction television is probably Babylon 5’s lasting contribution not only to genre fans but to TV in general. However, while it was on the air, B5’s truly herculean accomplishment was simply maintaining its continued existence as a serious outer space science fiction show not called Star Trek.
For years, speculation has existed that Paramount stole aspects of Babylon 5 for the premise of Deep Space Nine, owing to the fact that B5 was pitched to Paramount before being picked up by Warner Bros. And while B5 creator J. Michael Straczynski worried his show would be seen as a “last minute knock-off” of DS9, he soon adopted a “live and let live” attitude toward the whole affair. From JMS news in 1992:
“Were Pillar and Berman aware of B5 at any time? No. Of that I am also confident. The only question in my mind is to what degree did the development people steer them? One scenario is that they did not steer them at ALL…but knowing of B5, and knowing how swell it would be if they could co-opt B5, if Pillar and Berman came up with a space station on their own, they would likely say nothing, even though they might be viewed as being under a moral obligation to say something. Another scenario is that they gave direction to the creative folks without telling them the origin of that direction. There are several ways of dealing with this. One is to launch a major suit with full powers of discovery. The result is that DS9 gets tied up for months, maybe even years in litigation, and maybe the show doesn’t go forward. It also means hundreds of thousands of dollars spent by Warners and me and others pursuing this…not to mention the sense of ill will that will fly back and forth.”
The two shows eventually came to a reconciliation of sorts. Star Trek’s first lady Majel Barrett Roddenberry guest-starred on Babylon 5 in 1996 and B5’s Bill Mumy showed up in the 7th season of DS9. Further, in 1996 JMS went on record again on his site saying he doubted that Rick Berman and Michael Piller would have actively been “cribbing B5 plotlines,” and went on to defend Voyager producer Jeri Taylor. This particular entry even mentions friendly games of softball between the Babylon 5 cast and the casts of Deep Space Nine and Voyager. (DS9 lost to B5, which lost to Voyager. Why could this crossover not have actually happened on TV!?)
It appears that old space graves are being re-opened now, however, due to an interesting comment that emerged from an (excellent) io9 article celebrating the origins of Babylon 5 that was published on February 21st by Jason Shankel. A comment so interesting, in fact, that B5 creator JMS posted it on his own Facebook forum.
A commenter named Steven Hopstaken left the following comment in the io9 article:
I was working at Warner Bros. in the publicity department when Warner Bros. and Paramount were preparing to launch a joint [emphasis mine] network. Warner Bros. already decided to buy Babylon 5 for their adhoc PTEN network (a group of independent stations that agreed to show Warner Bros. shows in prime time.)
Paramount and Warner Bros. both agreed that Deepspace 9 would be the show that would launch the new network and there wouldn’t be room for two “space” shows on the network. I was told they purposely took what they liked from the B5 script and put it in the DS9 script. In fact, there was talk of leaving the B5 script in tact and just setting it the Star Trek universe. I had to keep rewriting press release drafts while they were trying to make the final decision.
But then, suddenly, Paramount decided to launch a new network on their own and screwed Warner Bros. over. That sent Warner Bros. scrambling to create their own network; grabbing up any station not already committed to Paramount and getting WGN to show the WB network on cable.
So Paramount definitely knew about the Babylon 5 script, I don’t know about the DS9 show runners, but I find it hard to believe they didn’t know.
What’s most damning about this statement is the notion that Paramount and Warner Bros. were teaming up to make a television network at a time when both DS9 and B5 were in development, meaning some kind of crossover (perhaps unbeknownst to Rick Berman, Michael Piller, or J. Michael Straczynksi) was bound to occur. Further, the idea that this guy was having to write and rewrite press releases that presumably did or didn’t establish the “space station show” as being set in the Star Trek universe, is totally fascinating. Can you imagine the names this hybrid show might have been called? Star Trek: Babylon Space 5, Star Trek: Babylon Deep, or worse yet, Space Babylon Nine.
JMS’s only reaction to this on his Facebook page so far has been to note that the comment is “interesting,” which seems like the appropriate response. After all, an unverified comment on a website is not exactly proof.
This notion sort of matches up with JMS’s 1992 theory that Berman and Piller didn’t know about Babylon 5, but that the powers-that-be might have manipulated the DS9 showrunners in certain directions. In the end, the two shows ended up being different enough to allow both to survive, and the characters and stories became divergent to the point of making everyone forget there was ever a controversy. And yet, the superficial similarities present at the start of both shows are staggering.
Stalwart DS9 fans will likely continue to maintain it is the best and most dramatic Trek, while Babylon 5 fans will always cite their show as one of the most pure and original “novels for television” ever. I’m a fan of both, but cop to being in the minority of folks who was pro-B5 and anti-DS9 when both were on. Being a Babylon 5 fan in 1993 (when I was REALLY young) felt like being a punk. I loved (and still do love) Star Trek, but even then could recognize its size and power might actually be preventing other cool sci-fi TV from flourishing. As recounted by Jane Killick in the Babylon 5 series guide book Signs and Portents, “The people behind Star Trek didn’t believe it could be done and sat on the idea [Babylon 5] for nine months.”
Star Trek had gone from being the underdog of the 60’s to the schoolyard bully of the 90’s. And while time has probably been more kind to DS9 than B5 (owing I’d say mostly to better production value on the former) B5 might have indeed been a victim of Star Trek’s success, at least early on.
In Babylon 5’s ambitious fourth season finale, “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars” the events of the series are depicted in a flash-forward historical retrospective. First the viewer sees what Earth thinks about the characters at the present time, then 100 years in the future, then 500, and so on. Each subsequent jump creates more bizarre distance, and strange manipulation of the heroic actions of Sheridan, Delenn and the other big characters. From academic trivialization, to military propaganda, to outright myth and legend, the story of Babylon 5 becomes a growing, changing thing.
Perhaps we’ll never fully know how much Paramount plucked from the B5 script for DS9; nor who knew about it. Do I think DS9 was a Babylon 5 rip-off? In the end, like JMS, certainly not. But it may have began its life that way, but there’s not that there’s much we can do about that now. After all, historical accounts of the initial construction of fictional space stations is hardly something most people get too worked up about. But as the future marches on, the deconstruction of these fictional space stations might provide us with some uncomfortable truths about the casual and wanton theft of imagination by powers who don’t possess any imagination themselves.
Ryan Britt is a staff writer for Tor.com.
I fall squarely in both camps: DS9 was the best Trek, and B5 was the best (or at least first) novel for TV. Both were awesome, I watched both all the way through.
BSG was almost as awesome as B5. If B5’s sfx could be reshot with today’s tech, and the non-sfx parts scanned into hd, it would be amazing.
@wiredog: I don’t really agree with that. Babylon 5 would definitely benefit visually from a Next Generation-style remastering, but that would come with two serious problems: it would make the already shaky sets look even worse; and, more importantly, it wouldn’t improve the acting. I really enjoyed B5, but overall the acting was of a much poorer calibre than DS9‘s.
What held B5 together as a series was the storyline, and the audaciousness of writing a “novel for TV” when nothing like it had really been done before.
The only people this matters too is the original writers of B5. These are 2 of my faviorite shows. I too agree DS9 was my faviorite run of Star Trek. The war with the Dominion and the war with the Klingons was pretty awesome.
It think we all benefitted from this. They took the idea from B5 because it was a good one.
As has been pointed out before about the very comment referenced above, it appears to be pure BS. There is no evidence of WB and Paramount planning a joint network in 1991-92, and Paramount’s solo network did not launch until 1995. The show that was used to launch that network was VOYAGER, not DEEP SPACE NINE. BABYLON 5 was also not part of The WB, instead airing in direct syndication (initially via the PTEN ad-hoc network and later just in standard syndication when PTEN fell apart).
A guy called Steven Hopstaken did work at Warner Brothers in the 1990s, according to JMS himself in that Facebook comment, but otherwise we don’t know how reliable the info is. Given the timeline of everything else that fell out, it seems to be bunk.
As for how B5 and DS9 were both developed, we do know a fair bit of info about this. We know JMS came up with the B5 concept (actually an amalgamation of two previously-separate projects) in 1987 and by early 1989 had a pilot script and outlines of a full season’s worth of episodes. This is what was shown to Paramount in early-to-mid 1989, and which they sat on for nine months before returning the material in late 1989 or early 1990.
Brandon Tartikoff then joined Paramount in 1991 and one of his first orders of business (certainly very early in his tenure) was to call Michael Pillar and Rick Berman to suggest expanding the STAR TREK franchise. TNG was due to end at the end of Season 6 (the conversation happened halfway through Season 4, and of course TNG did stay on air for an extra year) and Paramount wanted another show to air alongside it and then replace it. They didn’t want two starship shows on at once, and a planetary setting was dismissed as being too expensive due to the amount of location filming needed. At that point you’re only left with a space station as the direction to go in.
From that point Pillar wrote the pilot script with Berman producing. It’s unclear exactly when material ‘stolen’ from the B5 script would make it into the DS9 one, or who would do it. Tartikoff, by all accounts, was extremely well-respected in Hollywood and noted for his integrity. Some nameless exec slipping in ideas may be possible, but that sort of creative control is normally only handled by the producers and writers. In addition, the argument for setting the show on a space station seems quite strong regardless of B5 also being in development. The only really damning thing that JMS has raised is the presence of shapeshifters on both shows, but then morphing technology at the time was a huge deal because of TERMINATOR 2 (and, as far as I am aware, the shapeshifter on B5 was a one-off villain who was only ever going to appear in the pilot, not a regular character as on DS9).
Ironically, the only time that one show seems to have definitely influenced the other was during Season 3 of B5 (when Season 4 of DS9 was on the air), when B5’s head of CGI, Ron Thornton, was asked by SFX Magazine about the influence behind bringing in the White Star. He said, “Oh, it’s a cool ship for the crew to get around in, like the Defiant on DS9.” When asked, “Are you allowed you to say that,” his reply was, “I’ll say what I want.”
I am with wiredog. DS9 was my favorite Trek and Babylon 5 had the best arc story on TV. Newer shows understandably are afraid to plot anything out over several years and instead try to retcon to make it all fit together later – after they know they’re not getting canceled. I believe this is what Battlestar Galactica (new) resorted to. Fringe dealt with the issue by constantly resetting itself in a believable way, but in so doing sacrificed an overall story for a different message of love and family.
@Werthead I agree the storylines are not similar. DS9 was political in nature with an ultimate mythological theme, while B5 was the opposite (imho). Only in superficial details were they similar. The White Star vs. the Defiant. Kira versus Ivanova. The head of each space station being prophesized to do whatever.
@@.-@: Thank you for clearing that up. Really, Tor.com should’ve investigated the validity of the comment before posting it. It does sound quite illegitimate.
The idea that DS9 is a copy of B5 just because it’s a space station show has always been silly. How many dozens of shows are set in hospitals or law offices or schools? The only reason the space-station settings caught anyone’s attention was because there weren’t already a bunch of space-station shows.
If anything, I think that any parallels in tone or setting were just due to the cultural context. Probably both JMS and Piller independently wanted to do something that was different from the standard Trek format that dominated genre TV at the time, something that was in a different setting from just another starship and that deconstructed Trek’s idealism a little. As for them both being more arc-driven, that’s because TV as a whole was evolving in that direction at the time. The more ubiquitous syndicated reruns and home video became, the more people started thinking of TV series in terms of the whole entity rather than individual episodes, so the perspective of series television began to change.
According to the book The Making of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine by Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens, pp. 59-62, the original plan for DS9 was to set it on the surface of Bajor, not on a space station at all. The only reason they switched to a station is because they realized it would be too expensive to shuttle the whole production between the studio and an outdoors location on a weekly basis. And once you’ve ruled out a starship and a planet surface, then a space station is pretty much the only remaining option.
Well, it’s not just the space station. The Narn/Centauri situation is very similar to the Bajorans/Cardassians; the wormhole and the jumpgate are quite visually similar; the commander is attached to a religious prophecy; etc. I don’t think DS9 ripped off B5, but the long laundry list of coincidences makes it a not-unreasonable thing to think — and remember that the accusations started out going in the other direction.
@7
You said: “Really, Tor.com should’ve investigated the validity of the comment before posting it. It does sound quite illegitimate.”
I said in the article: “After all, an unverified comment on a website is not exactly proof.”
Sounds like we agree.
The reason I wrote this article was because this new comment prompted me to take a new look at an interesting quirk of science fiction history. I cop to my biases in the piece, but came to the same basic conclusions you and @4Werthead did. (This isn’t a smoking gun, it wasn’t, in the end, a rip-off.) Not sure where my investigative responsiblities faltered there. Not to mention, I am not the only Tor.com writer , Tor.com is a lot of people and writers with different viewpoints and voices.
Thanks for reading!
Looking back, I think its a good thing we wound up with B5 *and* Deep Space Nine.
I don’t think anyone thinks DS9 was a ripoff of B5, but Paramount certainly did see the script and likely used elements of the idea in in the genesis of the series. Everyone in Hollywood borrows things they like from someone else’s ideas. Few rarely call them on it (except maybe Harlan Ellison).
Both series turned out so very different though, and like PrinceJvstin @10, I’m glad they were both on so that different fans could enjoy both or either.
Having watched DS9 recently the whole series I can say w/ absolute certainty that B5 had influences in DS9…The whole story arc of “The Dominion” was created in Season 1 but took off in Season 3-7 with more hints in Season 2…in B5 the whole arc revolved around an ancient enemy and was just an incredible self-contained 5 Season arc.
DS9 started getting good when the Defiant was deployed and it just took off from there, just as B5 took off w/ Sheridan when he was brought on board.
So there are a lot of parallels in the series’ but BOTH are Top Notch Series
I was quite young when DS9 and B5 both premeired–not quite 7? And at the time I had been watching TNG since before I could SAY star trek, so it was a natural continuation for me and my dad (who I watched all Science Fiction shows with) to then continue onto DS9 (it also helped that we were like ‘YES someone is FINALLY calling Picard out on his Borg Days!’).
however I equally have recollection of watching B5 and loving G’Kar (I frequently told my dad I wanted G’Kar or Garek to be my adoptive father if he ever died and even wrote an essay about such in 5th grade about why I would choose the Antihero Patriot as a replacement father figure) and my father didn’t prefer one above the other (except in terms of actors/actresses).
As I’ve gotten older I’ve rewatched both marginally equally. I did a DS9 rewatch a year ago and I plan on doing a B5 rewatch starting this fall (need to finish Road to Avonlea), but I don’t think I prefer one over the other.
@9: Well, the piece would’ve been more balanced if you’d given equal time to the other side, interviewed someone who could offer specific counterarguments as Werthead did. Just presenting one side and saying “Well, it doesn’t prove anything” doesn’t really cut it, since not everybody reads the comments. Especially since, as Werthead showed, some of the assertions in the post don’t seem consistent with the facts. Claims should at least be fact-checked before they’re repeated.
STAR TREK had wormholes long before BABYLON 5. A Season 3 episode of TNG (the one where the Ferengi get stuck in the Delta Quadrant, where VOYAGER finds them many years later) depicted one in 1989, and of course STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE featured a wormhole in 1979. I don’t think anyone would get a TREK wormhole and a B5 jumpgate mixed up very easily.
The Bajoran/Cardassian situation does have some similarities to the Narn/Centauri one, but both were drawing on the times, namely the break-up of the Soviet Union, the fading of an old imperial power and the fragmentation of various states. SF literature was doing the same thing (Peter F. Hamilton’s NIGHT’S DAWN TRILOGY of a couple of years later drew on similar themes). It was a huge deal at the time.
The religious parallel between Sisko and Sinclair is definitely more striking, although it should be noted that Sinclair’s storyline unfolded completely differently in the series to how it did in JMS’s original outline (including the materials given to Paramount). Originally Sinclair was not Valen, did not go back in time and become him etc. He remained on B5 and fulfilled a role more similar to Sheridan’s. The idea of Sinclair being Valen apparently occurred to JMS only whilst working on DC Fontana’s script for Legacies in Season 1, and then O’Hare’s departure allowed him to modify his storyline to accomodate it.
If you can, it’s worth tracking down a copy of Volume 15 of JMS’s B5 scripts. It contains a detailed outline of the original storyline for B5 and let’s just say it’s very different to what we ended up with. B5 was pre-planned, as is often said, but that plan changed quite extensively between the original outline and the screen.
On wormholes: For decades, they were a rather obscure solution of Einstein’s equations that didn’t get a lot of attention in either physics or SF, and the fact that TMP referenced them back in ’79 just underlines what good science advisors that movie had. But in the mid-’80s, Carl Sagan wrote Contact and asked physicist Kip Thorne to help him come up with a plausible FTL mechanism, and Thorne’s research into wormholes led to a new generation of theoretical investigation into wormhole physics, and the novel gave the idea new exposure and popularity in science-fiction circles. TNG’s “The Price” was one of the earliest mass-media mentions of wormholes after that, but they started to become an increasingly popular trope in fiction in the ’90s, featured in the film Stargate and the TV series Sliders and Farscape as well as DS9. So wormholes were just a trope that became part of the genre’s vernacular around that time.
As for jump gates, B5 certainly didn’t invent those; the concept has been around in science fiction for decades, both in prose and onscreen. Hyperspace jumps have been part of SF since the 1930s, and fixed “gates” that allowed interstellar jumps have been around for a long time too. (I initially offered Andre Norton’s 1958 novel Star Gate as an example, but that was actually an interdimensional portal.) The 1979 Buck Rogers television series used “stargates” for hyperspace jumps, well before Devlin & Emmerich appropriated the name for a wormhole-based travel system. There are also the “Space Bridges” of the Transformers franchise in the ’80s.
As for the specific visual effects of the jump gates vs. the Bajoran wormhole, I don’t see any real similarity beyond blueness. Okay, there’s a certain circularity, but the jump gate effect is more cylindrical while the wormhole effect is more spherical. (As it should be. Just as the ends of a 3-dimensional cylinder are circular, so the ends of a 4-dimensional wormhole should be spherical. Most wormhole portrayals in fiction get this wrong. The DS9 version isn’t quite there, but it’s as close as we’ve gotten.)
As for the Bajor/Cardassia situation, that of course originated in the TNG episode “Ensign Ro,” which was written before there had been any thoughts of spinning off a TV series focused on Bajor.
Having been a fan of both, I think there were really only two things that stood out as feeling like one must have been derived from the other:
1. The Defiant/White Star. So the crew of DS9 gets their fancy spaceship so they can go zipping around, and in the very next season, the B5 crew gets theirs (made with super-cool alien technology none the less)? Coincidence, I’m sure, yeah right.
2. The DS9 tie-in novel The Siege and the first season B5 episode “Believers.” The main plot in “Believers” and the sub-plot in The Siege about an alien child whose parents religious beliefs prevent him from getting medical care are just so similar that it strains credibility to believe that it was a complete coincidence.
@14
I’ll cop to maybe not presenting the most balanced of an article. But I decided to take a certain angle with a certain tone. I use the word “I” in there a lot, so this isn’t intended as hard journalism, but more of an op-ed to start a conversation, and I’m hearing lots of awesome stuff here!
The only facts I tried to present were that people did say all these things, and then I linked (or noted) where I saw them saying those things. So, people saying the things I said they said seem to be facts, with citations. JMS did say those things and that person did post that comment on io9. That was my angle, that’s what I wrote the essay about. But I totally appreciate your input.
(BTW: Next time you’re in New York, come read some some Star Trek (or Babylon 5?) fiction for me at my reading series! Our mutual pal Keith DeCandido did a bang-up job back in October.) :-)
@15
Those original scripts sounds awesome. I do totally want to track them down. :-)
@17: It’s perfectly natural that a show set on a space station would need to add a starship at some point to broaden the opportunities for storytelling. If anything, it would be surprising if they hadn’t both gone that route.
I think I remember reading something, way back when DS9 was first starting or in the first season, about how the producers did have plans to add a larger ship than the runabouts eventually. It was probably something they were always considering, since after all the show was under the Star Trek supertitle and thus there would have to be a degree of trekking through the stars. The reason they finally decided to do it in the third season was because they needed a ship powerful enough to face the Dominion.
As for the White Star, I imagine the thinking was similar — as the war narrative built toward its climax, the heroes needed a ship suitable to the task. Not imitation, just convergent evolution.
As for David Gerrold’s “Believers” and its similarity to Peter David’s earlier novel The Siege, here’s JMS’s response:
Not surprising; writers are influenced by real life, so it’s not that unusual for different writers to come up with similar ideas independently around the same time. Again, not imitating each other but drawing on the same antecedent. (Also the novel and the episode resolved the crisis in very different ways. Personally I prefer Peter David’s version.)
Also, the odds that David Gerrold would’ve read a DS9 novel are probably slim, given that tie-in novels don’t have a huge readership. And if Gerrold had known of the similarity, he’s a professional enough author that he would’ve changed the story.
Plus, Peter David wrote a couple of B5 episodes in season 2 as well as a Crusade episode and a B5 novel trilogy (and one of the movie novelizations, IIRC), and I doubt he would’ve gotten along so well with the B5 team if he thought they’d ripped him off.
Like others in the thread, I immediately dismissed the claim about Paramount using DS9 to launch a network. Then I remembered that they also had an Untouchables reboot that was part of the same package that included DS9. If Untouchables had lasted more than two seasons, I can easily see the lineup expanding to more shows across more nights until it became a defacto network.
Locally, the same independant channel picked up both this two-fer and PTEN, so DS9 and B5 were airing on the same station anyway. I wonder how many other cities had this happen, and what sort of impact it may have had on both shows.
@21: A syndication package is a far cry from a network. PTEN may have called itself an “Entertainment Network,” but it was just a package of shows, and so was Paramount’s syndie package (and so was the Universal Action Pack which included Hercules and Xena).
Anyway, I don’t remember hearing anything about Paramount developing a network at that time, and we surely would have if it had been going on. It would be documented in the behind-the-scenes books about DS9, not only The Making of Deep Space Nine but the superbly in-depth and detailed Deep Space Nine Companion by Terry J. Erdmann with Paula M. Block. But it wasn’t.
With all due respect to folks like Werthead, I’m not going to start doubting one internet posting because of yet another internet posting–I tend to take it all with a grain of salt. It is pleasant for us to hang around the internet speculating, but it is speculation nonetheless. I think Ryan B wrote an interesting article, and while he found the IO9 posting intriguing, he also didn’t give it an inappropriate amount of credence.
If all the ideas in both B5 and DS9 had not been presented in a host of written SF stories over the years, the argument of which came first might be more interesting. As it is, both of them borrowed heavily from printed genre material. The ideas may not have appeared on TV before, but most of them were familiar.
[Oh and for the record, my vote for favorite goes with B5 in pretty much every category, the show includes some of my favorite television ever. And when you look at the budgets they had to work with, it makes the quality of the finished product even more impressive.]
@@@@@23: That’s actually not entirely fair. There are extraordinary and serious claims being made in the Facebook posting this article popularised. Most of those claims are fact-checkable in just a few minutes on the Internet, and these show that some of those claims are erroneous, either through being deliberately misleading or because the person making the claims is misremembering the situation (which seems a lot likelier, and the person is completely confusing the DS9 and B5 situations with the VOYAGER situation of several years later).
It’s not a case of ‘choosing sides’, but checking the veracity of the information. The original post’s reliability is, at best, highly questionable.
@@@@@ 19: There is an excellent summary of JMS’s original plans for the arc here:
http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=53739
The biggest one is that JMS originally planned two series spanning ten years, with B5 ending with the good guys losing, and then a sequel series would have picked up later on. There are some massive changes from the arc as we saw it. And frankly, I think what we saw on TV was a lot better. By condensing the 10 seasons of the two shows into 5, JMS was able to make a story that moved a lot faster and was more compelling.
I go for the ‘something in the water’ argument myself. There was a third space station series about the same time. Forget the name. Starred Linda Hunt and did the ‘western in space’ thing way before Firefly, but not nearly as well.
Watching both series as they were transmitted on UK TV, I was more struck how B5 influenced DS9, most notably from season 3 onwards as noted above.
But, also as said above, I’m just pleased we had both.
Werthead, I am not saying B5 invented the concept of “tunnels through space”; I am saying the idea of sticking one next to a space station and making it a major plot driver struck some people as a tad coincidental. That wasn’t an unreasonable thing to comment on at the time.
@25: The show you’re thinking of is Space Rangers from 1993, starring Jeff Kaake, Marjorie Monaghan, and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa. It was actually ship- and planet-based rather than space station-based; the main characters crewed a patrol ship that operated out of a human colony on the surface of an alien planet. It ran for all of six episodes.
@26: But B5’s jump gates weren’t actually “tunnels through space” in the way the wormhole was. They weren’t direct conduits from one star system to another, just openings into hyperspace, an expansive realm through which ships navigated much as they did through normal space, only much faster. Also, the Bajoran wormhole was a unique phenomenon, the only one of its kind, while jump gates were the standard, routine method of FTL travel throughout the known B5 galaxy — no more exceptional in that world than airports are in ours. So any comparison between the two falls apart completely if you bother to look beyond the most superficial level.
Yes, on anything but a superficial level the similarities fall apart. But we’re talking about network suits here. They don’t have any levels other than superficial. If the ripoff theory held any water, it wouldn’t be one creative person digging deep into another creative person’s work to borrow from it; it’d be an executive making “suggestions” like “Hey, can you put a big glowy tunnel next to the space station, to bring aliens to it? Oh, and there should be a gritty marketplace on the station, with gambling dens — a totally new vibe for Star Trek! And let’s tie the commander in to an alien religious prophecy, and give him some war trauma in his backstory.”
Again, I don’t actually think that anything was ripped off. But back in 1994, in the context of a laundry list of other coincidences, it wasn’t a ridiculous thought to have.
@28: I don’t see the point in arguing that people could’ve had the idea. What matters is that the idea is wrong.
If you don’t see the point in that argument, might I suggest you stop having it? I can decide for myself what matters, thanks.
@27
That’s it. Thanks. Six episodes eh? I’m surprised it managed that many. Could have sworn the characters were based on a space station. Good example of memory cheat.
but this is all moot – Farscape eclipsed both.
@32 Heretic! ;-)
Thanks to Jere7my for pointing out some parallels where clearly the shows were influencing each other; which direction was leaking and which sucking is very much a litmus test of your partisan position, of course.
As for the idea of putting up a show with a space station in it, there was a lot of fuel for that notion in the real world at that time, as the International Space Station was being built during this period. Part of the nobility of science fiction as a genre is its mission to reflect and project current trends and realities into the future.
So the good idea of a show with a space station was in the air at that time, nobody owned it for sure, nor did anyone own the SF tropes that showed up in each of them.
And I am with the people are are so happy that we got both of these shows!
@34: I think it’s been clearly demonstrated that the shows were not influencing each other, at least not with regard to the specific alleged similarities referenced here; that either they were drawing in parallel on the same antecedents or simply had some superficial similarities between elements that were in fact very different. It’s quite common for two given works to have common elements without one drawing directly on the other, because they do not exist in a vacuum. They are just two fish in a much, much larger cultural pond, and there are many, many other things that they could both be drawing on in parallel. If anything, it’s almost inevitable that two works in the same genre or about the same subject matter, produced around the same time, will have elements in common even if they have no direct awareness of one another at all, because they’re influenced by the same larger cultural context and because the nature of their common genre guides them in certain directions. Assuming that one must be copying the other is gross tunnel vision — it’s forgetting that they are not the only two creative works in the universe.
But by all means, let’s dedicate an entire article to it as if it is…
Is This the Smoking Gun…. – Britt, Tor
Absolute rubbish. I was a fan of both series, but DS9 always featured better scripting, more compelling episode plots, superior production values and a pleasant absence of the JMS “stroke my ego” melodrama. I still watch and enjoy both shows, but, again, Star Trek Deep Space 9 has aged far better; featuring stories which are still relevant and compelling. Babylon 5 was a glorious, space opera, menagerie and, more importantly, was not Star Trek, which, at the time, actually helped it to succeed. However, suggesting that the King Kong of all television space franchises had to plagerize, or borrow from a “B” grade show is simply the height of hubris for Babylon 5 supporters.
I will not deny that Star Trek has made more money than other SF franchises, Mr. Doggett, but I find your argument a bit parochial. You state that you like Star Trek best, and think that it has aged better, and then jump to the statement that thinking it has borrowed ideas from elsewhere is engaging in hubris.
I don’t know about script being taken from B5. I loved both of these shows, including next generation. B5 started out great and kinda of got mediocre. In a sci-fi show you never marry off you captain, what you’ll end up with is a soap opera. I dislike soaps, In ds9 the captian did get married but the bride died the same day, I think and the show was coming to its end.
I am not a tv person, but when it comes to a good sci-fi I will watch it. I miss star trek, I am waiting for a new series, I do hope they come out with one soon.
The movies so far AWESOM! Star Trek I can watch over and over again. That is a series that will never aged for me. Gene Roddenberry
phenomenal
It’s absolutely obvious that DS9 stole from B5. Even names like “Leeta” and “Dukhat” have obviously been used. Then you have episodes like the one where the entire station was infected by a virus that couls be spread by the stations air supply. It wasn’t until well after Season 2 that DS9 went its own separate way, and even then there were still obvious influences.
The good news is, B5 kicked DS9’s ass. More mature, and better written. Just take the virus episode… in DS9 they have a poxy trekbnobabble fix and in B5 an entire race is wiped out by the virus.
B5 is for mature and intelligent viewers.
Yes, Deep Space Nine’s Dukat (first appearing onscreen January 1993) was definitely a reference to Babylon 5’s Dukhat (first referenced onscreen February 1994). DS9 should get some credit for being committed enough to copying B5 that they invented time travel to do it, though.
Sounds like there’s only one solution… REMAKE B5 AND AIR ON TNT!!!
@26 specifically, but all in general.
Babylon 5 wasn’t positioned next to a jump gate, in fact it would take ships quite a few hours to fly from the station to the jump gate. And even then, I fail to recall a single episode where Babylon 5’s proximity (or not) to a jump gate had any significant bearing.
The Great Machine on Epsilon 3, however, is a different matter entirely. But it’s really cluching at straws to draw any comparisons because both stations were situated next to an item of incredible strategic importance.
@44: I hadn’t realized that about the jumpgate; I thought it was rather closer to the station than that. But you’re right — jumpgates are just a routine means of FTL travel, like freeway on-ramps, so they’re more analogous to warp engines than to the Bajoran wormhole.
As for both stations being positioned next to an important thing, that’s pretty much an inevitable consequence of the format. If you’re going to set a show in a fixed location, then it makes sense to have it be proximate to whatever important entity or phenomenon drives your series. Buffy‘s Sunnydale was right on the Hellmouth; Torchwood‘s Hub was right on a spacetime Rift; and so on. Indeed, I’d argue that this is a good trope to use, because if there isn’t some established special or unusual thing about your setting, it becomes contrived when everything important in the world seems to congregate around it anyway. Defiance is guilty of this, because the title community is supposed to be a small, isolated frontier community, and yet people and phenomena important to the lead characters just keep happening to pass through there from all over the country without any good explanation for the convergence. Grimm has never explained why there are so staggeringly many Wesen in Portland, Oregon. And Primeval never explained why temporal anomalies only ever seemed to open around London — or around Vancouver in the Canadian sequel series.
So it’s like I’ve said before: Many of the similarities between DS9 and B5 exist only because they were logical choices for a space station series to make. You could find a similar number of parallels between any two shows with equivalent settings, because they’re things that make sense for the setting. It’s just that there haven’t been enough space station shows for that to become as clear as it would be for, say, courtroom dramas or school-based sitcoms.
I would just enjoy a remastering of all of the cgi on babylon 5. Seasons 2-4 are the best scifi storytelling out there. The acting was great for what it is. The only thing that holds it back is the horrendous and super out dated cgi.
The makeup and creature work was fantastic. Just have some fans redo all the cgi, images of the ships, lazer fire and space battles. Release it on syfy. Or hell, make some of the episodes longer with longer space battles.
I enjoy watching ds9, and it is good. I like imagining if B5 had its budget. ds9 cgi still holds up fairly well.
@46: I think people forget that the CGI in B5 was seen as very impressive when it first came out. The recent advent of the Video Toaster made CGI affordable on a TV budget to a degree it never had been before, so while you could often see the CGI-ness of the effects, they were really rather revolutionary and remarkable to see for audiences at the time. They certainly had a versatility that the miniature effects of Star Trek at the time couldn’t match — and Foundation Imaging, the company founded to do B5’s effects, went on to bring Trek’s effects into the CG age in the later seasons of DS9 and Voyager.
So I’m not sure I like the idea of B5’s CGI being replaced. I think it deserves appreciation for its historical importance. And I think if something was good by the standards of the time, it should be respected for that.
(And I have to point out: “Remastering” does not mean replacing. That’s the exact opposite of what it means. Remastering means going back to the original master print of the material and making the most accurate, highest-quality reproduction you can from that original source. The replacement digital effects in the Star Trek Remastered Blu-Ray project were the only parts of it that were not remastered.)
Although Star Trek is good, Babylon 5 is in another league. Star Trek, and this goes for ALL of their various series, are inconsistent, the handling jumps all over the place, there is no proper consistent story to pull you into it. One can watch DS9 in any order without losing the plot. Characters are wooden and un-realistic.
B5 is a masterpiece of story telling, characters are believable and the actors, although relatively unknown, did a GREAT job of making the show successful. The best sci-fi series ever to grace our tv screens in my view.
Now for someone like me who reads a far superior sci-fi (Perry Rhodan, sadly only in German), B5 is the only other sci-fi that comes close to that, and i for one, await the proper filming/movie/series of Perry Rhodan, that is, if it ever comes about. From the comments of the Authors and those responsible, it would not become a hollywood led agenda, but would be done with FULL control, else it will not be done.
I just finished watching seasons 1 – 4 of B5. As a DS9 fan who has a couple of friends who preferred B5, I wanted to see for myself if B5 was superior story telling and if DS9 “stole” from B5.
I am flabbergasted. There’s no comparison. DS9 is superior in every way. Because of budget differences, I ignored B5’s horrible cgi and costumes. I compared writing, acting, and directing.
Acting: The only actors on B5 that did a credible job were Peter Jurasik (Londo), Andreas Katsulas (G’Kar), Stephen Furst (Vir), and some of the minor actors. Every other lead actor was terrible (excusing Michael O’Hare because of his illness), especially Mira Furlan (DeLenn) and Jerry Doyle (Garibaldi). By contrast, every single actor on DS9 was credible (yes, Avery Brooks’ acting was stilted in 2 or 3 scenes of ep. 1; I chalked that up being new to the role). Watching B5 gave me a better appreciation for the DS9 cast. By comparing the actors of the two series, I learned what it means when it’s said that an actor is “acting” rather than “being” a role.
Writing: I’m am floored that two commenters think B5 writing was better than DS9. YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS! What?! Comparing B5 to DS9 writing is like comparing a comic book to literature. B5 is melodramatic and obvious at every turn. DS9 is subtle and references seemingly minor events from previous episodes. DS9 characters grew over the course of its seven seasons. Sisko eventually accepted his place in Bajoran religion. Kira became more tolerant, eventually accepted the idea of Federation membership, and grew to revere Sisko as an icon. These are only two examples from DS9 (there are many more). With the exception of Londo and G’Kar, B5 characters did not grow at all. And even with the Londo example, the growth was not significant. And… with DS9, I was impressed with the way the scientific and religious perspectives of the wormhole and its inhabitants were juxtaposed.
Directing. Watching B5, there were many “where the hell is the director?” moments. With DS9 I can recall only 1 (ok, maybe 2 or 3). I’d love to give some B5 specifics, but it would mean watching it a 3rd time and I just couldn’t bare it.
Seriously, I think the biggest problem with B5 was JMS himself. He wrote (badly) 90+ of the 110 episodes. While the B5 storyline was an admirable one, JMS could have benefitted from the perspectives of better writers. And the fact that he directed many of the episodes doesn’t speak well of him either. He should have served only as B5’s creator and consultant and left the implementation to a writing team.
As to the notion that DS9 is a ripoff of B5? Ridiculous. B5 devotees ignore the fact that NOTHING is new in writing (or science or math or fashion). B5 was not the first to conceive of space stations. Not the first to conceive of civil or interstellar war. Not the first to conceive of shape shifters. Not the first to conceive of one ethnic/alien group oppressing another. As an example: an aspiring writer I know (ok, it’s me) conceived of a character who connects with an ancestor through time and space, only to later learn that scifi writer Octavia Butler had already written a novel with a similar theme (Kindred).
Stop the hate and appreciate all DS9 has to offer: great writing, great acting, great directing, and a great storyline.
@42
You have to look beyond what aired on TV to what happened behind the scenes. The ideas for B5, and a season’s worth of episodes, were written up and pitched to Paramount long before DS9 was dreamed up, so the studio did have that information before B5 ever aired.
@49
I’ll join the chorus of those who prefer B5’s writing to DS9’s – and yes, I’ve watched all of both. B5’s story had a consistency and continuity that few other shows matched, even DS9, mainly because from the first episode, the show knew where it was going. Yes, there were changes along the way, but the direction remained the same, and that guided the writing to produce a comprehensive story.
I think you’re being a bit disingenuous, or at the very least are a bit blinded by your own bias with regards to the characters, as claiming that Londo and G’Kar were the only characters with any development is ignoring a great deal of what happened on the show. What of Franklin’s and Garibaldi’s struggles with their own forms of addiction? Garibaldi dealing with the effects of what the PsiCops did to his mind, and his involuntary betrayal of his friend? Vir, turning from a meek and lowly assistant into someone who could become the leader of his people? Delenn, flying in the face of traditions she had protected her whole life to break and reform the leadership of her people?
There were plenty more examples of meaningful characters and their growth. However, something to remember is that the characters were never the focus of B5’s story – the story was the events that transpired in the world around them. The characters and the station they inhabited were simply the window into which we saw these events. It’s a different form of storytelling, one in which the growth of charactesr is second to the growth of species and their civilizations. The characters were merely the vehicle through which some of this growth took place.
As an analogy, if B5 and DS9 were aspects of “The Lord of the Rings,” DS9 would be the story of Frodo and Sam’s journey to destroy the ring, while B5 would be the telling of the war of the ring. Frodo and Sam occasionally touched into the world around them, as they encountered others on their journey, in the way that DS9 showed bits of what happened in the Dominion war, on Earth, Bajor, etc., but the focus was always the characters on the station. The focus in B5 was always on the bigger events themselves, the interstellar conflicts and political machinations, as seen through the eyes of a handful of humans and aliens, some of whom happened to have a hand in such events.
Each series uses a different perspective for its storytelling, and I think each is better for it. Not everyone will enjoy either or both methods, but outright dismissing one as inferior simply because it’s not your preferred style is being a bit narrow.
@50: There is evidence to suggest that the studio executives wanted something similar to B5, but that doesn’t prove that the people who actually wrote and developed DS9 were just imitating it. There are too many clear differences between them for that to be the case. There are many instances where a writer-producer has come up with original ideas that were coincidentally similar to some other work and that network executives embraced because of that resemblance (e.g. Glen Larson had been pitching the project that became Battlestar Galactica since the late ’60s, but he didn’t sell it until ABC wanted something to capitalize on the success of Star Wars). In those cases, it’s often been assumed that the creations were “ripoffs,” but the actual imitation was on the executives’ part, not the part of the actual writer-producers who created their work independently and in good faith.
@51
I never claimed that DS9 copied from B5 (or vice versa), as I have no personal knowledge of it. I will freely admit that there are enough similarities to raise suspicions of the possibility, but I will also admit that much of those similarities may be simple coincidence. The fact is that I can claim no inside knowledge on the matter, and as such can’t speak to either possibility as absolute truth.
My only intent was to point out that the specific argument of “DS9 aired episodes with these character names before B5 ever aired” was in no way proof that the names did not originate with B5, and claiming such an argument was pure ignorance of the facts and timeline.
Of course, it is also not evidence to prove such copying happened, it is merely unable to disprove it. I just thought the way that #42 threw it out so auhtoritatively as if it were an answer that meant anything was rather ridiculous.
I knew this all along, a DS9 actor admitted it to someone in B5 and he told Joe. B5 is better then all the Treks, but Classic Trek and Enterprise were the best, I hate Next Gen, Deep Sleep 9 and Voyager, they are all boring or snoozes. B5 towers above all of them in every way, characters, writing, concept. No contest. Paramount just ripped off what they liked, and were real bullies. B5 all the way.
JMS has to work, even he can’t just come out ands say.. yup they stole it from me.
B5 had a lot more hard science and believable characters, but that is not too surprising as it did not have to drag the “Next Gen” universe like Marley’s chains.
Technical correction: the still credited to “Sleeping in Light” of the station exploding is actually from the DTV “Lost Tales”. The camera angle and improved CG is the give-away.
As for the subject of rip-off:
1) strategically important station? Check.
2) mystically inclined race? Check.
3) commanding officer who turns out to be: a) part alien and b) a vital religious figure to the mystically inclined race? Check.
4) special warship introduced to expand the show off station? Check.
5) major interstellar war that the station and crew are vital to resolving (using the special warship)> Check.
6) special warship destroyed and replaced? Check.
7) abrasive, sometimes combatively opinionated female XO? Check.
I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point.
how come there has never been a Babylon5 rewatch on Tor? I’m kind of surprised considering how influential it is in sci-fi tv.
Where I live in Chicago Star Trek TGN was shown weekly on a uhf station channel 50. When it was its later years, they started showing Babylon 5 on the same channel. Deep Space Nine was shown a wgn channel 9, which became the WB, then the CW. When UPN bought channel 50, it became a network, Its flagship show was Star Trek Voyager. When this happened Babylon 5 had ended season 3 and had to find a new home on TNT to finish its planned story. It was a mistake in my opinion. I liked Babylon 5 more then I likes DS9 or Voyager. Of course I loved TNG above all including the original Star Trek, but Babylon 5 was a great original show. JMS was just another creative person like Gene Roddenberry. Just as worthy to have his ideas on TV
This does both shows a disservice. It’s true that JMS took his idea to Paramount, and they rejected it, but it was more likely that they didn’t want competition for there flagship Star Trek from another show. Does that mean Babylon 5 owns the rights to do a show set on a space station? No. Deep Space Nine was originally going to be more like a western, with an outpost on the planet Bajor. There are sketches in the Making of Deep Space Nine book. Realising that this would cost too much, the outpost became the station. They designed something completely unique so channel hoppers would have no doubt what the show was (Like Matt Groenig’s decision to have all the Simpsons characters yellow.)
TNG was in the enviable position of having no competition, but when two Science Fiction shows come out that are both set on Space Stations, all we do is accuse one of ripping off the other. So all the NCIS’s, CSI’s and all the other “procedural” shows are just fine looking exactly the same. If another program comes out that has “Dragons” in it, are we going to have lengthly articles about plagerism then.
Why can’t you like both.
Sadly for all “DS-9” fans?
BABYLON-5 was created years before Deep Space-9 as Paramount Studios was the first place “JMS” took the story treatment for the show!
Roddenberry shot it down immeadiately!
However, Rick Berman held onto the story treatment for an additional 14-days!
Making “JMS” think that the studio was seriously considering making the show “BABYLON-5” only to discovet that the Studio had passed on makig the show.
In 1991? When Roddenberry had died, Bermam went directly forward into shooting his take on “BABYLON-5″ which he called…”Deep Space-9”!
Oprning titles show the proof of Bermsn’s OBVIOUS PLAGERISM of “BABYLON-5”!
“A Space Station all alone in the night”! “A.place of commerce & trade, and home to thousands of Alien races”! “Living together in our LAST BEST hope gor peace”!
“The name of the place…BABYLON-5”!
BABYLON-5 is what Star Trek want’s to be….once it GROWS UP!!!!!!
One of the blatant similarities between B5 and DS9 was how Sheridan was mysteriously whisked away by The First Ones, while Sisko was whisked away by the Prophets in their respective series finales.
I happen to be a fan of both shows. However, I do believe that “BABYLON 5” was the superior series, even though it had a few flaws. Do I believe that “STAR TREK DEEP SPACE NINE” was the best Trek series? No. I think it had the potential to be the best. But I also feel that in the end, the writing undermined that potential. I’m not saying that “DEEP SPACE NINE” had terrible writing. Actually, it was quite good . . . like other Trek shows. But it was undermined by the franchise’s flaws.
I think it funny B5 fans call out DS9 fans for their bias, when B5 fans are the most bias/deluded of them all. B5/DS9 do have similarities, but some are really grasping and proved quite the opposite (Ron Thornton on the White Star/Defiant etc).
Although I prefer Ron Moore’s BSG over both, DS9 not only had the better arc with the Dominion, but far better standalone episodes. Not to mention better acting. B5 was ambitious, but due to JMS’ over management (and arguably, his ego), it damaged B5 from not having a varied talent pool involved in the writing or directing.
Whereas, DS9 started so-so with some terrible early episodes, as the show went on and the writing staff solidified (Ira Steven Behr joining etc), they really found their stride. The show just got better and better. B5 crashed and burned after three very good seasons (2, 3, 4). DS9 from 3-7 rarely dropped in quality as much as B5, with the later seasons actually being the best. Overall, it’s good the genre had both shows, but I feel B5’s cultish following, look at their show with some very rose-tinted glasses.
I loved both B5 and DS9 and no way would I accuse the DS9 writers of ripping off B5. Since both shows were sci-fi and on a space station, there was always the potential of similarities. There are several similarities between B5 and STAR WARS, but I would never make the accusation that B5 ripped off SW either.
According to a video I own, Michael Pillar, one of the creators of DS9 states quite firmly that the DS9 space station concept came about for economic reasons. The station was changed and moved from the planet Bajor to an orbiting space station because it would have been too expensive to constantly film Bajor outdoors. This is confirmed again in the book The Making of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine by Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens, pp. 59-62.
Below, I’ve listed other similarities between DS9 and B5 and how they are simply incidental and in my opinion the accusations that anybody ripped off anybody are untrue.
MYSTICAL RACE SIMILARITIES—
There have been many mystical races in sci-fi, from BUCK ROGERS, THE OUTER LIMITS, TOS, STAR WARS, TNG, etc.—all long before B5. B5 fans claim the Bajorans/Cardassians came from their Narn/Centauri conflict. Unfortunately the Bajorans/Cardassians conflict began on TNG well before B5. If anything, like DS9, B5 was influenced by TNG.
COMMANDING OFFICER AS PART MYSTIC ALIEN, PART CAPTAIN–
As I stated above, the mystical, spiritual Bajorians precede B5. So if the DS9 creators and writers used TNGs Bajorian episodes as a model, they have first claim to do so and the influence is here… not B5! Once again, like DS9, B5 might have been influenced by TNG. According to what I have read, Gene Roddenberry hated religion and when his influence decreased on STAR TREK, the producers wanted to put a different spin on the captain and TREK itself, so making the captain a spiritual leader, connected to an alien race, was the perfect way to move the traditional ST captain and ST itself, in a new and unexplored direction. Actually, the producers wrapped the entire DS9 series around faith and spirituality, which Roddenberry hated! Both Kira and Odo are religious, spiritual individuals.
INTRODUCTION OF SHIP ON BOTH SHOWS—
Because TREK fans weren’t responding to DS9 as they had other ST series, the Defiant was added to make the show more adventurous, more mobile, less stationary-bound. The produces admit to this. It had nothing to do with the ship B5 also added. It was incidental. Also, Any concept of a space station, is bound to have a special ship anyway. No smoking gun here at all.
MAJOR INTERSTELLAR WAR—
War has been used so much in sci-fi, I won’t even touch long on this one. For people to claim DS9 ripped-off B5 here, I’ll just say two words… STAR WARS!!!
WARSHIP DESTROYED AND REPLACED—
Writers are always looking for ways to create drama and excitement. What better way to do so than to destroy a ship in battle? And the writers, when doing so, sure as hell are going to have to replace the ship. So both writing staffs used this silly ploy. How many times has the ENTERPRISE been destroyed and replaced in the ST movies? It’s a cheat, for sure. Babylon 5 writer(s) could be accused of ripping off ST3: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK by using this dramatic device, however, I won’t. I only bring this up to make a point.
ABRASIVE, COMBATIVE, OPINIONATED FEMALE CO—
I’ve heard this one a lot. DS9 ripped off B5 by stealing Kira Nerys from B5s Ivonava. However, what these people are not aware of is that Ensign Ro—an abrasive, combative, opinionated female came from TNG, and was suppose to be the CO in DS9. However, the actress who originally played the role in TNG didn’t want to commit to a TV series, so we got Kira Nerys instead. So Kira is a rip-off of Ensign Ro, NOT B5s Ivonava. Once again, I could accused B5 of ripping off TNG. No. It’s just incidental.
In conclusion, on the surface, it may look and sound true that DS9 ripped off B5. DS9 had one of the best writing staffs on TV at that time. You want me to believe, they spent their time viewing B5 episodes and copying step-by-step, season after season? Sorry. Don’t buy it. Nor is there ANY evidence that any of the DS9 writing staff or the creators of DS9 used a B5 bible.
Now I can see why the founding fathers were so wise in putting in the Constitution a man is innocent until proven guilty. It’s so easy to make mistaken judgements on surface evidence which may appear true.
This is utterly stupid. B5 die-hards are seriously claiming that DS9 ripped off B5? Even though others have brought up how it was obvious the two shows were just influencing each other, at best? All fiction pays homage to other art. That’s the nature of the medium. If you can’t handle that, grow the hell up. Especially given those working behind the scenes on DS9 deny ever ripping off the series, and even JMS himself admits he doesn’t think Piller or Berman had malicious intention so much as it was Tartikoff. Case closed. As for which one I prefer, I’m only just now getting around to checking out B5 now I’ve got ’em all downloaded, but I have to say just from the comments alone, this sounds like one man’s personal project, which… er… that can be a mixed bag. On the one hand, some claim it has greater consistency. On the other hand, others claim his ego and overmanagement got in the way. I’m willing to bet the truth is somewhere in the middle. But I do know that all the greats needed others to rein them in, or their excesses would smother the final product. Look at Roddenberry. You see what happened when he was not reined in. You get misogyny like some of the worst episodes of TOS, you got The Motion Picture, and you got the awfulness of early TNG. Or take Toriyama from mangaka series Dragon Ball. He was at his pinnacle when his editors were reining him in and telling him what to do. Same with George Lucas. Why do you think the original trilogy of Star Wars is so beloved and not the prequels? Lucas had competent, talented people to overcompensate for his glaring flaws as a writer, problems with dialogue, poor direction, and lousy execution of his ideas. Now, DS9, by contrast, was a joint project between fans of the original series, and someone earlier brought up how from the get-go it seems it didn’t have any idea what it wanted to be? I disagree. The themes and ideas are very clear within the first few handful of episodes. It’s just raw and clumsy. It needed further refinement, which it got. Seriously, why fight over this? I’m sure I’ll love B5 just as much as I love DS9 once I get around to watching it.
@64/Elliot: I like early TNG. It was awkward, but I wouldn’t call it awful. I like the way it took themes and ideas from TOS and tried to tell new stories with them, that it took the idea of a peaceful, utopian future seriously (which is much harder to do than a run-of-the-mill “darkest hour” tale), that it tackled themes like the death penalty and the ozone layer. It’s true that many episodes were bad, but some were quite good – “Where No One Has Gone Before”, “11001001”, “Home Soil”, among others. I would gladly exchange any 21st century incarnation of Star Trek for something like early TNG.
As for the question who copied whom, I agree that it doesn’t matter.
@64
Babylon 5 worked the way it did because it was a one person project. It really needed the consistency in the storytelling, since so much depended on what had been told before and what would be told after. It’s like the doorstopper fantasy book series this site talks about so much, like Wheel of Time, A Song of Ice and Fire and Malazan. They’re mostly one author with a vision writing. One of them was completed by another due to author death (Wheel of Time) and the other has a different author sometimes writing sidenovels in it (Malazan), but the main idea is one person telling a coherent story.
@65 I dunno. I find it unwatchable. Maybe not bad, but… the actors feel so green to the role, it’s kind of like how a few of them felt over on DS9 (sans Avery Brooks, Nana Visitor, Colm Meaney, and Terry Farrell). Also you got the racism and sexism in stuff like “Code of Honor,” “The Last Outpost” where the Ferengi are treated as borderline caricatures – no, scratch that, a complete joke of a race filled with capitalist cavemen caricatures that Gene was trying to turn into his own personal porn project because he was huffy that Harve Bennett, a man who’d never watched Star Trek, made a better movie than he ever did. I think what you describe would fit Season 2 more, since I actually watch a few episodes from Season 2 now and then. And yeah, fighting over this is pointless. Can’t wait to check out B5.
@66 Total consistency is impossible. I’m sure many people here, especially the die-hard fans once they take off their nostalgia goggles, could point out the inconsistencies in B5 that all TV mediums have, especially when it’s something like 22 episodes per season and five seasons worth. The only problems DS9 had, in a vacuum, were when it came brushing up against other Trek shows like TOS or TNG, and frankly, don’t you wish B5 was large enough to have tons of side shows? I wouldn’t trade TOS or TNG for anything. Inconsistency doesn’t mean bad.
@67/Elliot: Season 2 was when I really started to like it. I’m one of the rare Pulaski fans.
I agree that the early Ferengi were terrible caricatures. It’s astounding what DS9 managed to make of them. But what does Harve Bennett have to do with it?
@@@@@ 66
The creator (JMS) had to adapt a lot of what he thought the story would be due to real-life limitations (like actors quitting or budget limitations) and his own change of plans (like not having 10 seasons in 2 shows but 5 seasons in 1 show). The end result, though, is very, very consistent, much more than what was shown on TV at the time. It is serialized TV, with very few “filler” episodes. Not 100% consistent (the time travel episodes in season 1 and 3 have some inconsistencies due to change of plans, but they still work very well all things told), some character arcs are foreshadowed but not completed due to the actors problem I mentioned early, especially Talia Winters, but the abrupt end still works story-wise).
I wouldn’t like more Babylon 5 series. I disliked the spin-off Crusade and didn’t appreciate much the TV and direct-to-DVD movies that were made after. Some novels were enjoyable though.
Babylon 5 is a story of people in a space station as a galactic war starts and ends, with civil wars happening also. It’s not about one universe going on forever, like Star Trek. There isn’t much story to tell after the end of the wars I mentioned, and season 5 suffered for it. Season 4 had to be rushed because the creator thought it was going to be the last season of the show, and so the end of the two wars (the galactic and the civil wars) happen in it, with the season having 2 climaxes instead of 1. There’s clearly content for 2 seasons in it instead of 1, and that’s why I say it feels rushed. Then the show got renewed, and season 5 didn’t tell much of a story.
I dislike the pattern that happens in American TV of having shows outlast their story or pad it out, so that they become zombies until they’re cancelled by the TV station. It’s much better for the TV show to just tell the story it wants, end it and the people involved in it can go on to work in other projects.
The other main writer on the show, DiTillio, was fired on season 3 because JMS wanted to write everything from then on. JMS has his flaws in writing and they become more evident as the great story he was telling ended (again, season 5), but I have to say if DiTillio wasn’t fired he wouldn’t have been part of Transformers: Beast Wars, which is the best Transformers series I’ve seen, so we wouldn’t have that. So I’m kind of glad he was fired lol.
@68 Gene was always jealous Harve Bennett created what many fans felt was THE quintessential TOS movie, while his got the often-mocked moniker of “The Slow-Motion Picture” and “The Motionless Picture,” and early TNG was him running it into the ground in attempt to “salvage” was left of Star Trek, his vision, from the mindless masses. He really was a perverted, snobbish, egocentric, misogynistic, overbearing, arrogant, haughty, disgusting man. Glad he’s dead, I won’t lie. Maybe now his vices will be purged from his spirits so he can ascend to a higher vibration.
Well, advancing more into B5, and I find stuff like the Earth-Minbari War fascinating, that during this genocidal war where we nearly lost, the attacking force called it off. Though it sounds as if the religious caste did that to prepare to bring the humans into an alliance to fight against the Shadows. Or that the Centauri occupation of the Narn was equivalent to the Cardassian occupation of Bajor. About to start the reviews for Season 2, and apparently Sinclair is about to leave. SF Debris equates this to the “Kirk vs. Picard” debate in the Trek community, so… won’t even touch that. I think Sinclair is a fine commander. I do love all the Trek cameos so far. Jeffrey Combs, Walter Koenig, Theodore Bikel, David Warner, it’s just amazing. Still, hearing that Sinclair might be part Minbari, this is where you go back to the theory where the two series, DS9 and B5 were clearly drawing ideas and paying homage to the other. Again, all art imitates other art, and there’s nothing shameful about that, and given they were the only two space station shows on TV at the time, it’s no surprise. This is probably where the retcon that Sisko is part Prophet which made him a rape baby came from. Let’s hope B5 handles it better!
@70/Elliot: Wow, that’s… blunt. I take it that you don’t like Roddenberry much.
I haven’t met him, nor read any of the available biographies, but he surely had his virtues and his flaws, like everybody. His coworkers seem to speak fairly well of him.
Personally, I don’t like TWOK (I assume that’s the “quintessential TOS movie” you mentioned). Too militaristic, too violent, with none of the kindness I love about Star Trek, and I hardly recognised my favourite character, Kirk. I see it as the film that would have broken Star Trek if Nimoy hadn’t repaired the damage in TSFS.
I liked B5 when I watched it many years ago, and I liked both Sinclair and Sheridan. These days, I’ve grown weary of big war stories, and I appreciate TOS and early TNG all the more because they managed to show a galaxy at peace.
@70 & @71 I always assumed the quintessential Trek movie was ST:IV: The Voyage Home. It has all the ingredients of Star Trek in that it is a problem to be out thought rather than a specific villain, uses all the cast in some way, has both humour and action, some snappy Spock-Bones moments (and sappy Kirk/Spock moments) and Kirk seduces a lady for a specific reason other than romance but still remains on good terms with her, and then they return to the Enterprise at the end. Plus it hates punks.
Wrath of Khan is okay, and so is The Motion Picture, I wouldn’t get in a fight over them (I think I would put TMP as the one I prefer, that doesn’t mean it is better though -or worse-, just personal preference) and I don’t know why so many fans seem to want to. Star Trek is a big enough tent to encompass almost everything. Except super space fungus or giant tardigrades, or species who ought to have either evolved to chill out rather than be on the verge of a fear heart attack long before they reached sapience much less civilisation. Star Trek can be almost everything else including Wrath of Khan and TMP and Saving the Whales, and even Neelix.
It certainly could have been a space station show, and a space station bound spin off had been talked about and rumoured for as long as I had been in fandom and I remember hearing that it was considered even before TNG came along. So I do not think B5 and DS9 had much to do with each other except that for that time in the 1990s it was Space Station season. I love Babylon 5 too though. It is its own special thing.
@72/random22: Oh yes. And Kirk quotes poetry. I always love it when they quote poetry. And Gillian travelling into the future is pure fannish wish fulfilment.
@JJ 68/71 No official biography, but according to several reliable accounts, while greatly imaginative and creative, Roddenberry could be something of a control freak (which drove many of his Trek staffers away) had issues with alcohol/drugs, and was a notorious womanizer and unfaithful husband, even to Majel after leaving his first wife for her…Paramont blamed him for the “failure” of TMP, pushing him aside to the ceremonial role as Creative Consultant while bringing in Bennet, a complete Trek outsider who had never watched a ST episode prior…Fait to say Gene resented Bennet due to the latter having more success on the silver screen with his baby…Gene saw TNG as a way to bring back what he thought Trek should truly be…And funny what you said about equating Gillian with fan fulfillment as Catherine Hicks was never a fan prior to her work in STI
@75/capt_paul77: I know. But comment #67 seemed to suggest that Roddenberry invented the Ferengi because of his resentment to Bennett, and I’d like to see some evidence for that.
@76 JJ Sorry for the misunderstanding, but yeah I’ve never seen anything or read into the Ferengi being analagous to Bennet, or any specific person for that matter..
I never implied that. At all. Sorry. I meant early TNG was his revenge against Bennett.
Hey, seems my comment got removed. I’m sorry if I crossed the line and went too far. I do have a tendency to become perhaps too passionate in my approach sometimes. I hope I didn’t offend anyone so far.
Advancing more into B5, and I do find it fascinating. Though I have to wonder if Sinclair being reincarnated with a Minbari soul is where DS9 got the idea to have Sisko being a Prophet rape baby. Again, as I said, all art imitates other art, so I don’t mind if B5 was borrowing from DS9 and vice versa, like with the White Star. That said, I tend to agree with SF Debris in that DS9 and B5 are very different shows, in that B5 is the place to come together and forge peace, while DS9 is the frontier on the front lines. I take it the characters are all on a journey of personal growth? Sinclair being Minbari is something he’s going to obviously learn to explore, G’Kar is going to have to give up his hate and his anger toward the Centauri, and Longo is going to have to learn his desire to rebuild his people to greatness is the kind of attitude that led them to subjugate the Narn in the first place. Excellent writing. Again, I don’t get this dick-waving between DS9 and B5. I love DS9. To me, it is like THE best Trek show. But B5 seems like something special too. I can’t wait to delve in, once I finish the reviews. :)
@78/Elliot: “I never implied that. At all.” – Okay, my mistake. Sorry.
“I meant early TNG was his revenge against Bennett.”
Hmm. I think that early TNG was something else. Star Trek, long before Bennett and TNG, had the reputation of being optimistic, idealistic, progressive, utopian. That’s what many fans loved about it. It’s also what people still emphasize in book introductions and anniversary speeches. But TOS’ utopianism is really quite tentative, deliberately avoiding specifics. When he planned TNG, I think Roddenberry tried to deliver on his earlier promise, to really show the utopian future people were already praising him for. You can see this as a bad thing (he believed his own hype and did something he wasn’t qualified for) or as a good thing (he tried something difficult and worthwhile, and at least partially succeeded).
I see it as a good thing. Writing dystopias is easy. Writing utopias is hard, and I’m glad that somebody tried, even if the results are uneven and awkward.
@79/Elliot: “Hey, seems my comment got removed. I’m sorry if I crossed the line and went too far. I do have a tendency to become perhaps too passionate in my approach sometimes. I hope I didn’t offend anyone so far.”
I read your comment before it got removed and wrote an answer. Then I noticed that it had been removed and didn’t post it :). I didn’t feel offended. A bit misunderstood perhaps.
“I take it the characters are all on a journey of personal growth?”
Yes, they are. Or perhaps in at least one case, change rather than growth. I remember reading a comment by Straczynski that he tried to avoid the usual predetermined characters – this character is an asshole, this character is for comic relief, etc. He wanted his characters to change into something you could not predict right from the start.
@80 “Okay, my mistake. Sorry.” Eyyy, it happens. :)
I’m not sure I’d agree. TOS wasn’t really seen as “utopian.” Perhaps in the sense Earth was a united world, but that wasn’t a main feature of Trek until TNG, where we finally see this supposed “paradise” and Roddenberry began inserting his own views into it, and we see what flaws “utopia” has, because that’s a purely subjective thing. Since my comment was deleted, take a look at this.
“The way I see Star Trek is sort of a V TOS in the middle at the base with TNG branching off to the left and DS9 branching off to the right. TNG was mostly about exploration and diplomacy and generally advocated peace, was more optimistic about human evolving and sometimes peace at all cost. DS9 on the other hand dealt with the politics and the pragmatic end and mainly the show was about fighting to preserve freedom. TOS is the balance of the two shows where Kirk were willing to fight, break rules to preserve freedom of sentient beings whilst taking in consideration that you can’t go too far in provoke. I never saw DS9 as something separate to Star trek (as some people believed it betrayed the series) but rather taking the pragmatic sides of TOS and focusing on it whilst TNG took the optimistic side of TOS and focused on that.”
TOS wasn’t all sunshine and roses, it was at times fighting ruthlessly to preserve the peace, but knowing when to step back at times, not to go too far. Kirk fighting the Gorn is the top incident that springs to mind. Roddenberry himself had weird ideas on Trek that… frankly, he shouldn’t have had too much control. He thinks Kirk should have been curious about the Ceti eel that just crawled out of a man’s ear after mind-controlling him and wanted to study it. Do we really need him to act like Picard in “Silicon Avatar?” And then there’s his sexual perversions. No, I really think Roddenberry was angry at how control was taken away from him, and felt Trek was being marketed to the lowest common denominator. Remember that during the 1960s Roddenberry was fighting the networks to get what he wanted, and many times he didn’t. When he got control, he did the same thing they did and smothered the creativity of budding young artists. Look up what Michael Piller terms “the Roddenberry Box” to get a clear idea what I mean. He was like some old and useless emperor who didn’t contribute much to the actual empire he ran. I’d also recommend the book “Gene Roddenberry: The Man and the Myth behind Star Trek.” Here.
http://startrekdom.blogspot.com/2007/06/saving-star-trek-from-gene-roddenberry.html
I don’t think he wanted a utopia so much as he was set in his ways and couldn’t adapt to change well. He was a control freak. And like Berman and Braga, it was all about his egos. Hell, like with Voyager, they even tried to start their own network with a Trek series as the flagship show.
I’ve begun watching the actual episodes of B5, and I like what I see. I get how some comment on how the dialogue is a bit too “comic book like,” but then, I like comic books. LOL. I can understand why G’Kar is so angry about how his people were treated by the Centauri, I really do. But at the same time, you can’t pay that back on unarmed and helpless civilians as he does on “Midnight on the Firing Line.” That’s what scares me most about our history. Huge ethnic populations were abused by those who had power, and when given the chance to strike back, a lot of times they became the very evil they were fighting against, because revenge was so liberating, or they felt entitled to their enemy’s land, resources, and women, no matter how young. It’s frankly repulsive, and as sorry as I am for his race, I can’t condone what he wants to do to the Centauri. I also find the Earth/Minbari conflict fascinating as well. I heard (but haven’t seen) that the war began over a misunderstanding, the death of their spiritual leader, and so they wanted to wage a war of total extermination? Genocide. In the Sheridan vs. Sinclair debate, I like both, from what little I’ve seen. But Sinclair’s line that he spoke to G’Kar in “Midnight on the Firing Line” when referring to past human conflicts really resonated with me, a lot. I get the feeling I’m gonna become a huge B5 fanboy as much of a Trek fanboy. I also think claiming DS9 or B5 ripped each other off after now watching the series (I’ve seen “The Gathering,” “Midnight on the Firing Line,” and am beginning “Soul Hunter,” plus I’ve watched reviews for Season 1 and have begun Season 2 reviews)… yeah, it’s silly. I think they inspired one another, even if Tartikoff originally “ripped off” the idea. I mean, as SF Debris notes, and I concur, the shows go in very different directions, in that B5 is repeatedly stated to be the place to forge peace, while DS9 is the front lines on a harsh and unknown frontier. Other than that, similarities such as the “jumpgate” vs. the “Bajoran wormhole?” Yeah, those are just… no, not happening. Some are probably paying homage. Those two ain’t it. In fact, I’d daresay late DS9 suffers from its somewhat episodic nature in that they throw too many ideas into the vat, yet they’re desperately racing to maintain continuity and keep up the race, so consequently those don’t get fleshed out well. Like Sisko being a rape baby. I don’t understand how he could ever trust the Prophets again after learning that. Or trying to shoehorn Dukat into his previous iterations when he really should be past that into his heel realization he had in “Waltz.” Oh well. No use crying over spilled milk. ;)
@81/Elliot: “TOS wasn’t really seen as “utopian.””
I don’t have a quote right now, but I think it was, and rightly so. No more racism (“The Savage Curtain”). “Where I come from, size, shape, or colour makes no difference” (“Plato’s Stepchildren”). One hundred years of peace (“The Infinite Vulcan”). Progressive penal colonies (“Dagger of the Mind” – okay, not really, but it’s what everybody believes, and our heroes clearly care about humane treatment of criminals). Mental illness almost eradicated (“Whom Gods Destroy”). No smoking. A military that spends most of its time with space exploration and ferrying diplomats and medicine, wears relaxed, colourful uniforms and has abandoned saluting. All this is pretty close to my personal utopia; yours may be different.
“TNG was mostly about exploration and diplomacy and generally advocated peace, was more optimistic about human evolving and sometimes peace at all cost. DS9 on the other hand dealt with the politics and the pragmatic […].”
There was very little exploration in TNG; early DS9 didn’t have less exploration than TNG. And peace at all cost? They had the Borg war, the Cardassian war, and the Klingon civil war. TOS took place in a more peaceful world than TNG. As for the politics and the pragmatic, how would you describe the whole Maquis storyline and Ro Laren’s desertion? That’s less idealistic and more realpolitik-y than anything in TOS.
“TOS […] was at times fighting ruthlessly to preserve the peace, but knowing when to step back at times, not to go too far. Kirk fighting the Gorn is the top incident that springs to mind.”
Uh, in the context of the episode, Kirk was wrong. He was scolded and punished by superior beings for pursuing the Gorn ship, and he noticed in the end that he had been wrong about the Gorn. It’s one of the “Kirk learns a lesson” episodes.
“Roddenberry himself had weird ideas on Trek that… frankly, he shouldn’t have had too much control. He thinks Kirk should have been curious about the Ceti eel that just crawled out of a man’s ear after mind-controlling him and wanted to study it. Do we really need him to act like Picard in “Silicon Avatar?”
Yes, we do, because these people are explorers, and there was no need to kill the Ceti eel after it had crawled out of the ear. By the way, that’s a mistake also made in some TNG episodes. For example, why did Crusher kill Ronin in “Sub Rosa” after he was no longer a threat? Totally un-startrekky.
@82 What was great about TOS was that Earth was a united world, yet people still disagreed. See Scotty, McCoy, or Kirk trading arguments to get a clear idea what I mean. And it had nothing to do with race either, but just differences of opinion in how to get things done. Though I’d argue TOS was very misogynistic, and again, most of that fell on Roddenberry’s shoulders. Having Spock earnestly insist women are more easily frightened than men, or hearing that this supposed utopia doesn’t let women captain starships is very hard to swallow. By TNG, however, that’s where the “utopia” has changed from respectful disagreement to absolute conformist, where deviations from the norm are seen as shocking or strange. And there’s still mental illness in the Trek era. Picard, in a future timeline, was very likely to get space senility. Maybe contemporary Earth mental illnesses are cured, and maybe present-day Earth diseases, but that doesn’t eliminate them altogether. People still get sick in the future. We’ve seen that over and over.
What? Very little exploration? There was “Cause and Effect,” “I, Borg,” “Schisms,” or the setup to many other episodes where they were charting nebula and other stuff. That’s exploration, dude. And TOS had plenty of conflict. There was the episode with the Horta where Kirk was determined to hunt it down at all costs. Or where they ran into the space probe NOMAD and had to stop it from murdering people. Or their regular confrontations with the Romulans and the Klingons. How long has it been since you’ve watched those series? Because I watch them regularly, and I can tell you’re wrong, no disrespect intended. As for the Gorn, within the episode itself, it was stated that they’d set up a colony in their space without knowing there were intelligent beings there. Then the Gorn attacked them, and kept up the attack even though they sent a signal announcing their surrender, that they had children with them, and they didn’t listen. Kirk was so disgusted he went to hunt them down, similarly to the Horta. The reason he spared the Gorn was arguably the weakest part of the episode, because it should have been that he didn’t wanna play games by the Metrons, because the Gorns were clearly not acting in self-defense when they blasted a colony of women and children into nothingness and they were surrendering to try and spare their casualties. This is my point. There’s still conflict, still war in the TOS era. Hell, remember “Errand of Mercy” where a war with the Klingons began, and Kirk adamantly called himself “a soldier,” and “not a diplomat?” It took the intervention of the Organians to broker a peace treaty.
Would YOU spare a mind-controlling alien slug that had crawled out of someone’s ear and violated that poor person right in front of your eyes? I wouldn’t.
@83: Yeah, while Kirk wasn’t there for Khan’s little speech about how the things eventually kill their hosts, he knows that Khan used them to control Terrell and Chekov, and that Terrell killed himself rather than remain under the eel’s influence. Can’t say I blame him.
If anyone, Nicholas Meyer, not Harve Bennet was responsible for making Starfeet more military…He bellieved the pacifistic notions of Starfleet were noble, but too ideal and impractical. Naturally this, as well as similar elements Meyer used in ST VI were not well received by GR. There was always a fair ammount of lip service in TOS and TNG about SF’s goal being primarily exploration, diplomacy and science with military force only being used as a last resort..
@83/Elliot: “Would YOU spare a mind-controlling alien slug that had crawled out of someone’s ear and violated that poor person right in front of your eyes?”
Yep. For starters, there’s no reason to kill it, and I’m not prone to disgust. More importantly, there are many reasons to keep it alive. At this point, I couldn’t be sure that there was no lasting damage to Chekov’s brain, or nervous system. Examining the slug might help to understand and fix any damage. Secondly, perhaps Khan has put slugs in other people’s brains – say, other Reliant crewmembers. A slug outside a brain could be analysed to find out how they attach and what they do to their victims, and thus help to free any remaining victims. Thinking further, others could use the slugs to mind-control people in the future, and if there’s one species of mind-control slugs, there may be others; that’s a serious threat to the Federation, and understanding what the slugs do is an important step in counteracting it. Destroying that slug was criminally stupid.
“Hell, remember “Errand of Mercy” where a war with the Klingons began, and Kirk adamantly called himself “a soldier,” and “not a diplomat?””
The whole quote is: “I’m a soldier, not a diplomat. I can only tell you the truth.” That’s a way of saying “I’m a simple man; please believe me.” It’s also a lie. We all know that Kirk is a brilliant rhetorician. We also know that he is a diplomat, or at least, has been trained as one – McCoy says so in “Metamorphosis”: “Maybe you’re a soldier so often that you forget you’re also trained to be a diplomat.”
Of course, this means that Kirk is a soldier a lot, so this doesn’t really contradict your point that there is conflict in TOS. The thing is, I never said that there isn’t; I said that there is no war. Except for the Klingon war in “Errand of Mercy”, which lasted how long? One day?
“The reason he spared the Gorn was arguably the weakest part of the episode, because it should have been that he didn’t wanna play games by the Metrons, because the Gorns were clearly not acting in self-defense when they blasted a colony of women and children into nothingness and they were surrendering to try and spare their casualties.”
I couldn’t disagree more. The reason Kirk spares the Gorn is the strongest part of the episode. It is what turns a meh story about humans fighting lizardmen into a moral lesson and a first rate Star Trek episode. Because Kirk sees that he has been wrong: There is an explanation other than “invasion” for the Gorn attack. That’s enough for him to spare the Gorn. You’re completely right that the Gorn were not acting in self-defense. The Gorn are not nice. Yet there is a misunderstanding at the bottom of the conflict, there is a chance for peace, and Kirk doesn’t hesitate to take it. It’s this kind of behaviour that makes Star Trek my favourite TV show, and Kirk my favourite character. And I also love the fact that he does not mind “playing games by the Metrons”, that he accepts their assessment of him as a savage. I love his humility.
“How long has it been since you’ve watched those series? Because I watch them regularly, and I can tell you’re wrong, no disrespect intended.”
Ooh, I wanted to say the same thing to you. Seems we’re both guilty of arrogance. To give my fannish credentials, I watch TOS all the time. There are episodes I practically know by heart. I’ve recorded audiotapes in the 1970s, then bought videotapes, then bought DVDs. I introduced my daughters to it. I read the books and the comics. I collect fanzines. I own an IDIC necklace. Good enough?
“What? Very little exploration? There was “Cause and Effect,” “I, Borg,” “Schisms,” or the setup to many other episodes where they were charting nebula and other stuff. That’s exploration, dude.”
Good point. I know that there is a thing I love dearly in TOS that’s missing from TNG, and I used to think it was space exploration. But you’re right. Perhaps it’s something more specific – the exploration of alien planets with weirdly coloured skies and strange plantlife. Or perhaps it’s the joy of exploration. The TOS characters are often awed by what they find, call it “amazing” and “fascinating”. The TNG characters are much more impassive.
“Having Spock earnestly insist women are more easily frightened than men, or hearing that this supposed utopia doesn’t let women captain starships is very hard to swallow.”
Yeah, there’s that. But they also had great female characters like Areel Shaw, Helen Noel, Edith Keeler, and many others; lots of female scientists; Uhura was a great character once she was allowed to do more than open hailing frequencies, especially in “Mirror, Mirror” and “The Gamesters of Triskelion”; and the women in the crew were always treated respectfully and as normal crewmembers. That’s important to me, and it is not true of all 1960s TV; for example, it is not true of the German SF series Raumpatrouille.
“What was great about TOS was that Earth was a united world, yet people still disagreed. See Scotty, McCoy, or Kirk trading arguments to get a clear idea what I mean. And it had nothing to do with race either, but just differences of opinion in how to get things done.”
Finally, we’re in complete agreement.
@85 Got a source for that? Because from what I can tell, Harve Bennett had to gently remind Roddenberry that Starfleet IS a military organization. That’s not the only purpose, but it is devoted to the defense of the Federation regardless, as much as it’s related to the culture and science and exploration of the Federation.
@86 Roddenberry was specific on this. He wanted Kirk to study it as a new lifeform because he was “curious” about it ala Picard in “Silicon Avatar,” that general respect for life. And yet given how Kirk has acted many times in TOS, with that kind of bold-faced, dashing, to-hell-with-the-rules, I’m-going-to-play-things-my-way cowboy type attitude (which I still see Wrath of Khan paying homage to with the Kobayashi Maru scenario in that while he breaks the rules, it also has a consequence in that he’s blind to certain things), yeah, I could see him blasting the slug.
It wasn’t a lie. Starfleet in TOS was always more militarized. Again, refer to “Arena” where they shot a mortar at the Gorn. We don’t ever see a mortar until DS9, and it’s a very weak Klingon mortar to boot. But then, this was in the era that Gene Roddenberry was fighting the networks to get what he wanted on the air, and it’s a good thing he didn’t, as early TNG proved. That’s why it was so awful. Roddenberry had full control, and the franchise suffered because of it.
Presenting a utopia with conflict is still a utopia that has baggage, depending on what type of conflict it is. In TOS, it was conflict over the right things. In TNG onward, it was conflict over increasingly worse values. Like the Prime Directive. The Prime Directive soon became a straightjacket to prevent any and all humanitarian aid to suffering people and letting whole civilizations die out under the justification of, “We don’t know the future, nature is right, and because I said so.” To me, that’s not a utopia. That’s… really a backward society.
What is more important to you, I ask, peace or justice? Should one trump the other, even if it means war? Because no matter how you wanna spin-doctor this, those helpless people were butchered, women and children alike, and those attacking them paid no price. I’m not saying they need to suffer. But they should at least stand interstellar trial or something for their actions. An example of this would be WWII rapists who hunted down and preyed on millions of women and girls, and their commanders turned a blind eye. They never faced international justice for their crimes, and thus, the war ended. Is that right? Would it be worth starting a new war and risk more lives if it meant getting justice for them, like some in the US high command had wanted at the time? I think it’s important to the victims that those who hurt them pay some kind of price. It doesn’t have to be sinking to their level. But it should at least be a trial of your peers. And literally under the situation that Kirk was forced into, he had a duty to avenge those women and children. He chose not to. That’s a betrayal of their suffering. The Gorn swept in on a helpless colony begging for surrender, and instead of demanding that they leave, just killed them, then laid a trap for the Enterprise. Kirk was right to suspect invasion, given the information they had been gathering on the Federation, so him sparing the Gorn, I would argue, is criminally stupid.
Okay then. I admit I haven’t seen many TOS episodes, I’m waiting for SF Debris to review them before diving in. I’ve seen a few new ones lately. Like “Obsession,” which I liked.
… yeah, because that’s matte paintings or a warehouse with painted ceilings. Though the TNG crew was just as often awed by the unknown. Like in “I, Borg” when they talked about how magnificent the sun was. I can recall numerous times they showed just as much wonder at the universe. Hell, don’t you remember “The Inner Light?” That’s about the beauty of a dying civilization holding strong in the face of their death, and finding new life in someone a millennium later, to teach others about the richness of their lives. I’d say that fits right in with what you missed in TNG.
Uhura was just a glorified secretary and Nichelle Nichols hated the role. She only stayed because, big surprise, a man told her to stay because “our people need to see them fairly represented alongside whites.” It’s men thinking about racial problems or men’s issues, not how women hurt. Typical. But I will agree there were a lot of good female roles. There was also Whitney worrying about getting the man who possibly attempted to rape her in trouble in “The Enemy Within,” which is just cringe-inducing levels of uncomfortable, and I’m betting came from Roddenberry, one of the reasons I think he was the one to rape her. And there’s other examples. I dunno. I’d hardly claim denying the Captain’s chair to someone with a vagina is respect. A lot of times we see females on TOS are treated as meat for men to lust over. I mean, those “uniforms.” UGH! Also uniforms like the one that that android girl wore in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” which is more from the Star Trek School of “we’re progressive, but check out the body on this babe!”
@87/Elliot: Concerning the question “How military is Starfleet?”, here’s a quote from the 1967 Writers Guide: “Is the starship U.S.S. Enterprise a military vessel? – Yes, but only semi-military in practice – omitting features which are heavily authoritarian. For example, we are not aware of “officers” and “enlisted men” categories. And we avoid saluting and other annoying medieval leftovers. On the other hand, we do keep a flavor of Naval usage and terminology to help encourage believability and identification by the audience.”
Nobody in TOS or TNG ever shouted “Captain/Admiral on the bridge!” except in a Nicholas Meyer film, and when Jellico replaced Picard in “Chain of Command” as captain of the Enterprise D. Just one example to show that Nicholas Meyer portrayed a more militaristic Starfleet than TOS.
“Roddenberry […] wanted Kirk to study it as a new lifeform because he was “curious” about it ala Picard in “Silicon Avatar,” that general respect for life.”
I don’t find that a bad idea, either. Explorers should be curious about new lifeforms, and Kirk is an explorer just as much as Picard. He also has a respect for life. That’s why he doesn’t kill the Horta when it is wounded. At that point, he does not yet know that the “monster” is a mother defending her eggs, he only knows that “it’s not making any threatening moves”. That’s enough for him to spare it.
“And yet given how Kirk has acted many times in TOS, with that kind of bold-faced, dashing, to-hell-with-the-rules, I’m-going-to-play-things-my-way cowboy type attitude (which I still see Wrath of Khan paying homage to with the Kobayashi Maru scenario in that while he breaks the rules, it also has a consequence in that he’s blind to certain things), yeah, I could see him blasting the slug.”
TOS Kirk isn’t like that. His “To-hell-with-the-rules, I’m-going-to-play-things-my-way cowboy type attitude” is an invention of TWOK. In “Shore Leave”, Kirk chats with McCoy about his Academy days: “And you being the very serious young -” – “Serious? I’ll make a confession, Bones. I was absolutely grim, which delighted Finnegan no end.” In “A Taste of Armageddon”, he doesn’t want to endanger his crew by trespassing into Eminian territory, but Fox orders him to go on, and so he complies. In “The Apple”, he complains: “Four hundred people. They’ll die because I couldn’t see a warning sign. I had to follow orders, always orders.” In “Spectre of the Gun”, he disregards the Melkotian warning because “Our orders are very clear. We’re to establish contact with the Melkotians at all costs.” He’s a bold-faced, dashing, very obedient soldier. With a respect for life. He wouldn’t be my favourite character otherwise. I don’t like to-hell-with-the-rules, I’m-going-to-play-things-my-way cowboy types.
“It wasn’t a lie.” – “I’m a soldier” wasn’t a lie, but “I’m not a diplomat” was.
“The Prime Directive soon became a straightjacket to prevent any and all humanitarian aid to suffering people and letting whole civilizations die out under the justification of, “We don’t know the future, nature is right, and because I said so.” To me, that’s not a utopia. That’s… really a backward society.”
I agree.
“And literally under the situation that Kirk was forced into, he had a duty to avenge those women and children.”
I disagree. There’s never any duty to avenge anyone. And an imperfect peace is almost always better than war. That would just lead to more women and children being killed.
You probably wouldn’t like “Space Seed” or “By Any Other Name”, either. In these episodes Kirk gives planets to defeated enemies – ex-dictators, aliens who have killed one of his crewmembers to punish him. I love stories like these. The forgiveness and the desire to help are a big part of why I like the original Star Trek so much.
“… yeah, because that’s matte paintings or a warehouse with painted ceilings.” – Yes, so simple, and yet it captured my imagination.
“Hell, don’t you remember “The Inner Light?” That’s about the beauty of a dying civilization holding strong in the face of their death, and finding new life in someone a millennium later, to teach others about the richness of their lives.”
Oh yes, that’s a wonderful episode. One of my three favourite TNG stories, together with “The Offspring” and “Darmok”.
“Uhura was just a glorified secretary” – No, that’s Janice Rand. Uhura was a glorified radio operator.
“[…] and Nichelle Nichols hated the role.” – No, she only hated that the role was so small. She thought about leaving, decided to stay, and instead asked to be included in landing parties. Which she was several times, in the second season.
“A lot of times we see females on TOS are treated as meat for men to lust over.” – I guess I have a different perspective on this because I’m female. (I assume that you’re male because of your name. Am I right?) When I look at a dress, I ask myself if I like it. When I look at a female character, I pay attention to her job, if she’s portrayed as smart and capable, if her male collegues value her work, if they talk down to her or not. Much (not all) of TOS holds up pretty well in this respect. Oh, and I actually like the uniforms. Many women wear miniskirts, and not just in the 1960s – they do it right now. Is that different where you live?
@88 You invalidate your own argument. You say Starfleet doesn’t go authoritarian with the military, yet showing proper respect to procedure and having specific regulations for situations they encounter in space isn’t a bad thing, nor is it authoritarian. We even see that in TOS. The real reason it wasn’t in TOS to the degree it was in Wrath of Khan was it was on a shoe-string 1960s TV budget, and that Roddenberry didn’t have total control, that’s all. If you dislike it as a matter of preference, that is one thing. But to pretend it’s somehow less or more inconsistent than TOS is just wrong. They got into their fair share of military scrapes there too. Take “The Ultimate Computer” which is a war games simulation. That has a very military feel to it. Hell, the computer itself argues with Kirk over the best way to command a ship. Simply announcing the Captain or Admiral is on the bridge is actual professionalism instead of a kids’ military clubhouse feel TOS Starfleet sometimes had because of budget problems and so on. BTW, what about them giving weapons to a local primitive tribe to help them fight their enemies in “A Private Little War?” Doesn’t that strike you as just a wee bit militarized?
Would you have respect for a wild chimp that rips off a man’s nose? If it’s an alien form of life that’s different but benign, that’s one thing. When it starts hurting or killing or eating actual living human beings, that’s when people’s priorities change. I wouldn’t be curious, I’d be disgusted. Roddenberry also proves what a hypocrite he is in how Picard is faced with a similar body-controlling creature with the queen of the bluegills, and when confronted with it, his face curls up in disgust and he ruthlessly guns it down, when he had complained about Kirk doing that to the Ceti eel. Another reason I hate the man. But getting back to your point, I feel Picard had every right to blast the queen bluegill, same way Kirk had every right to blast the Ceti eel. What do you feel? Should Picard have tried to preserve it for information? Just trying to get your thoughts here, because I want to see if you’re going to remain consistent on this argument you’re making. With regards to the Horta, that’s where it gets a bit inconsistent. Kirk deciding to spare it feels forced, like it comes out of nowhere, because it had caved him in, then burrowed out of the wall, and he has his phaser on it, but doesn’t shoot, when he had expressed they had no other choice earlier on. My best explanation is that he was surprised it wasn’t rushing him, and didn’t pull the trigger for that reason, out of reflex, which led to him testing it, then he was curious to its motives, rather than fascinated by alien life, which led to the mind meld, and he found it had good reasons. The Ceti eels don’t have good reasons. Neither do many other alien lifeforms presented in Trek. Kirk is not Picard. He doesn’t ooh and awe over the wonders of new alien creatures. That’s Picard’s schtick.
Kirk’s cowboy diplomacy is legendary, what show were you watching? You cited “A Taste of Armageddon.” But they regularly violate the Prime Directive and meddle with alien cultures for various reasons like in “A Private Little War” and “Friday’s Child” or the aforementioned “Errand of Mercy” to prevent Klingon aggression. In “The Return of the Archons,” rather than trying to escape the planet, Kirk instead chooses to stop Landru, same as in “Armageddon,” where he chooses to end their war for them. That’s absolutely brazen and is most definitely against the rules, specifically the Prime Directive. How about “Arena” where he stated that they’re the only policemen, a crime had been committed, and it was a matter of policy? Kirk is a captain who’s less concerned with doing things by the book and more concerned with practical command, that fits right in with stuff like the Kobayashi Maru scenario. BTW, Kirk’s comment that “How we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life” is something I could see him saying given his boyhood experiences with Kodos the Executioner, and how so many died for so little reason. Kirk also was the man who was tempted to murder Kodos, but did not. There’s your cowboy captain. Wrath of Khan was paying homage to the best aspects of TOS, which despite your views, are part of the lore of Trek, just open to interpretation. You simply hate Wrath of Khan because you don’t consider it “your Star Trek” given its stronger emphasis on military. I just think there’s nothing wrong with a more increased militarism during the 2280s of the Federation’s existence, especially given we have no idea the events that preceded that. As always with Starfleet, sometimes certain aspects are going to take more precedence, like how the discovery and conflicts with the Borg and the Dominion forced Starfleet into putting more emphasis on its defense infrastructure.
Good. I can’t stand Prime Directive defenders who think letting whole species die out is a good thing.
Not in this case. The price was very clear. The Gorn had been gathering information on them, and very possibly had lured the Enterprise there to nab its command staff as high-ranking prisoners to interrogate. Killing the Gorn would have only resulted in the destruction of their ship, and the Gorn government would have remained unaware of what had happened, and perhaps had reason to think twice. Kirk’s reason doesn’t change, but his motivations do to fit the plot. It makes no sense. The Gorn wasn’t “protecting” himself, and I suspect they had every reason to think they were lying, or were protecting themselves in the way the Nazis or Soviets were during their expansion campaigns and conquests of terror. Killing the Gorn was smart. It would have kept the Gorn from further acts of barbarism. You let them get away with it, they’ll be encouraged to try again. It’s exactly like Kirk said, which I quote further above. They’re the only policemen in this part of space, and a crime had been committed. We don’t let crimes go unpunished. Sometimes justice requires a certain level of ruthlessness. It’s similar to the boat scene in The Dark Knight. It would have made more sense if the civilians had chosen not to press the detonator simply out of suspicion they might blow up their own boats, using logic rather than “them good vibes, man,” because with the Joker, you never know, it’s always possible. Because no large group of that many human beings when faced with a chance to live or die, with children present, and mothers there, will knowingly choose to die. That button would have gotten twisted, especially since the democratic majority ruled in favor of pushing it.
I love “Space Seed,” and it’s ironic you like it given it led to the movie you hate. I don’t like “By Any Other Name” in that Kirk pretty much does that, yeah. But that’s part of Roddenberry’s rather psychotic view towards Star Trek. “We accept death, we don’t mourn” to the point human lives sometimes inadvertently don’t mean as much to other humans. A little boy is shoehorned into the Roddenberry Box not to grieve for his mother, Kirk lets murderers go free, and then Picard compares humans to brine that whale eat with the Crystalline Entity, which is just criminally stupid given how it had conspired with Lore prior. It’s like SF Debris notes. “‘I’ll never tell my mom I love her again.’ ‘Oh suck it up!’ ‘I’ll never tap that ass again.’ “OH MY GOD THE HORROR!'” As for forgiveness, that has to be earned, the same as freedom, as Kirk noted. You can’t just be given forgiveness. Same as trust, like Worf commented on in TNG.
On that I can agree. I think the matte painting of the mining colony in “The Devil in the Dark” was pure perfection.
My favorite TNG story is “Best of Both Worlds,” but there’s many, many, many more I love. “Cause and Effect,” “Parallels,” way too many to count.
Fair enough, I guess, lol.
I have read Martin Luther King Jr. demanded she stay to see their people represented on TV, and that irks me because it’s men once again prioritizing racial issues or men’s issues over women’s issues. That happens all too often that, as a Feminist, it really gets under my skin in a very personal way.
I am, but as I said above, I’m Feminist-minded, though my own breed of Feminist, not what others tell me. Starfleet has a dress policy. For them to put the women in miniskirts or skintight jumpsuits (ala TNG) is misogynistic in universe and out of universe because it wants them to be objects that go easy on the eyes. And when you combine that with the fact that Roddenberry himself said in TOS how females aren’t allowed to be captains, and add how women are there to serve men, like bring them food and so on, well, it really offends me deeply. TOS was very regressive on women’s rights even for a 1960s show.
Speaking to the DS9 ripped off B5 debate, I actually think it’s more fair to say Voyager might have ripped them off. In one of the altered timelines, the Krenim warship looks like Babylon 5, and Species 8472 seems like a poor man’s version of the Shadows (at least from my reading). There’s also the fact that the Hierarchy later on resemble the Sontarans from Doctor Who. Voyager was constantly ripping off anything they could throw at the screen which might work, like Dragon’s Egg, the sci-fi novel about watching a civilization evolving at an accelerated rate of speed. Voyager was too lazy to put nuance to the ideas they should be paying homage to, rather than stealing.
This thread started out talking about Babylon 5, but got taken over by Trek talk. Just more proof that Trekkies are always stealing things… :-)
@90/AlanBrown: :-)
@89/Elliot: “You invalidate your own argument. You say Starfleet doesn’t go authoritarian with the military, yet showing proper respect to procedure and having specific regulations for situations they encounter in space isn’t a bad thing, nor is it authoritarian. We even see that in TOS. The real reason it wasn’t in TOS to the degree it was in Wrath of Khan was it was on a shoe-string 1960s TV budget, and that Roddenberry didn’t have total control, that’s all.”
You’re misrepresenting my argument, and I wish you wouldn’t do that. Discussions are more fun when people actually listen.
So, my view on TOS Starfleet again, in a nutshell: TOS Starfleet is a multi-purpose organisation. It has a military structure and its starships control the borders, carry heavy weapons, and do maneuvers. All this makes it a military. They also spend most of their time with exploration and other jobs that have nothing to do with fighting or defense, they wear brightly coloured uniforms that look like sportswear, and there are Starfleet lieutenants who say of themselves “I’m not a military man” (Jaeger in “The Squire of Gothos”, which was not written by Roddenberry). As for Kirk, he says “I’m a soldier” in the first season and “I am primarily an explorer now” in the third season (“Whom Gods Destroy”), so you could say he has something of a character arc. All this makes them “semi-military”, and for me that’s one of Star Trek’s utopian aspects – the military spends most of its time doing totally un-military things.
And I’m not the only one saying that Starfleet became more militarised/militaristic (i.e. more similar to a contemporary military, with most the utopian aspects missing) in TWOK. Many people have said this over the years. For example, Keith R.A. DeCandido says it in his review of TWOK on this site.
Roddenberry never had total control. He had virtually no control over third season TOS and the animated series. I suspect that I would have liked a Star Trek where Roddenberry had total control much less than the one we actually got. Much of what I like comes from Gene Coon, Dorothy Fontana, Paul Schneider, Jerome Bixby, and the actors. Although sometimes it’s hard to say, with everybody’s rewriting everybody else’s scripts all the time.
“Would you have respect for a wild chimp that rips off a man’s nose?”
If I could stop it without killing it, I would. Wouldn’t you?
“Roddenberry also proves what a hypocrite he is in how Picard is faced with a similar body-controlling creature with the queen of the bluegills, and when confronted with it, his face curls up in disgust and he ruthlessly guns it down, when he had complained about Kirk doing that to the Ceti eel. […] Just trying to get your thoughts here, because I want to see if you’re going to remain consistent on this argument you’re making.”
You have to help me here, because I don’t know TNG as well as I know TOS. Which episode is that?
Anyway, I agree that Roddenberry was a hypocrite. And jealous. But he was still right about the Ceti eel :-)
“With regards to the Horta, that’s where it gets a bit inconsistent. Kirk deciding to spare it feels forced, like it comes out of nowhere, because it had caved him in, then burrowed out of the wall, and he has his phaser on it, but doesn’t shoot, when he had expressed they had no other choice earlier on.”
I don’t agree that it’s inconsistent. They way Kirk was written, he had two souls in his breast. He was a genuinely nice person who always tried to help others, but he was also the soldier/mother hen, with a tendency to act violently when the people he was responsible for were threatened. The wanted to kill the Horta because it killed the miners. As soon as he really met it, face to, um, face, as soon as it was no longer an abstract threat, his nice side took over – perhaps also his curiosity – and he observed it instead. If this makes no sense to you, it makes perfect sense to me. As I said, it’s my favourite episode.
“Kirk is not Picard. He doesn’t ooh and awe over the wonders of new alien creatures. That’s Picard’s schtick.”
No, you’re wrong there. Kirk is Picard, or rather, Picard is Kirk – the older, more mature, mellowed Kirk of the abandoned “Phase II” TV show. That’s how he was originally written, just as Riker was Decker, Troi was Ilia (pun alert), and Data was Xon, the Vulcan who admired humans and wanted to be more human. It was only after TNG became popular that people started to reconstruct Kirk as some kind of anti-Picard. The reason is probably that people like polar opposites. But Kirk and Picard aren’t polar opposites. An article about Kirk I can recommend is Kirk Drift by Erin Horáková. Reading it back in 2017 made me very happy because the distorted image of my favourite character that can be seen, for example, in the 2009 film had been bothering me a lot.
“You cited “A Taste of Armageddon.” But they regularly violate the Prime Directive and meddle with alien cultures for various reasons like in “A Private Little War” and “Friday’s Child” or the aforementioned “Errand of Mercy” to prevent Klingon aggression. In “The Return of the Archons,” rather than trying to escape the planet, Kirk instead chooses to stop Landru, same as in “Armageddon,” where he chooses to end their war for them. That’s absolutely brazen and is most definitely against the rules, specifically the Prime Directive.”
That’s actually a tricky question, because we never learn how the Prime Directive exactly looks like. And in “Bread and Circuses” and “The Omega Glory”, Kirk upholds it instead of breaking it.
My interpretation is, once again, that Kirk is torn between two impulses – he wants to abide by the rules, and he wants to help people. And he wants to help people just a little bit more than he wants to abide by the rules. But sometimes he still needs to convince himself that he isn’t really breaking the rules. From “The Return of the Archons”: Kirk: “Landru must die.” Spock: “Captain, our Prime Directive of non-interference.” Kirk: “That refers to a living, growing culture. Do you think this one is?” Note that he does not say “To hell with the Prime Directive”; he tries to find a loophole.
“How about “Arena” where he stated that they’re the only policemen, a crime had been committed, and it was a matter of policy?”
That makes him a policeman, not a cowboy.
“Kirk is a captain who’s less concerned with doing things by the book and more concerned with practical command […].”
Kirk is very concerned with doing things by the book. If the quotes I cited in my previous comment didn’t prove that, here’s one from the animated series (“The Eye of the Beholder”): (They listen to a transmission from another starship.) Kirk: “It was against all orders.” McCoy: “The need was apparently desperate.” Kirk: “The captain of a ship, no matter his rank, must follow the book.”
“Kirk also was the man who was tempted to murder Kodos, but did not. There’s your cowboy captain.”
Um, how does it make him a cowboy captain that he doesn’t murder Kodos?
Again, I refer you to Keith DeCandido, who argues that Kirk’s reputation as a rule-breaker is a myth throughout his TOS rewatch on this site, most extensively in his rewatch of “The Galileo Seven”.
“Wrath of Khan was paying homage to the best aspects of TOS, which despite your views, are part of the lore of Trek, just open to interpretation.”
I guess we strongly disagree what the best aspects of TOS are. Star Trek fans are a diverse bunch :-)
“Killing the Gorn was smart. It would have kept the Gorn from further acts of barbarism. You let them get away with it, they’ll be encouraged to try again.”
No, because from their point of view, they were only defending themselves. Their response was ugly, violent, and way over the top, but it still was a response to a perceived threat. Showing them that there had never been a threat was a way to stop the violence, and thus the right thing to do.
“I love “Space Seed,” and it’s ironic you like it given it led to the movie you hate.”
That isn’t the episode’s fault, is it? Really, it makes sense – one of the reasons why I dislike TWOK is that it makes Kirk’s magnanimity at the end of the episode seem like a mistake. Given what you say about forgiveness, I assume that you would regard this as a feature, not a bug.
“My favorite TNG story is “Best of Both Worlds.”
I don’t like that one much because it bothers me how Riker treats Shelby. Also how everyone seems to think Riker’s career choices are as important as the Borg threat. And while it has a nonviolent solution, it has none of the mutual understanding I love Star Trek for. You’re probably not surprised when I tell you that my favourite Borg episode is “I, Borg”.
It makes sense that someone who thinks Kirk was wrong in “Arena”, and behaved inconsistently in “The Devil in the Dark”, would like TWOK and “The Best of Both Worlds”. You and I simply don’t like the same things. I also think that Picard was right about the crystalline entity.
“As for forgiveness, that has to be earned.”
Well, I disagree. And of course, this means that you reject one of the things I like most about Star Trek.
“TOS was very regressive on women’s rights even for a 1960s show.”
What? What about all the female scientists, lawyers, engineers, IT specialists,…? As a girl who grew up in the 70s, I can tell you that Star Trek had great female characters, and felt very empowering. Much more so than Star Wars, because while Leia was a good character, she was the only woman in the universe (except for Luke’s aunt), and had to be saved, too. Compare this to all those women in the background on the Enterprise. They gave me a real sense of belonging. And believe me that there was far, far worse in the 1960s. Women who were portrayed as stupid, or helpless, who were ridiculed and given silly nicknames by the men. For the most part, Star Trek wasn’t like that. (There was some ridiculing Chapel because of her affection for Spock. Very annoying. Believe it or not, I’m a feminist too.) Which wonderful 1960s shows did you watch? I must have missed them all. The only one I can think of that did better than Star Trek is The Avengers.
And did you know that the miniskirt uniforms were introduced because the female actors wanted them? In “The Cage” and “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, women wore trousers. Later on, there’s still the occasional woman in trousers in one or two episodes, so we can assume that in-universe, miniskirt uniforms were optional, but many crewmembers wanted to wear them. Just like the actors in the real world did.
@90 Well, just ask me what you will about B5. I’ve watched up to “Interludes and Examinations.”
What would a new and good space station series be? How about “Sector General”? That book series by James White, set mainly on a massive space station dedicated to medical treatment and research for all intelligent species.
Such has been sort of tried. Remember the thankfully very short lived “Mercy Point”? When I saw the promos I had high hopes that perhaps it was based on the Sector General books. Nooooo, not at all. Gack.
Just please ignore “The Galactic Gourmet”, which involves attempting to force a carnivore species to become vegan and blaming the destruction of their environment on their diet. It’s a bad, horrible novel, totally ignorant of even the basics of biochemistry. Dunno what James White was on when he wrote that one. Doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the series.