Babylon 5 is one of the best science fiction shows ever made. It also kind of sucks, and that’s okay.
“I hope the future will be like Star Trek, but I’m afraid it’s going to be like Babylon 5.”
This is how a friend convinced me to watch Babylon 5 close to a decade ago, and it’s a statement that gets both more and less prescient by the day. Babylon 5 depicts a future rife with stratified poverty, union busting corporations, xenophobic hate crimes, colonial legacies blossoming into new conflicts, and the tide of fascism rising right in our own backyard. In J. Michael Straczynski’s imagined future, the smug neoliberal western hegemony that arose from the ashes of the Cold War really was “the end of history”, and the results are simultaneously anodyne and horrific. Psychic powers are real, but those born with them are enslaved by the state. There are ancient terrors lurking on the edges of the map—civilizations who long ago ascended but refuse to let the children of the galaxy play unattended in the sandbox. People who live on the titular station still have to pay for their freaking healthcare in the year 2258.
And, of course, let us not forget what happened to San Diego1.
Here’s what Babylon 5 also has: a complete, pre-planned, serialized story arc that is arguably one of the first successful examples of such on American television. A bisexual second-in-command and a nod to legalized gay marriage (in 1994!). An episode where “King Arthur” visits the station and knights an alien ambassador while drunk and actually this all has deep and ultimately painful relevance to the show’s immediate backstory, I promise. There’s a collective of time-travelling alien janitors all named Zathras who inexplicably become the most important hinge on which the stable time loop that ties together the first three seasons hangs. The heroes of Babylon 5 quite literally tell the universe’s most powerful threat to “get the hell out of their galaxy” eight episodes into the penultimate season and then spend the rest of the series mopping up civil wars, succession debates and personal crises. Yeah, that’s nearly two whole seasons the show keeps going without the Big Bad and most of it is very, very good (some of it is very, very not).
Babylon 5 is both exactly as wild as it sounds, and utterly underwhelming in terms of execution versus expectation. Because, honestly, a modern show with a Game of Thrones level budget would have a difficult time living up to the vision B5 presents in its five-year-arc, which attempts to suggest a history extending a million years in either direction; a great hand reaching out of the stars… and then doing absolutely nothing else. That Babylon 5 manages to grant us even a sliver of of that vision—like peeking through a crack in the door—is mind-blowing when you really examine all the things the show had going against it2 .
— which is kind of the critical equivalent of giving the show a gold star, or a participation trophy, isn’t it? This show won two Hugos once upon a time, but the legacy it has today tends to buzz around in the form of its “firsts” and the “in spite ofs”. Nothing else was doing serialization like this in the ’90s! Oh, it got cancelled, then un-cancelled! They never had the budget to do what they wanted! But… but! But, but, but!
So here’s the question I want to ask—is the show actually worth it, beyond the novelty of it simply being what it is? Because so often Babylon 5 is recommended in terms of those novelties, a piece of art that only justifies its existence in a self referential, metatextual sense because of its place in history. But aside from all that, is it really… any good?
I mean, obviously I think it is. It’s one of my favourite shows, and I’ve been known to be somewhat evangelical about it. I’ve marathoned it with friends and family members no less than five times in the nine years since I first watched it. I’ve witnessed more than one person cry during the series finale. My mother balefully admitted to me in a horrid whisper that she thought it was better than Star Trek. That it’s worth it seems self evident to me.
However, B5 is not a straightforward recommendation. There are many things about the show that are bad. And not just “cringey” or “cheap”, but legitimately, objectively awful or misjudged. The thing is, I don’t think that these flaws particularly detract from Babylon 5’s goodness. In fact I think they enhance it. They are thematically cogent and cohesive with what’s good about it, and I think that it would lose something in translation if that Big Budget, technically “perfect” modern adaptation everyone is dreaming about actually happened.
Don’t believe me? Well, consider Babylon 5’s cast: an eclectic mix of outstanding character actors, career genre gutter dwellers, and true amateurs, many of whom grew into their roles in various ways. Can you really imagine any of these characters being recast? It’s not controversial to sing the praises of the more colourful members of the dramatis personae, of course; Andreas Katsulas and Peter Jurasik’s lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry as adversarial Ambassadors Londo and G’kar is legendary. Mira Furlan brings both her effortlessly luminous demeanour and sobering real-world experience with war, to the destiny-obsessed and destiny-defying Delenn in a performance that is as effervescent as it is complete. Claudia Christian might be the only one who loves Susan Ivanova more than we do, and everyone adores Captain Sheridan. Well, a lot of fans these days actually hate Sheridan, who commits the twin sins of being both terribly earnest and also being right most of the time, but you can’t deny that Bruce Boxleitner bleeds sunshine out both his ears.
It doesn’t stop there: No one forgets the first time they meet the slimy, self-righteous Psi-Cop Alfred Bester. The Ambassadorial Aides are irreplaceable [even Na’toth (especially Na’toth [the joke here is that she was replaced; it wasn’t the same])]. Richard Briggs brings an understated naturalism to the ship’s head medical officer Doctor Franklin that makes him carefully invisible until his demons start to leak out. Jason Carter? Who even is that guy even? I have no idea, but he was so pitch perfect as the charmingly annoying and quixotic Ranger Marcus Cole that for the longest time I thought his British accent was fake. There’s layers.
For example: Jerry Doyle—who played the station’s wise-cracking and entertainingly damaged security chief, Michael Garibaldi—had a notably short career as an actor, cushioned on either side by stints as a Wall Street trader and a right wing radio host. This is the kind of extra-canonical knowledge that would usually ruin a character for me but, y’know, I don’t like Garibaldi because I agree with him politically; I mean—he’s a cop. I like him because he feels real, and he feels real because Doyle was on, some level, playing himself. You really can’t say there’s a single actor in the main cast who didn’t truly and thoroughly make the role their own. In the same way your high school’s production of Les Miserables might create a stronger visceral memory of the barricade scenes than Colm Wilkinson’s flawless recitation of ‘Bring Him Home’ in the 10th Anniversary Concert, it’s the imperfections that make this stagey, un-subtle, occasionally overwrought Space Opera seem authentic.
That authenticity is underscored by the world these characters inhabit. Babylon 5’s production design is inspired. Unique. Gorgeous—I will not budge on this point. I’ve seen the Season 1 Ambassador outfits in real life: they’re incredible works of sartorial art that the current DVD transfers simply do not do justice. Instead of streamlined and sterile, B5 is rich and gaudy and grandiose. It’s peak ’90s pop art aesthetic, and it’s bargain bin film noir: smokey and dark and grimy, shot through with bursts of neon and pastels. Lounge singers are backed by bands with Christmas lights glued to their guitars to make them look “space”-y. The drum-sets have glowing fluorescent rims. Every room on the station is crafted with a careful eye for detail that often gets lost in the sumptuous shadow-drenched lighting.
Colours mean things in Babylon 5, they have thematic and character associations. Hazy reds dominate G’kar’s living quarters and illuminate his steps as he treads the path to prophethood. The dazzling, abstract shards of light in Minbari architecture express both their complex, sharp-edged fragility and the Platonic foundations of their religious beliefs. The peaks and valleys of Londo Mollari’s fall-from-and-rise-to-grace are marked by him literally changing his coat. That last one’s kind of gauche, I know, but so is the character, so it works.
The show does its best to break monotony in the endless parade of flat-lighting, shot-reverse-shot film-making popularly seen in network spec shows pre-dating the revolution brought about by later seasons of The X-Files and Buffy. Which isn’t to say the directing is good—it’s not. In fact, sometimes it’s laughably amateur, the kind of dumb camera tricks I’d have thought to do if someone handed me a Super 35 in high school and told me to to go nuts; dutch angles, weird zooms, filming a tense exchange from the most obscure angle in the room possible… but there’s a sort of artistic innocence and freedom that comes from that lack of expertise, from filming a show that doesn’t need to be as safe as the TNGs of the world. Often the camera is doing something really stupid, but it’s rarely resting on its laurels. The show is at its worst—visually and atmospherically I mean, but also in terms of writing, yeah—during its fifth season, when it had the financial security to “look good”. Something is lost in the transition. It loses the fervent passion and becomes workmanship-like. The lights have come on and chased the shadows away.
Which only makes sense. The literal Shadows are gone from the galaxy too, and all the wars are over. The fifth season weaves so many narrative threads—some elegant, some nearly unwatchable—together that the plot hooks could set up a whole other five-season arc. Telepaths demanding the postponed freedoms they were promised, servants of the vanished Old Gods trying to fill the power vacuum left by their departed masters, beloved characters falling prey to destructive patterns and desires you would have hoped they’d overcome, while other members of the cast prosper in their roles as historical figures in the making. None of it is wrapped up.
Which is the point—that peace is difficult to maintain and there’s no magic fix. That when you kill your Gods you have to find something to replace them. That the needs of the truly oppressed are often treated as an after-thought by the bigwigs fighting the war, and their freedom will be used as a bargaining chip. For all these reasons, toppling oppressive regimes can have unexpected consequences that persist for years. For decades. The heroes have brought down the pillars of corruption with in such a way that the structure is still standing, and so they are forced to rebuild with the tools they already had.
But what if they had new tools? This is a possibility the show never even considers, and while there is a strong degree of intentionality to that point, Babylon 5 makes a big deal from the word go about the fact that we are supposedly witnessing the beginning of a “New Age”, so I think it’s valid to ask if perhaps the show could muster a bit more vision in its soft revolution.
The literal text of the show suggests that the natural result of Capitalism’s decay is a re-emergence of Fascism, and Earth is already locked in what we can now recognize as a familiar pattern of increasing technocratic censorship paired with a loss of political efficacy on the part of normal people when the series begins. There’s an election going on in the first episode and the conservative party wins on the basis of what we are to assume is reactionary rhetoric. He’s not the guy our protagonists were supporting, but the whole thing is treated with a shrug. It eventually leads to a civil war. We’re immediately thrust into a cynical world wracked with bureaucratic inertia and callow appeasement. Our heroes emerge as heroic because they choose to reject apathy, normalization and compliance. Watching Earth inexorably slip further into violent authoritarianism is gripping stuff, brilliantly played as background noise for the first two and a half seasons and just as novel as it was in 1994 even when expressed in the silliest possible terms (Earth Gov is really out there literally quoting Nineteen Eighty-Four on its propaganda posters, huh?). But I’m not sure how cognizant the show is of its own political subtext, or, y’know, text in general.
Actually, the real problem is that I am sure.
What I’m saying is that Babylon 5 is… a little politically naive. It succumbs powerfully to the temptation to paint its central characters as the Great Men (and Women!) of History. The solutions it offers are not much different from the problems it wants to solve. This—in some regards—is fine, because we know what happens a million years after the end of the series: Earth falls to fascism again. Human civilization is boiled down to its bones in a nuclear war. Eventually, we rebuild. Eventually we ascend and go beyond the furthest ring to hang out with Kosh and Sheridan, and it’s all very Lord of the Rings in a way that has you half-expecting Gandalf to pop out from behind a corner at points. Like I said: it’s ‘The End of History’, the zeitgeist of the 1990s taken to its logical conclusion. It’s a Liberal hellscape, and that’s intentional at least 50% of the time. It might be asking a lot for a major network show from the Clinton-era to offer a more cogent critique of the system everyone was happily drowning in at the time than this.
The show can be crassly broad when broaching topics such as the AIDS epidemic, McCarthyism or Jehovah’s Witness medical restrictions, but it is simultaneously also very good at presenting situations in which no one is exactly right, or subverting its own subversions. Babylon 5’s parallel to the Cardassian/Bajoran conflict is initially problematized by presenting the formerly colonized Narn as a bloodthirsty, ambitious Regime in their own right, eager to make a mark on the galaxy and give back every inch of pain meted upon them by their former oppressors the Centauri. But it’s still the Narn Ambassador G’kar who learns to look towards the future, and the Centauri Ambassador Londo who helps his Empire re-brutalize the Narn twice as bad as has been done before out of a petty desire to feel important again. The wheel does not turn: the Centauri’s Imperial desire to see themselves as martyrs now under the boot of their victims is the poison tooth at the heart of the show’s many conflicts.
However, this all looks very First Year PoliSci even when compared to that contemporary non-blood relative Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which stumbles all over the place in its own Star Trekky way, but was perhaps more astute in its attempts at social criticisms with episodes like ‘Past Tense’ and ‘Far Beyond the Stars’ as well as notably more mature in its engagement with colonial war crimes. But what Babylon 5 lacks in wisdom it gains back in boldness and specificity. The reason I can respect this narrative, as outdated and self-defeating it is at points, is because B5 is never afraid—or embarrassed, even when it should be—to state its positions and their proximity to the world outside its narrative confines.
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This specificity of framing is in sharp contrast to Star Trek, which presents a vibrant playground in which to pose infinite number of philosophical moral quandaries but has shockingly little to say about the political architecture of that playground. We all know that the Federation is a glorious Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism paradise, right? I mean, it is—there’s nothing else it could be, but no writer has ever told us this directly. Starfleet Officers are awfully self righteous about a way of life that the franchise seems averse to actual spelling out in explicit terms. And if you don’t say something out loud, it turns out you don’t actually have a whole lot to say about it in the end after all. I find specificity more valuable the older I get. I can have a conversation with Babylon 5, all the parts I find illuminating as well as the ones I find odious. I can interact with its ideas about capitalism and extremism and religion and western interventionism without getting lost in the weeds of polite innuendo post-Cold War Star Trek often malingered in. (NOTE: I also love Star Trek)
Babylon 5’s willingness to engage heavily with the material conditions of the world it depicts is the reason I get nerd snobby about classifying the show as a Space Opera, not! a science fiction show, despite its many fascinating hard sci-fi elements. B5 has some very obvious fantasy trappings—ripped directly from Tolkien here, quoting Arthurian legends there—but what makes it capital-F Fantasy in my opinion is its preoccupation with communicating story and theme through the evocation of historical verisimilitude in its world-building. Babylon 5 uses its world to tell a mythic tale with contemporary tools rather than to posit questions about our future. With the philosophical and allegorical framework of the “primary world” removed, the story gets a whole lot easier to swallow.
This convincing world-building is achieved not just through the beauty of the production design, but also through its storytelling format which, for all B5’s pretensions of being a “novel for television”, is actually a hybrid of arc-focused serialization and stand-alone episodes. This was a format that American television was experimenting with a lot at the time, but what makes Babylon 5 unique is that it does not separate the two narrative approaches into neat, tidy bins like, say, The X-Files did with its “mythology” and “monster-of-the-week” episodes, which can essentially be watched independently of each other to create two very different television shows starring the same characters. In Babylon 5, lore-heavy episodes often have frivolous B-plots and seemingly inane stand-alone adventures can affect the course of the series in unexpected ways.
Each episode shows you a new facet of the world. It doesn’t hand you the puzzle pieces in order and it’s not shoving them at you aggressively, begging you to guess its secrets. Season 1 is a world-building venture more than it is a storytelling one, sketching the extremes of the B5 universe’s unique elements in surprising detail, from the depressingly mundane horrors of anti-alien hate crimes and union busting to the startling implication six episodes in that psychic powers can manifest in such a way that they will cause a human being to surpass their physical form and become something akin to a God. In this same episode, we learn that the galaxy is full of “bermuda triangles”—places where people have incomprehensible encounters and, sometimes, disappear.
“There are things in the Universe billions of years older than either of our races,” explains Ambassador G’kar—until this point, presented as a villain, soon proved to be a Cassandra. “They are vast, timeless, and if they are aware of us at all, it is as little more than ants and we have as much chance of communicating with them as an ant has with us.”
The most tense conflict we experience in the episode before this is watching the station’s Commander try to save face coming up with a demonstration of Earth’s religious traditions for a cultural exchange festival while melodramatically distracted by an old girlfriend. It’s this patient see-saw between present-day material conflicts and universe-shattering metaphysical overtones that allow the show’s various foreshadowing elements to pile up almost unnoticed, so that when the first major shake up happens at the end of Season 1 it feels like a genuine gut-punch.
Amid a tangle of diverging plotlines involving almost every major character on the show, the B5 staff discover signs of an assassination plot within Earth’s Government. They scramble to decode where this evidence leads in a race against the clock that they ultimately lose—by a shockingly wide margin. By the time anyone found indication of foul-play, it was already too late to stop the the gears from turning. “The avalanche has begun,” warns the enigmatic Ambassador Kosh, representative of a species so ancient and advanced that he possesses no corporeal form, “it’s too late for the pebbles to vote”. He’s talking about bigger, older things than the political machinations of Earth-bound xenophobes, but the characters aren’t far enough away from the frame to see the entire picture yet. Earth welcomes the New Year with a sinister change in regime and the protagonists are left empty handed, disbelieved, and alone in the night.
At the time, this episode was shocking because it broke the rules set up by Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show that JMS was actively and obviously reacting against. In the 1990s, heroes didn’t fail to the extreme degree that Babylon 5’s protagonists do in that first season finale. The twist remains shocking even now because it still breaks the rules set up by its own premise; an episodic story where the world doesn’t get reset at the end of each episode. And the show continues its mostly episodic pace afterwards, so that the next paradigm shift hits just as hard. And the next one, and the next one, until the entire galaxy is on the brink of collapse.
This structure is so effective that even the plot twists and status quo shifts which are poorly foreshadowed, or ill-explained, or over-explained feel natural and world-shaking because Babylon 5’s pace always gives you time to breathe, and the world is so believably lived in, that any crisis that strikes it feels immeasurably more impactful than damage wrought onto a world that we’re meant to understand changes from the get go. By the time the show starts hurtling along a set of truly serialized arcs in Season 4 there’s a feeling that anything could happen. It still feels fresh today, maybe even fresher than it did in the 1990s simply because very few people are making shows like this anymore. Modern serialized television asks you to be a voyeur to the chaos, to consume it as fast as possible, or to consume it as a communal project. You and your friends waiting for the next big bombshell and treating everything between like treading water. A show paced like Babylon 5 asks you to come live in those in-between moments. It wants you to watch the chaos from inside the world and to stick with it during the long silences.
And it is very easy to inhabit those silences. Babylon 5 has a very particular kind of tonal variety that makes the world inviting—an appealing balance of drama and playfulness. A lot has been said about the show’s occasionally regrettable sense of humour, and there are certainly some epic clunkers in almost every script (the less said about a certain Season 3 episode that effectuates a kooky, sitcom-esque tone while discussing ethnic cleansing the better), but I find myself laughing along with Babylon 5 more often than not. A lot of the humour is character derived, and I love the characters. I really do—I love the contrast between their realistic flaws and depressing personal lives and the cheesy, stage-play poeticism of the dialogue. I know more about the lives of Babylon 5’s senior staff than I know about any Starfleet Officer. They’re all a mess of workaholism, addictions, failed relationships, PTSD, broken paternal bonds—except for shining paragon of All-American Gee Whiz’ism, John Sheridan, who is broken down piece by piece during a war that reveals him to be a ruthless, “means justify the ends”-style General. He grows a beard while being tortured by his own government and never shaves it off. No one’s arc is static. No character ends where they begin. Most characters shed their comfortable roles for new directions on a season by season basis. B5 is a show that flourishes upon rewatch, largely because it’s very satisfying to start over again with all these characters knowing that most of them end up so, so far away from where they begin, in both edifying and tragic ways.
Babylon 5 is a station full of weirdos and failures. It attracts alien ambassadors with lists of sins ten miles long, disgraced nobles that no one else wants, military officers desperate to either escape their demons or build their careers on their own terms, rejecting the path laid out for them by mentors and patriarchs. It’s the staging point of a successful rebellion, the nucleus of several catastrophically failed peace treaties. It bears witness to the extinction of an entire species and the destruction of the key to immortality. Some dark shit goes down in this show, yet the unflagging ’90s-style optimism and local-theater-esque presentation keeps it from dipping into the kind of “gritty” grim-ness that defined TV spec fiction in the post 9/11 era. And oh, don’t get me wrong. I am a big fan of grimdarkness. I don’t inherently reject it the way a lot of people (understandably) have in the last few years, but I do reject the idea that it’s embarrassing for fantasy to be, well… fanciful. Babylon 5 is shamelessly fanciful.
I’ve been very tongue in cheek about the quality of B5’s writing up until this point, but there are lines in this show that have stuck with me for years. I can quote many of them off the top of my head, and I bet every fan of the show can sing along at home:
My shoes are too tight, and I’ve forgotten how to dance.
* * *
Understanding is a three edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth.
* * *
The wheel turns, does it not?
* * *
All life is transitory, a dream… if I don’t see you again here, I will see you, in a little while, in a place where no shadows fall.
* * *
It’s all a game—a paper fantasy of names and borders.
* * *
I have seen what power does, and I have seen what power costs. The one is never equal to the other.
* * *
I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them?
* * *
There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. Then you accept it or you kill yourself or you stop looking into mirrors.
* * *
Who are you?
What do you want?
Do you have anything worth living for?
* * *
Will you lay down your life—not for millions, not for glory, not for fame—but for one person, in the dark, where no one will ever know or see?
I’ve talked a lot about politics in this essay, but no piece of art can truly endure solely on what it means in the substantive, theoretical sense. It’s exhilarating to read or watch or play something that was truly prophetic, however those stories are far and few between. Storytellers can’t predict the future, they can only survive it. The further away from the original context of a work we get, the more its ephemeral aspects begin to matter over its literal ones. And the aspect that leaves the deepest impression in the sands of time is always how something feels.
Babylon 5 remains emotionally evocative in all the places it has become perhaps thematically irrelevant: in the jagged edges of the sets, the stumbling waltz of its plot threads, the lush indulgence of its dialogue, the patchwork aspects held together by glue and determination, as imperfect and brimming with colourful quirks as its most beloved characters. My favourite scenes in the show are the little things: Ivanova’s illegal coffee-plant, Londo and Vir singing Centauri opera together in the station’s hallways, Marcus regailing a beleaguered Doctor Franklin with his nerdy headcanons about which characters in Le Morte d’Arthur he thinks the B5 crew are most like, Delenn and Sheridan telling each other quiet, ordinary anecdotes about their very different childhoods. Babylon 5 is a story that is truly greater than the sum of its parts. Modern plot-driven shows tend to do one thing, and do it very well. Babylon 5 does a little bit of everything: mostly okay, sometimes horribly, and occasionally with an earnest beauty that is almost transcendent.
I think the value of Babylon 5, and indeed its entire thesis statement, is best summed by Ambassador Delenn’s sage invocation of Carl Sagan. She says:
“I will tell you a great secret… the molecules of your body are the same molecules that make up this station , and the nebula outside, that burn inside the stars themselves. We are starstuff. We are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out.”
Everything is interconnected, the ugly and the beautiful, our triumphs and our mistakes. Our best work and our worst. It’s only when we embrace both that we can leave behind something worth remembering.
I believe that when we leave a place, part of it goes with us and part of us remains […] when it is quiet, just listen […] you will hear the echoes of all our conversations, every thought and word we’ve exchanged. Long after we are gone our voices will linger in these walls…
Jennifer Giesbrecht is a native of Halifax, Nova Scotia where she earned an undergraduate degree in History, spent her formative years as a professional street performer, and developed a deep and reverent respect for the ocean. She currently works as a game writer for What Pumpkin Studios. In 2013 she attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop. Her work has appeared in Nightmare Magazine, XIII: ‘Stories of Resurrection’, Apex, and Imaginarium: The Best of Canadian Speculative Fiction. She lives in a quaint, historic neighbourhood with two of her best friends and five cats. The Monster of Elendhaven is her first book.
[1]The oft mentioned but never elaborated upon destruction of San Diego always struck me as a hilarious bit of world building. Why San Diego? What’s in San Diego? Were they nuking Comic-con????
[2]For example, the unstable ancillary cast that saw Straczynski playing musical chairs with narrative roles behind the scenes for over half the series, including the departure of the show’s leading man at the end of Season 1. And did I mention Warner Bros. losing virtually all of B5’s effects shots? Making a Hi-Def—or even normal def—version of the show a pipe dream.
1: The oft mentioned but never elaborated upon destruction of San Diego always struck me as a hilarious bit of world building. Why San Diego? What’s in San Diego?
Much of the United States Pacific Fleet is based out of San Diego. Assuming that is still the case in the 22nd century (or whenever the nuking of San Diego occurred in the B5 timeline) then San Diego would be a very logical target for any nation or terrorist group that wanted to reduce the United States’s ability to effectively project military power into the Pacific.
JMS was mugged there once and he holds a grudge.
And the spaceships (mostly) obeyed the laws of physics during their battles! I know, this seems pedantic, but the first time I saw a Starfury flip around and fire at a pursuer while maintaining its course and speed it changed the way I viewed all other sci-fi shows.
One of my favorite character arcs was that of Vir Cotto, the Centauri Ambassador’s Aide. From comic relief (almost a SF version of Flounder in Animal House) to Centauri Emperor. And along the way his interaction with the representative of the Shadows. Great character.
I have the entire run on DVD. I wish the effects shots could be recreated so that it could be remastered for HD.
Babylon 5 is one of my favourite series of all time, and is a frequent bit of SF comfort food for rewatches, and that’s largely because it succeeds at something too many stories today fail to recognize the importance of: resolution. What happened in the 24 hours of his life Sinclair can’t remember? Why did the Minbari surrender at the Battle of the Line? Who are the Vorlons, and what do the Shadows want? What happened to the crew of the Icarus? B5 actually has answers to these questions and gives them to the audience in a reasonable timeframe rather than stretching them out interminably, something almost unheard of in this post-Lost era of storytelling. It also helps ensure that, for the most part, all of the major story arcs and plot threads come together in a cohesive and satisfying manner. In an era when Game of Thrones completely collapses at the finish line simply because the showrunners were feeling lazy, when Dragon Age: Inquisition offers nothing but anticlimaxes and condescending lectures, and when the people behind the new Star Wars films are too busy offering empty mystery box plots and “subverting your expectations” to actually, you know, tell an engaging and well-crafted story, it’s quite refreshing.
JMS is insistent that WB have a complete copy of the episodes on film, complete with the VFX (printed frame-by-frame onto the film). While it’s all in 4:3, there’s no reason these couldn’t be scanned for an HD quality version (or at least far higher than the current DVD or online versions). Unfortunately, there’s continuous push-back on doing anything further with the property from senior WB execs.
Very definitely one of my most favorite SciFi shows ever. Unfortunately Amazon over here will only offer the very very awful German dub for streaming, so I’ll have to dig for my DVD box sets for when I want to re-watch.
When I first watched it it was the German dub and I used to absolutely loathe Delenn because of the whiny voice of her German voice actress that turned her into a completely different character. My mind was blown when I first heard the original voice, accent and all.
I think a re-watch is in order. After I’m done re-watching Stargate SG1 in it’s entirety, that is, because that’s where I’m at.
And while we’re quoting:
“Who am I? I am Susan Ivanova. Commander. Daughter of Andrei and Sophie Ivanov. I am the right hand of vengeance, and the boot that is going to kick your sorry ass all the way back to Earth, sweetheart! I am Death Incarnate, and the last living thing that you are ever going to see. God sent me.”
I can see echos of B5 in The Expanse. The conflict between Earth, Mars, and the Belt. Something big and dangerous lurking in the Cosmos.
One of my all time sci-fi series ever…..!!
Ah B5, I loved it when it first came out (with the exception of the final season which I thought both unecessary and more uneven than any of the others). I have the entire series on DVD and keep meaning to re-watch it, but I’m afraid my love for it will crumble in the face of the admittedly awkward (and sometimes downright bad, or at least amateur) parts you mention, but maybe I just need to be willing to view it from a different lense.
The show succeeded in doing what good scifi should but to rarely these days does do best. It filled me with a sense of awe and wonder. The twists and turns were both epic and very personal. Yes it can definitely be very, very bad at times but the good bits are some of the best ever shown on television.
As I noted elsewhere, we got warned some time ago about a maniac with an unusual haircut and terrible taste in interior decoration who allied himself with dark forces in order to Make Centauri Great Again, and yet here we are.
The other way to look at B5 is that it’s The Twilight Zone with a narrative. There are more morality stories there than you can shake a stick at, often with a very Serling-esque ironic consequence.
And my favorite quote is from (verb-challenged) Zathras: “Time infinite, space infinite… this wrong tool.”
The oft mentioned but never elaborated upon destruction of San Diego always struck me as a hilarious bit of world building. Why San Diego? What’s in San Diego?
As noted: a major naval base on the Pacific, and a huge amount of supporting military industry. It’s the American Hiroshima.
“Ah, arrogance and stupidity all in the same package…how efficient of you!”
Londo Mollari
Slow clap. As a watcher back in the ’90s I agree with most of your thoughts. Thanks for sharing
Perfect summary of the pros and cons of this great series!
The Shadow Wars story arc was the best and most brilliant TV of that period and beyond. What happened after, not so much. The last season was a disaster because of things happening behind the scenes in productions which destroyed storylines and characters. What they did to Lennier (Billy Mumy) was beyond horrible, for example.
If you want an answer to Star Trek look to Blake’s 7 instead.
This was, in my eyes, ultimately a failure. Lots of eye candy and even more one liners and bon mots but the substance was missing in the end for me. The story came out hollow and naive at it’s best moments and where there was something like what you’re pointing to about the “end of history” and the rest of that tommyrot, it was by accident not intention.
Look back to the firsts and give it credit for them. But when I try to watch it now? Aside from those silly moments like Susan Ivanova comically calling herself the hand of god, there is little that can even catch one’s passing fancy much less really hold your attention.
IIRC, the show was planned for 5 seasons and when it was cancelled JMS had enough time to fit the major plot points of the 5th season into the 4th, and then it was unexpectedly given a fifth season which then had to be filled with new stuff, which is why it doesn’t work quite as well.
I’ll just say from the beginning that this essay made my day. I loved it and thank you Jennifer! Please advocate yourself for a B5 rewatch series!
This show is one of my favorites. I love a serialized show done right. My first exposure to it was Saturday mornings as a kid watching Sonic the Hedgehog. It was just getting into it’s prime when it swtiched and went to a super cheap, 2 vignette per 30 min episode format. I was so disappointed and I’ll never get that back. I learned much much later, and on this site coincidentally, that JMS was a writer for that serialized portion of Sonic the Hedgehog. I was both surprised and not surprised, he does awesome stuff. By then I’d consumed B5 a number of times. I’ve never seen the long game played out so perfectly. There’s things in season 1 that don’t come back until season 4. Nothing is throw away. I love it dearly.
Best serialized shows:
Babylon 5
Reboot
Battlestar Galactica (2000s version)
My favorite Babylon 5 quote was when Delenn goes full badass and shows up with the White Star and Minbari fleet to protect the station from Earthforce after they ceceed (apologies if I misquote it a bit):
“One man has faced a Minbari fleet and survived. He is behind me. YOU are in front of me.”
Goosebumps!
Well, this made me tear up.
Everything you said and a bit more: the acting. The acting is so unbelievably tremendous – Londo and G’Kar’s story arcs alone – ugh. Some of the finest acting in tv, tbh, in any year.
Time for a re-watch, methinks.
I agree with this article, and I still want something new in this universe. Maybe not a reboot or retelling, but something else. It’s one of my favorite SFF shows
Who is Jason Carter? Well, at the time, he was my fantasy casting for Sirius Black.
B5 is my favourite show of all time!! I watched them as they came out, bought the video cassettes one by one and then the DVD’s.It truly effective my life as I became involved with the new on line fandom and had some great times with them at events and shows or just down the pub.
And I still cry whenever I watch the last episode!
No other show effected me as much and all subsequent shows are held up to it and in most cases found wanting (well perhaps except the Expanse but they don’t have so many aliens). It is my touchstone and it realised this when I could not see what all the fuss was about GoT and Avengers Endgame. Others had invested so much time in these shows whereas I had not so they mean so much to them at the end where as all I can think of is “meh”. We all have a show that touches us and I am just glad mine was B5.
Still probably my all-time fave TV show, and the standard by which I judge attempts at arc-based storytelling. (Not to mention the final season being a cautionary tale of how executive meddling can damage even the best-laid plans.) It is also a good example of how a story that purports to be about the future always reflects the culture and times during which it was made.
This essay is an excellent summary overall, although I find the critique of political naïveté a bit odd, especially since the more likely explanation arises just a few paragraphs later: JMS frequently favored narrative clarity over nuance. I recall that one of the best aspects of watching the show during its initial run was the ability to read JMS commentary on his creative choices in near real-time; it was fascinating to see not just the story unfold, but to learn about the creative process itself.
I do hope the rumors are true that WB has some footage in a vault somewhere that would allow them to remaster the episodes. It’s kind of a problem when it is easier to twiddle my TV settings to make my Rocky & Bullwinkle DVDs look better than those for B5. But even with the mediocre DVD transfer, we’re long overdue for someone at Tor.com to conduct a re-watch…
@1, @14: No, really, @2 is correct! JMS was asked about it and explicitly stated that the picked San Diego in response to his real-world mugging there. Any further symbolism is completely in the mind of the viewer. ;-)
I’m not sure which episode I cry more at: the season 5 finale or the season 4 finale. Yes, the final end is very cathartic, but there’s also that conversation Sheridan and Delenn are having at the end of season 4.
Sheridan: …and I was wondering if they will remember us in hundred years from now or a thousand. And I figure probably not.
Delenn: But it does not matter. We did what we did because it was right and not to be remembered. And history will attend to itself. It always does.
Oh, and one other quote that always makes me misty-eyed:
“Understand that I can never forgive your people for what they did to my world. My people can never forgive your people. But I can forgive you.”
I suppose it’s a good thing he wasn’t mugged in Des Moines.
Or, come to that, Slough.
Speaking of resolutions, the head on a pike was such a lovely moment.
Though I remember there are still gaps in the story and I’m not sure if it’s because I missed something or because it never got resolved for one reason or another.
As was mentioned earlier, JMS is very clear that it would take almost no money or effort to provide a perfectly rendered special effects. Problem is that the show was done by PTEN, the primetime entertainment network, which was WB’s underground spin off cable effort. Warner Bros. Execs always hated them and held a grudge – according to JMS the Warner executives want to keep everything done by PTEN deeply buried forever. Until those executives die, Warner Bros. will not lift a finger to do anything to make Babylon 5 better, including providing hi def scans of the original film. As for nuking San Diego, as someone else pointed out, JMS was mugged on the streets of San Diego and he definitely holds a grudge.
“To absent friends, in memory still bright.”
I always liked, never loved, having said that, i’d like to rewatch on reruns![.](//s04.flagcounter.com/mini/Jkzv/bg_FFFFFF/txt_DEDEDE/border_FFFFFF/flags_0/" width="1"/>)
I know I’ll be ignored and/or slammed for this but I find B5 probably the most overrated piece of entertainment ever created. Everything about it is just so… bad. The effects, the sets, the acting.
I read stories like this and I’m wondering if maybe JMS added some sort of subliminal messaging that I’m immune to that makes people actually like this slop.
I’ve thought that maybe since the one time I could actually make it through the whole series was when I was first bed bound due to my back for an extended period. Maybe the pain and depression clouded my judgement. Then I load up the first episode again, try to force myself to watch it but only make it through 10 minutes.
I guess the writing isn’t THAT bad but everything else…ugh.
You mentioned the comparison between the Narn-Centauri conflict and the Bajoran-Cardassian Conflict, but what you seem to fail to realize is that Babylon 5 started as a pitch to the Paramount executives for a Star Trek TNG spin off set on a station called Babylon 5. Originally, the station was to have a Vulcan, a Klingon, a Romulan, and a Human ambassador, with the Q sending one of their own and the big bads being the Borg, not the Shadows. It’s important to remember that the Klingons had recently emerged in TNG from a period under the dominion of the Romulans.
Paramount turned JMS down, stating that the idea of a stationbound, highly political Star Trek Spin Off wasn’t very doable (something they reversed themselves on in short order, but decided to go with the newly created Cardassians and Bajorans instead of Romulans and Klingons). In the time Paramount went from cold to hot on the subject, JMS revamped his idea to drop all Star Trek references, rebuilt his universe to stand on its own, and went shopping for funding.
If that sounds improbably, I got that informations straight from JMS personally, as he and my father were friends.
G’kar to Garibaldi “One of your household gods”.
Daffy duck.
In “A Late Delivery From Avalon”, G’Kar was a resistance leader not an ambassador.
Rim, not ring.
That is the 2762 section of “Deconstruction of Falling Stars” where the fascism and nuclear war on Earth happens, so 500 years and just the human home world. Humans living on Earth’s colonies and on independent human settled worlds are unaffected who aid in covert reconstruction. In the Million year hence segment, unknown forces are turning Sol nova but we have already evacuated Earth and relocated to the new human homeworld.
There are a few other typos and inaccuracies too.
@35 That is bullshit which has been debunked so many times over by this point.
A quick note about why Commander Sinclair left after season 1: the actor’s real life mental health problems suddenly started to get worse (underlined points by me). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_O%27Hare
So yeah, under these circumstances, his departure is like 100% understandable.
I have to say reading this article has broughtm some relief and despair at remembering Babylon 5. When you look at when the show was made, it was at the time just after the USA had won the cold war and was in a honey filled dream. What this show did was to take a look at the future and say what if things don’t get solved magically and thatmade me fall in love with this show.
To dream is to see a world without limits but to dream a story where the characters are flawed and and realistic is something else entirely. Babylon 5 made that possible whilst also keeping its 90’s quirkyness.
Even though the story has it’s moments where it can be strange and the camera work amateurish at times, the show always kept going and the failures of other characters would realistically resound throughout the story without becoming a constant focal point.
A show like Babylon 5 only comes only like gold snowflakes within a hot summers day. The imperfections of it make the show ever more endearing. added as well I want to say to the author of the aritcle that you have produced a decent piece of work.
B5 is my favorite TV show. It had a scope and character development that is unmatched to this day. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, or wants to rewatch, it is streaming free on Amazon Prime. It’s well worth the time, IMHO.
@@.-@
“What do I want, Mr Morden? I’d like to live just long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next 10 generations that some favors come with too high a price. I want to look up into your lifeless eyes and wave… like this.”
I just watched B5 for the first time (20 years late to the party). I’d already heard most of the major plot points and spoilers and the like, because pretty much everyone I know loves it (and they were entertained by my periodic live tweeting). Plus, you know, tumblr gifsets.
As far as the politics goes, watching the rise of a fascist, xenophobic regime from my couch in the US in 2019 was not a particularly comfortable experience. A lot of it felt all too real and plausible.
The CGI and sets were painfully 90s, like BabCom ran on Windows 3.1 (or 95 at the latest). That isn’t necessarily a bad thing – I was in HS and college in the 90s and have a lot of nostalgia for some of it, though the episode sponsored by Zima sure is a thing that exists… A lot of the acting, especially in S1, was extreme amateur hour, mostly the visitor-of-the-week plots, but there was enough substance overall to keep me entertained. Then the plot kicked into gear and wooo boy.
Anyway, I enjoyed it and would watch it again.
The Braving Babylon 5 podcast is a very good podcast, involving commentary from a gentleman who is watching the series for the first time. I highly recommend it.
When I first started watching Babylon 5, I was not that impressed. Things turned around with me with an episode about an earlier Babylon station. The Shadow War climax was so much better than Game of Thrones’ zombie one!
18. JMS’s Twiter feed answered this last week (I believe) – when Bill Mumy approached him about Lennir being in love with Delen JMS asked him “Are you sure?”, because Lancelot’s story NEVER ends well (by all accounts he was constantly using the actors performances and feedback to tweek the characters and add to his own lexicons of where they could go, as well as given everyone multiple potential exit points from the narrative if circumstances necessitate it).
God’s I adore this show though. Not perfect but it did so much that no other shows were really trying.
The absolute best call-back ever. This quote from Season 2, paid in full in Season 4
Morden:
What do you want?
Vir Cotto:
I’d like to live just long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors come with too high a price. I would look up at your lifeless eyes and wave like this. [gives a mockingly cheerful finger waggle] Can you and your associates arrange this for me, Mr. Morden?
I rewatched it last year. Much of it still holds up well, but I have to say, if you are going to rewatch it, know going in that the first season is pretty bad in places.
Dont give up during the first season and decide it wasn’t as good as you remembered. Stick with it. Starting in the second season it gets much better.
@45 Even in granting that wish, his death, it made things worse; sparking the whole Fall of Centauri Prime/revenge of the Drahk thing. Proof that no request of the devil, no matter how satisfying or innocuous, can turn out well. The only good answer is no answer. No-Platform the Devils!
Long time lurker, first time poster. Oh Babylon 5! Fond memories watching it on German TV back in the day. It truly is one of the best SF series ever, but the change from 4:3 to 16:9 aspect ratio for modern television sets has not done the show any favors. I bought some episodes on iTunes and the visuals are appaling. Really waiting for a good quality transfer for a proper rewatch.
Great essay, thanks for that. And since many are leaving quotes, this one by the immortal being Lorien has always stuck with me:
“To live on as we have is to leave behind joy, and love, and companionship, because we know it to be transitory, of the moment. We know it will turn to ash. Only those whose lives are brief can imagine that love is eternal. You should embrace that remarkable illusion. It may be the greatest gift your race has ever received.”
@21:
To close it, and because Mira Furlan bit these words out like they would force the enemy to move all by themselves, “If you value your lives, be somewhere else!”
@36:
“Yeah, he’s… kind of a god of frustration.”
The monk’s insistence that “Faith and reason are the shoes on our feet” has become one of my by-words. Things like the commonality of Swedish meatballs in galactic cuisines (the Narns called it flarn) was part of the gentle surrealism that endeared me to the show as well. B5 fandom was the last online fandom I felt significantly at home with, too. I tried with Buffy/Angel and drifted off with darkly tinged memories. B5 fandom remains warm and shining in my mind, even though I know we had our own crap to shovel (oh, the arguments over Ivanova’s bisexuality and how it was presented alone…).
I will also agree heartily that it had flaws. Some of them dire, if only in a single episode to never appear again. I remember writing a review of one season five episode that felt way too much like JMS was still writing for a 70s police procedural, down to a moment I can summarize as, “but you can’t have the blood do that, Joe, space stations aren’t going to allow leaks in the interior walls unless you WANT people to die in a hull breach.”
And he never read that review of mine, but I felt like he might take it politely if nothing else. Another mark of that show’s strengths was JMS’ sheer availability. He was on Usenet. He’d answer email. As a creator, he was right there. His thinking and way of doing had an immediacy that was otherwise lacking back then. A precursor to how you can get to dozens of authors with a Twitter account and a minimum of effort nowadays.
Thank you so much for the trip down memory lane. That show had much to love about it, warts and all. You reminded me and many of us so well of that.
A treat to read, and you did the show justice. Thanks!
I enjoyed the first four seasons, though I missed many episodes. Then it moved to a channel I couldn’t access for season 5 and I reluctantly had to let it go. Thanks for reminding me of unfinished business!
The fifth season was made on an absolute shoestring compared to the rest of the series. TNT saved it but they slashed the budget by around a quarter, forcing them to shoot for one less day per episode and also forcing almost the entire cast to take significant pay cuts (Claudia Christian was instrumental in convincing the other actors to do so, and one of the reasons she quit is that she wasn’t given promised time off to go shoot a movie). You can tell by the quality of the guest stars and the almost blanket use of existing sets that the fifth season was hugely compromised monetarily.
@8: Daniel Abraham is a huge fan of Babylon 5, although that’s more obvious (oddly) in his fantasy series The Dagger and the Coin, which has a very Londo-esque protagonist.
@19: Blake’s 7 was a huge influence on Babylon 5 and shares a lot of DNA with it (excellent and excruciating dialogue, sometimes in the same scene; a very theatrical presentation at odds with modern “realistic” TV; very low budget; dubious costumes, sets and effects; an unusual level of serialisation for the time), but it is a huge stretch to say that Blake’s 7 is the better series.
@30: The show resolved almost all of its storylines in the show itself or a series of novels that came out later on, usually addressing things fans were curious about but Straczynski felt would be incongruous to bring up again (such as the fate of Catherine Sakai, or why Centauri Prime is on fire again 17 years in the future). The only big thing they’ve never resolved is the fate of Lennier.
@35: I’m assuming that’s an attempt at satire, because every single word of that is completely untrue.
@48: I assume you mean the CGI situation? The show was itself shot and filmed in and for widescreen, one of the first network TV shows (if not the first) to do so. The only problem was that Warner Brothers refused to buy the CG department a widescreen reference monitor, so they rendered everything in 4:3, so for the widescreen version of the show they had to crop every CG scene, which was and still is ridiculous.
@34 (Uncle Pickle), I can understand your reasoning. Babylon 5 isn’t for everyone, I’m sure. Personally, I love it, but I know that people’s tastes do vary widely. I can’t stand football, for example, and am mystified why it seems the entire country shuts down when the Superbowl is playing. What exactly are they slipping into those beers? Etc.
I am wondering, though, why you felt the need to come to this article about a show you hate, scroll down to the comments, and then leave a comment about something you can’t stand. I’m sure it would have save you some time (and some blood pressure) to simply skip over the article instead. Why do you torture yourself this way?
One of the greatest shows I ever watched i had to go back and binge watch it again….I just hate the way they ended the series. Andromeda is a great series as well….just hated the way they ended it and the last season dragged a little. Battlestar Galactica is a good series too. All the Stargates are great but they arent offered on Netflix or Prime anymore.
@53:
Sorry, I wasn’t aware that this site didn’t allow comments from dissenting voices. I was actually hoping there would finally be something said about the show here that became that first spark that could possibly lead me to enjoying the show. Now that I know your aren’t capable of providing that spark I suppose I will go away. Thank you for making me feel so welcome.
PS Thanks for worrying about my blood pressure. It’s fine BTW.
@53, 55 Disagreeing with an article is definitely allowed here, as long as it’s done in a respectful way and in accordance with our moderation policy.
I just finished rewatching season 5 a few weeks ago. I still like the show overall quite a bit, although I could’ve done without the hippie telepaths in S5. I remember watching S1 (back in the first airing), getting to that episode near the end of the season, and having an almost audible CLICK as all of the hints and seemingly random references suddenly fell into place and the larger picture began to appear.
Time for the movie collection now. Wow, Lyta Alexander was so very, very young …
JMS wasn’t just mugged in San Diego. He was stabbed and came very, very close to dying. Like blood pressure of 0 close. “The Long Night of Londo Mollari” was partly based on that. He also spent some time in a cult there. I can’t really blame him for blowing up the city.
The show also benefits from rewatching, when you can see all the pieces falling into place. There are seeming throwaway lines in one season that suddenly become hugely important 2 or 3 years later. I’d love to see a rewatch here. Mark Oshiro recently finished an unspoiled watch, but being able to discuss spoilers would be interesting.
This flip flops with Farscape as my favorite SF show of my youth, with TNG in third. Severed Dreams is my favorite episode of the three series noted. The effects can get dodgy when they integrated live action with CGI, but I still stand that the pure CGI space shots hold up well today. Severed Dreams is a testament to that. Hiroshi ramming the earth gov ship while in flames is spectacular.
One of my favorite exchanges from the show:
I recently rewatched the entire series with my 13 year old son, and he was enthralled. He loved how G’Kar went from the Bad Guy to the Good Guy, how Londo went from sad silly to sad doomed, enjoyed Garabaldi, loved Ivanova, and just totally invested in the story and how things were going to turn out.
I think the show still works, still has something to say, and can capture audience attention even today.
That is not quite true. They have written dialogue telling us that the Federation, or at least Earth, is a glorious Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism paradise. What they have not done is write stories that show how that glorious FALSC paradise actually works. Which rather encourages that suspicion that they do not know how it works. And makes the paradise seem less real.
The Earth of B5 seems more real, simply because we see more of how it, and its people, tick.
Excellent article. Babylon 5 might be my all time favorite show, exactly because what it does well and what it doesn’t. Between the (probable) depiction of humanity’s future, to the characters themselves, Londo and G’Kar are one of the finest adversarial scifi pairings I can think of. Londo’s descent into darkness just breaks my heart every time, especially when he’s watching the bombardment of Narn. I absolutely love the concept of truly ancient races, it wasn’t something I really remember seeing before, but had always thought made sense. Even the somewhat cheap looking sets add to a certain amount of charm for me, and all of the space battles are fantastic, even with the dated CGI, they look decent. I also can’t leave out Christopher Franke and the amazing music he composed for the show. Another site had compiled episodes that were “required” watching, and I had to disagree with their list, this is a series that needs to have every episode watched, and then watched through again to truly appreciate all the set up and foreshadowing of things to come, and even the “smaller” more stand alone episodes give character development that you just don’t seem to see today. Hopefully with this streaming on Amazon Prime, it can reach a new audience who can appreciate it for the masterpiece that it is.
And, yeah, Season 5 was rough. Some of that was the shenanigans from the studio about waiting until the last minute to renew that forced JMS to “conclude” the entire story at the end of Season 4. But it was still his responsibility to create quality storylines which for the first part of the season he mostly failed at. There are still some good things in there … but the whole Byron arc …. yeesh, not very good.
It got better when they started focusing more on Londo’s ascension to the throne and of course the finale is pitch perfect.
I bloody love this show, I loved it from the first episode,
but the moment for me, the moment that completely blew my mind was in the Season 2 episode “in the Shadow of Z’ha’dum” Sheridan has Mr Morden locked in a cell, and Delenn takes John to her quarters and tells him about the first ones.. “beings millions of years older than either of their races. Some moved on, but not all. A few remain, waiting until they’re needed, when the shadows come again.”
She tells him about the last great war, and then how the Shadows began to return 1000 years ago. “They were defeated by the few remaining First Ones and the Minbari and now there’s still one race of First Ones left”: then looks at Kosh..
made even better 2 seasons later when you find out how much crap the Vorlons were feeding the minbari and the other younger races.
@64: And then she tells Sheridan that he has to let Morden go. Shivers.
Sadly, I’ve never been able to rate B5 much above a B5 (which would be worse than an A1 or even a B4.) I thought there were brilliant moments and episodes in Seasons 2-4, but there are problems even there.
An example of an early episode. Just how was the David McCallum character able to smuggle the components of a nuclear bomb aboard the station, assembling it in a private room. The station is such a strategic political and tactical hotbed that they don’t put a monitor in there?
In the opening episode of Season 4, “Hour of the Wolf‘” we get the Claudia Christian character saying “You can’t sleep, and all you can see is the troubles and the problems and the ways that your life should’ve gone but didn’t. All you can hear is the sound of your own heart. I’ve been living in the hour of the wolf for seven days, Lyta. Seven days.”
The problem is that the Hour of the Wolf *is* a real thing, or at least myth. And JMS knew this. I have been the host of a sf/f radio show in NYC by that name since the early 70s. JMS was a semi-frequent guest on Mike Hodel’s program from the same network (but in LA), and after Mike’s untimely death, JMS was a frequent co-host with Harlan Ellison. When they didn’t show up (at least once a month) they played edited down versions of — you guessed it — Hour of the Wolf. The title for the radio show is taken from the title of a movie by Ingmar Bergman — Vargtimmen, in Swedish. The myth was ancient then. Google it, folks, and find the meaning. (Just ignore the hits that refer to B5.) Here’s a good one: http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/235825%7C0/Hour-of-the-Wolf.html#
Some years later when I met up with JMS at a con, he denied ever hearing of my show, (all I wanted was a non-confrontational interview) and brusquely moved past me and (I think) avoided me the rest of the con. Ellison (who knew me well) tried to change that, but no go. I think JMS was embarrassed.
My point is that JMS IMO wrote very quickly, trying to make deadlines, and certain things ended up being sloppy. This is but one example that I’m all too familiar with, and I think that a close, critical examination of the show may raise eyebrows as to how prescient it was, but how sloppily it was sometimes written. I suspect if he could reboot it (Netflix? Amazon? anony one reading this) he’d do a much better job today.
[Footnote: there is now a movie called “The Wolf Hour” which takes its name from the radio show, which took it from a movie. we’ve come full circle. http://filmthreat.com/reviews/the-wolf-hour/ ]
But yeah, let’s have a rewatch!
This is the first time I’ve read a review of B5 that really nailed the dichotomy between its greatness and terribleness. I was always intrigued by the long story-arc, but the dialog and individual episodes were such a let-down.
At the time I wondered if JMS was just stretching himself too thin by essentially doing all the writing himself. But now it seems like those seasons are more or less regarded as better than the stuff done with an actual writing staff.
I loved the way that B5 felt lived in and connected to a real past, mostly because they could reference Warner Brothers cartoons versus Star Trek’s more high brow bent when it references any popular culture.
Also, allow this former 90’s teen girl a moment to say “Oh my god, Marcus Cole.”
B5 is one of my all time favorite shows warts and all. I have all the DVD’s and the movies and the spin offs. I’ve read all the tie-in novels. I just started re-watching it last month. I just want someone to explain in the name of the Maker how do they cure the stupid plague?. Crusade never gets to complete it’s mission and the tie-in novels say that it happens but they never say how it’s done. It’s unfinished . I WANT TO KNOW!
Wonderful essay! As a teen in 90s, I remember being at the same time enthralled by B5’s worldbuilding and repulsed by its political grimdarkness. I wanted so much for things to go well! At first I would think like, “Ow, I’d love to be on the Psi Corps!” But it felt more real in its downturns… I gave up. Never finished it. But you gave me plenty of reasons now for watching it again.
B5 is probably my favourite TV series ever. So many characters and actors are fantastic (G’Kar, Ivanova and Marcus are my favourites, and Peter Jurasik does an amazing job of making me hate Londo while still being unable to not find some of his comments funny), there’s a lot of thoughtful themes, and there’s a great series arc (including Season 5! – especially the parts with G’Kar and Londo). And a lot of fantastic lines – funny ones, inspirational ones, and poignant ones.
At the same time, there’s also some very bad acting (especially in Season 1 and from guest actors), some incredible blatant and heavyhanded use of themes and references, and some really bad dialogue.
Taken all together, it still manages to be an excellent show.
What struck me on my last re-watch was the arc portrayed by, of all people, Jeff Conway. From security guard to Night Watch recruit to Man with Conflicting Loyalties, to redeemed (albeit minor) hero. Just so much goodness in this show.
I so agree with all of this!!!
I do love this show. One thing I noticed last time I watched it was that B5 was clearly in the infancy of having actors react to CGI. Star Trek did this really well and made it look easy, but it isn’t easy when the director tells you “you are looking at a scary thing which the visual effects team hasn’t drawn yet, so, you know, work with that.” Liam Neeson in TPM had the same issue.
I love B5 unreservedly. Being on usenet during its broadcast was a treat. I was one of the moderators of rastb5.m I’m still friends with people I met on the newsgroup. The cast and crew did an amazing job with the resources and time they were given.
I don’t quite forgive Joe for Grey 17 is Missing though.
@66. jfreund: Not sure I’m seeing the problem here. Ivanova simply turns “hour of the wolf” into an extended metaphor.
Are you taking offense that JMS didn’t acknowledge the existence of your show?
Regarding the influence of B5, one detail is tickling my memory. I seem to remember another show having a Zathras-like character, but I can’t recall the show or character. Doctor Who maybe? One of the Treks?
Still one of my favorite shows of all time. Coincidentally just finished (yet another) rewatch.
So many good scenes, so many… not so good.
But when you have scenes like G’kar’s “what is truth, and what is God?” those easily overshadow the bad. Doubly so when you realize what his character started out as and what he has become.
I’m glad B5 is starting to get the recognition it deserves. An excellent article that sums it up perfectly. In my world B5 is easily the best sci fi show ever. I own the series on DVD and I never miss a year revisiting my old friends.
The thing that made me forgive Sheridan was an anecdote to the effect that that Bruce Boxleitner, after not seeing the show for some years, watched an episode at a con or something, turned to the person next to him, and said “Wait, did I really have that grin on my face for five seasons? Jesus! Why did nobody punch me?”
Goes a long way to excusing the grinning, in my book.
@66:
That’s not the only “huh?” part of the station’s design and operation. Consider the existence of the underclass in Downbelow, because B5’s open-port policy (Casablanca-ish) allows people to arrive without proof they can leave again. Or even, in a habitable volume five miles long (**), why don’t the ambassadors have offices separate from their sitting rooms?
Remember, this was the fifth attempt to build a diplomatic outpost, and it was a cut-down version built partially from leftover materials (*), done so only at the insistence of the non-Earth powers. Sinclair extols human persistence (“when something fails, we build it again, and again, and again”) but it’s easy to surmise that the appropriations committees in EarthGov left some bits out, either from fatigue, incompetence or malice (viz., a shift in authority over the decade of the project).
(*) Babylon 4 is much larger. It, and super-sized ships like the Cortez gatelayer, imply the Earth Alliance should have experience constructing comparably huge stations in Sol and elsewhere. But that’s an irrelevant bit of worldbuilding.
(**) As revealed by later comment from the CGI staff, “five miles of spinning metal” refers only to the rotating portion of the station. Overall, it’s eight miles.
I did do an extended rewatch of the show last year, with the goal of incorporating as much trivia and secondary information as possible, although I only made it to the end of Season 4. The thought of covering the considerably less-gripping Season 5 in the same level of detail threw me off.
I do plan to get back and finish it later this summer.
I have to say one of my favorite episodes of the entire series was “A View from the Gallery”. I just love the episode not being told from the view of the main characters, but “2 ordinary joes” and their perspective of everything that is going on. Their perspective and conversations were priceless. To me that was unique and storytelling at its finest. It has been done since but I had never seen before they did on B5…
@42 – Oh yeah, I’ve been watching it with my 17 year old and we got to S04E08 “The Illusion of Truth”. It made him so uncomfortable that he asked me a few times whether we had to watch it. And he drew a lot of parallels to current events. I told him the show was moving to a different kind of war. I definitely agree that it’s got a completely different feel now from when I watched it at his age, as it aired.
It is definitely my favorite sci-fi show, though, and its weaving of threads has always been an inspiration to me in my own storytelling.
One of the most interesting trivia bits about this show, from a storytelling aspect, was JMS’ use of “trapdoors” for every major character. He basically wrote in escape clauses for everyone in case he lost any of his cast, and had secondary replacements lined up conceptually. So when, for instance, they lost the doctor and telepath seen in the pilot, they were seamlessly replaced by new ones. Ditto Sinclair—> Sheridan, Ivonova—> Lochley, and so on.
A discussion of this technique can be seen here and I’ve just always found it to be an appropriately prescient tool for a show with as many behind-the-scenes issues as B5.
The article I linked also touches on all sorts of other nifty trivia bits as well.
I love this take on the show. It is basically how I feel about it, but could never really Express in words. It’s a beautiful mess. The Londo and G’kar dynamic is the highlight of the show for me.
Obligatory pedantic fan comment: Star Trek actually beat B5 to the showing alien genitalia on screen with Star Trek 6 (1991). Admittedly a pair of red alien knees is no where near as cool as the centauri having 6 squid tentacles and Londo using them to cheat at cards, but the line “not everyone keeps their genitals in the same place” after Kirk brings down the giant alien is priceless.
WB did not lose anything, they have all the fx shots on file. they simply due to politcal infighting refuse to release a decent version
I’ve rewatched B5 a number of times. Usually as a run up to try to watch Crusade, Legend of the Rangers and Lost Tales but somewhere in S5 I bog down and never get there. 8-(
I adore Claudia Christian/Ivanova but I’ve always wondered what could have been. When the show started, JMS mentioned Tamlyn Tomita’s casting as a positive diversity move, and yet her character was supposed to fill the part of the psychic mole that Talia Winters ended up being. She’s the one that poisoned Kosh. So how would that have been positive repping for Japanese Americans?
The best literature is character-driven, not plot-driven, and that’s why Babylon 5 was a success and remains the greatest television show in history. The comments about the perfect pacing in the article are dead on. The plot of B5 serves the characters, not the other way around, and that’s why the pacing seems right. Another commenter was on to something when they mentioned how unsatisfying the conclusion of Game of Thrones was. But the reason for that Game of Thrones disappointment was because the show started off as character-driven and well-paced because the plot served the characters. But by the end, that dichotomy had reversed. The pacing feels wrong at the end of GoT because the characters were now serving the plot.
One remarkable thing about B5 was that it features one of my all-time least favorite characters: Doctor Franklin. My god, I hate that self-righteous prick. And his walkabout plotline must be the most boring thing ever put to film. I stopped reading comics when JMS re-used that plot in Superman. Ugh. But despite the loathsome Doctor Franklin and that yawn-inducing plotline, the rest of the characters were more than enough to carry the show on their shoulders. And I even like the fifth season. Death-wish Byron is a wonderful character and worth the entire season all by himself. Favorite episode, and again despite Doctor Franklin’s walkout in it: “And The Rock Cries Out No Hiding Place.” I get giddy every time I watch Lord Refa’s demise sung to the tune of a gospel song.
@83 – TNG did it with their seventh season episode “Lower Decks” four years before B5. It’s interesting that both shows saved this important viewpoint for their final seasons. They were both among the highlights of each show’s respective final seasons.
+1 to this, between Refa and Morden (Virs head on a pike quote and payoff mentioned often up thread), B5 did bad guys getting there comeuppance well.
Mostly spot-on but for one of your photo captions: Andreas Katsulas (G’Kar, by far the best character on the show) was not simply A guy in a rubber mask–he was The guy in a rubber mask.
Londo Mollari: The humans, I think, knew they were doomed. But where another race would surrender to despair, the humans fought back with even greater strength. They made the Minbari fight for every inch of space. In my life, I have never seen anything like it. They would weep, they would pray, they would say goodbye to their loved ones and then throw themselves without fear or hesitation at the very face of death itself. Never surrendering. No one who saw them fighting against the inevitable could help but be moved to tears by their courage…their stubborn nobility. When they ran out of ships, they used guns. When they ran out of guns, they used knives and sticks and bare hands. They were magnificent. I only hope, that when it is my time, I may die with half as much dignity as I saw in their eyes at the end. They did this for two years. They never ran out of courage. But in the end…they ran out of time.
This still my favorite quote from the series and the series I watch more then I did trek
The “Most Terrible” in the title immediately put me on the defensive, as B5 is my favorite TV show of all time, but the article did a good job of capturing what the show was about. Star Trek is what humans wish they could be, but B5 captured humanity as it is; in all its glorious, heroic and despicable messiness. There were so many characters I grew to love, so many good lines, so many exciting moments, and so many deep truths contained in the show.
I was deeply immersed in the show for years, reading every novel, following every (unfortunately failed) spinoff, building model kits, and painting war gaming miniatures. And there were five “making of” books, one for each season. When you read about how many challenges and shortcuts they had to make behind the scenes, you appreciate how it looked on the TV even more. For example, all that different lighting was not just for artistic reasons, it was to create more variety in the very limited number of sets they had to work with.
Loved the show then, still love it now. I have the discs on the shelf, and this reminds me that it is far too long since I have done a rewatch.
@35 and your “this was Star Trek before it was B5” post:
Sorry, but everything you posted was utter nonsense. I actually know Joe, and have for years, and none of it is in any way true.
Jennifer, I really enjoyed your essay. It was well written and well thought out. Perhaps I liked your essay so much because like you, I enjoyed B5. If I have nothing to do and I come across an episode on some obscure cable channel, I will often find myself watching. (In fact, last week a saw the King Arthur episode. I loved when G’Karr jumped over the railing to fight with King Arthur.)
One point of contention, however. It was not Straczynski’s decision to get rid of Michael O’Hare (the actor who played Sinclair – the station’s commander during the 1st season). O’Hare suffered from mental illness that became so bad that O’Hare could not continue working. Straczynski had offered to suspend filming so O’Hare could get treatment. O’Hare ultimately decided that a suspension might be the death knoll of the series; too many jobs were at stake. He and Straczynski agreed that he should be written out as B5’s commander; he would later come back at the end of Season 3 for 2 episodes. (As an aside, I think O’Hare was correct. Had they suspended filming, B5 would never had made it to Season 2 – given that it was syndicated for the 1st 4 years and one never knew where and when B5 would be on.)
I wonder how the series would have been different if O’Hare did not have to leave the show. Would there never have been a John Sheridan? Would it have been Sinclair who fell in love with Delenn and be the leader in the fight against the Shadow and Clark. That is something I doubt we will ever know. I do not see Straczynski giving up that info.
Thanks for reading my musings.
AndrewHB
B5 was one of the most goddamn things I’ve ever seen. Sure it had some clumsy moments, far overshadowed by great moments and grand storytelling. My only hope is that WB never does a Star Trek TOS or Lukas – Star Wars type of modernization. It’s a document of J. Michael Straczynski’s vision and 1990s television. With all it’s imperfections, it’s perfect in every way!
Yes! This! A show both as glorious and messy as the Human Condition itself! And (mostly) Newtonian spacecraft!!
Mark Oshiro just finished an unspoiled watch of the show (with plenty of encrypted spoiler discussions in the comments) that I can’t recommend highly enough.
Lorien: I was old when the molecules of your world came together to make land and sea, and fish and man…
John Sheridan: You’re one of the First Ones?
Lorien: I AM the First One…
For me the most amazing episode in terms of character development and sheer drama was “Comes the Inquistor”. G’Kar becomes a fully-fledged leader, Garibaldi shows he’s willing to bend the rules as long as you don’t bend HIS rules, and Sheridan and Delenn’s relationship takes the first steps into love… And the amazing Wayne Alexander, the actor that portrays both Lorien and Mr. Sebastian, makes his first appearance.
I adore Babylon 5. I have watched the series, the made for TV movies and Crusade more than 30 times. I stopped counting years ago. As I watch it again and again I can virtually recite the lines of every character. JMS published the complete scripts and I bought every one of them plus other books he published and this doesn’t even include the several paperback novels about the show.
The actors, the professionals, were all great in their roles. Music by Christopher Franke was superb.
There are some technical flaws, of course. Given the budget and time constraints things slipped by.
The only apparent reason there has been no continuation of the show is ambivalence on the part of Warner Brothers. JMS has his hands tied. TNT twice killed Crusade before a single of the 13 episodes were broadcast. In my opinion there is a special circle in the hot place below firmly reserved for TNT bean counting executives who wanted to run the show with virtually no respect for the creator. Rather than drop his standards the show died. I have a wish that some day, in any format acceptable to JMS the remaining story that might have been Crusade be told.
Babylon 5 was truly the best show I think I ever watched. B5 never spoon fed us a morality tale or made heroes and villains out of the characters rather there was complexity and humanity with a dash of wit, intelligence and intrigue. A well written piece, Jenn, thanks for taking me down memory lane.
Wiseguy was serialized long before B5
I might have to give this another chance.
I liked season one, and hated, HATED Bruce Boxleitner.
Please remember Blakes 7 was 16 years before B5.
My family re-watches this every other year.
What I got from the way everything played out was “history may not repeat itself, but it tends to rhyme.” The golden age passes, the shining tower falls, and whether what happened was good, or even important, depends on where you were standing at the time and who was whispering in your ear. But on the other hand…the farm is cleared again, the well is dug again, the book is written again, and people go on. It’s very Tolkien. (I just sorta turn my head and ignore the whole “we’ll all turn into starbabies someday” subplot, partly because transhumanism annoys me, and partly because Lorien is an asshole. “You should cherish that remarkable illusion.” Gee, thanks for hleping.)
I also saw the characters, not as great people, but as people who looked around and went, “Oh crap, somebody’s gotta do something…oh crap, that’s me.” It’s noteworthy that the ones who are the most certain of their Great Big Destiny are Londo, the poor damn fool, and Delenn, who has to do damage control for her decision to follow that destiny pretty much for the rest of her life.
Something that I don’t remember ever seeing before B5 is the number of times that our heroes, while still indisputably doing the right thing, let people down. They have 52 things to think about already and Lyta’s troubles (for example) are thing number 53. And that doesn’t get tidily wrapped up. It just exists: they’re fallible, they screw up, and life goes on.
My favorite lines have mostly been cited already, but I’ll add:
“Woo…hoo?”
@Len Friedman no. 83: Oh, man, I forgot that one!
Londo and G’Kar squabble past, trailing backstory, body count, and insults
One regular Joe to the other: “How long have they been married?”
Somehow, even with the gloriously *bad* parts, B5 manages to be So. Dang. Good.
“Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender. The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. “
I liked Babylon 5 a lot, but have never rewatched it. I think the reason for this is that the best pieces are all part of the ongoing story, so I’d have to rewatch it all to do it justice, and I just don’t watch enough TV for that. But this article makes me want to reread To Dream in the City of Sorrows.
“John Sheridan […] is broken down piece by piece during a war that reveals him to be a ruthless, “means justify the ends”-style General.”
And yet the show seemed to agree with his actions. At least that was the impression I got.
@19/wlewisiii: Blake’s 7 was an answer to original Star Trek. Babylon 5 was an answer to TNG.
@61/ad: “That is not quite true. They have written dialogue telling us that the Federation, or at least Earth, is a glorious Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism paradise. What they have not done is write stories that show how that glorious FALSC paradise actually works. Which rather encourages that suspicion that they do not know how it works. And makes the paradise seem less real.”
They can’t know how it works – it doesn’t exist yet. It always seems more real when the future is like the present, but it’s really less likely. We have invented space flight, encountered myriads of alien races, all with a history as rich and varied as our own, all with their own unique social and political inventions, and yet our societies and institutions are unchanged? Not likely at all. (Oh, and as far as I am concerned, United Earth shouldn’t have a President, it should have a Prime Minister. That goes for Star Trek too.)
@68/ducky: “I loved the way that B5 felt lived in and connected to a real past, mostly because they could reference Warner Brothers cartoons versus Star Trek’s more high brow bent when it references any popular culture.”
Personally, I believe that Shakepeare will be more long-lived than Warner Brothers cartoons. And I enjoy artsy stuff, so I love Star Trek’s appreciation of the arts. Also, Star Trek referenced Sherlock Holmes. That’s popular culture too, isn’t it?
@90/Bryce: I like “A View from the Gallery” much better than “Lower Decks”. “Lower Decks” was about a bunch of entitled, career-obsessed youths out of place in the enlightened Star Trek future. “A View from the Gallery” was about a pair of working men. The closest Star Trek has come to portraying working men was in the character of Miles O’Brien.
@99/JT: Sheridan and Delenn’s relationship was one of my favourite things in Babylon 5. I didn’t know that they would become a couple when I started watching it, and their emerging love was written so well, it felt like watching two friends fall in love in real life. I usually don’t believe in spoilers and don’t mind knowing plot points in advance, but in this case I was glad that I hadn’t been forewarned.
My partner and I still exclaim “Hat!” with very little provocation, which started while watching the lines of extras the show didn’t have a makeup budget for.
That’s not a quote, except of ourselves. But we also still say “Sooner or later: boom.”
Babylon 5 is one of my favorites series.
I still remember how excited I was to watch the show after reading an newspaper article about the five-year story arc. It may not be perfect but the stories and the characters make it enjoyable.
My favorite scenes:
Kosh taking Sheridan to one of the worse area on the station to show him “one moment of perfect beauty”
Delinn and Garibaldi watching Daffy Duck and eating popcorn . The look on her face…
@66 Thank you for the history lesson about “The Hour of the Wolf” and its true meaning.
However, in the scene, Susan is telling Lyta what her father told her. It wasn’t a history lesson. It was a story told from parent to child in Russia, and then related to someone else late at night while drinking vodka, a story about outlasting the night when the wolf is at your door.
It doesn’t matter what the pure historical fact was in this case.
As one of my favorite authors wrote, “Fact and truth and history are rarely related … It is better to be a Storyteller.” And Ivanova’s story was a good one.
Star Trek then B5 then Firefly. All others fall into the rest category.
I’m pretty skeptical about that. I don’t know what kind of effort that would require, precisely, but assuming the source files still exist, they were created for completely outdated software running on even more outdated hardware (and not even consistent software and hardware at that; those changed considerably as things progressed). It’s a lot of effects shots, and I’d be surprised if you could just copy the files over to a modern computer, hit “render” and end up with pristine footage. A great number of those effects are composite shots that combine live-action footage and CGI, too.
I’m sure it’s doable, if you’re willing to commit to it, but when I hear “almost no money or effort,” I would like to hear an explanation for that, because that’s generally not how these things generally work — in fact, that would be be the exact opposite of how these things generally work.
@52 Yeah, I mean the CGI situation. For anyone who is interested, this article offers a lot of details: https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/22/babylon-5-digital-video-quality/
@111 The newest information by JMS is that WB wanted every season for their archives on 35mm film. The CGI on this archive prints is of higher quality than the video broadcast resolution and would make a good quality and cheap HD release a possibility. It would have to be a 4:3 aspect ratio, though. Which I think is perfectly acceptable. But apparently WB has no love for B5…
@76 sunspear
Somewhere (I don’t recall where, but by coincidence Comet TV rebroadcast that episode last night and I will rewatch it) she explains that the phrase for Hour of the Wolf refers to the deepest part pf the night, like 3 AM. It is the crepuscular (love that word!) dawn. No reason not to get it right unless you’re simply in a rush. He had the time of day wrong and the symbolism/metaphor wrong. I am using my own personal knowledge and extremely limited personal experience as an example of what I consider hastiness due to the pressure of getting the show out on time. He was writing 22 episodes a year whilst being what we today call a “showrunner.” I believe that had he had 13 episodes a year (more common nowadays but unheard of in the 90s he could have given the show more of the time and polish he probably wanted to.
No doubt. I have as healthy an ego as many producers, and have good reason to believe that the reference on B5 was a shoutout. I later got it on Good Authority that he had been harassed with many people who wanted a piece of him or the sho, and I chalk up that behavior to a fear of someone trying to hustle him, which many people were. But yeah, I felt a humiliated like a poor country cousin at a public event. I’m quite over that now. I do not criticize the show out of hubris. I merely give a first-hand example of some typical (minor) minor flaws with the show, even when it was at its best.
Passing through Gethsemane: So many things I can say about that but my words are always going to be inadequate.
However its amazing that the one thing that has stuck with more more than others is a quote I use regularly those misquoted I am sure. “Its the making and the giving – i am doubly blessed” always to confused looks :)
There is a lot here to unpack but I do love this show. It took most of the first season to hook me but when it did I was all in. One of the great companion pieces to this show was the online “Lurkers Guide,” which really opened up the depth that this show offered.
Memorable quotes: “I didn’t know that similarity was required for the exercise of compassion.”
@68, here is a second Oh My God for Marcus Cole. I remember thinking ‘I have no idea who this guy is but I love him!’
@43
I also reccomend The Audio Guide to Babylon 5 podcast. They did finish the main series in August 2018 and promised to come back for spinoffssome day. The format is one I see often for show rewatches – two long-term fans and one preson new to the show. Most B5 rewatch podcasts (and there are a few) talk about the story, characters and actors (and there is nothing wrong with that), but TAGtB5 also discusses directing and/or cinematography.
@49
Correction: flarn is a Minbari dish (which Sheridan tries to cook one time), the Narn version of meatballs is called breen. And Centauri have their version called Roopo balls. See https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Breen
Thanks for the excellent and thoughtful review!
I remember when watching it how all these analogies kept coming up with Europe and the rest of the world just before WWII, when a large fraction of the world refused to believe or to accept how big was the evil that it was faced with, and they tried to pacify Hitler and trade with him…
I can’t think of another SF TV show that conveys this sense of observing a convincing (and scary!) historic process. Well, may be Man in the High Castle but that in a way a historic show about the French resistance transplanted to the US.
Wonderful, wonderful essay!
I remember my high school sophomore’s mind was utterly blown when Delenn revealed the real reason why the Minbarri did not press their advantage and conquer humanity, but instead simply withdrew.
I also still think that Ambassador Kosh was the coolest thing and Talia Winter had such style!
@117 now that people mention it, I think I had a crush on Marcus. That’s a weird thing to recognize a couple of decades after the fact.
“Bugger! Now I have to wait for somebody to wake up.”
B5 will always have a special place in my heart. I love the way it builds its story, piece by piece, moment by moment, sometimes in plain view and sometimes more stealthily.
But that very structure means that the best parts of the series are scattered moments, widely distributed over a lot of screen time. The heart of the show does not reveal itself quickly and you have to be willing to let it do so on its own terms.
I came pretty close to not doing that. I wasn’t that impressed at first and only watched intermittently in the first season. (I still think Soul Hunter is clumsy and Infection is just plain bad.)
I might never have gone back, except the next year I moved and no longer had cable. I had fewer choices of what to watch. But a distant station I could pull in over the air ran the show.
For those of you who don’t remember or never experienced analog TV, a weak analog TV signal gives you degraded picture quality. This turned out to be helpful, because it meant I wasn’t looking at the CGI or the sets that closely, and these were never B5’s strengths. But I did have surround sound and the show’s sound design was effectively immersive, at least for me. So, I picked the show up again at the start of season 2, which is also where the show hits its stride. And it was then that it hooked me.
My wife looks at me somewhat skeptically when I talk about B5. We tried to watch it together a few years ago. It didn’t work for her, and I can see why. I kept telling her she had to give it more time. But TV has changed, and who has that kind of time now? I know I wouldn’t give a new series today 20+ episodes to build my relationship with the characters.
Still, even if I never watch it again, I still think of B5 on a regular basis. Elements of it: moments, scenes, lines of dialog, character arcs, etc. have become part of my basic vocabulary for thinking about storytelling and myth. And I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
“It taught us that we have to create the future, or let others do it for us. It showed us that we have to care for one another, because if we don’t… who will? And that strength comes from unlikely places. Mostly, though… it gave us hope… that there can always be new beginnings, even for people like us.”
B5 is great in no small part because it both accepts that people (and TV programs) are flawed while refusing to accept that as an excuse, on the one hand, or as a sign of moral failing on the other. Where Trek offers a better tomorrow which demands little from us now–for to achieve it, we need limitless energy and the ability to “materialize” food out of that energy, a post-scarcity future–B5 is demanding. It asks us how we would face dilemmas and consequences. It presents us with situations that occurred in the past and have recurred since, again and again. Watching along my mother, who’d not seen the show before, in 2002-3, we were struck with how current or prescient the show seemed. That’s because it shows us as who we are, presenting the best, the worst, the mediocre, and challenging us to be better. Who among us would go with Delenn and Lennier into the Markab quarantine? Take a literal leap of faith? What compromises would we be willing to make? And how can we justify doing nothing and letting others create the future for us.
I also think that some of the critiques of the show (even, or especially, the fair ones) are driven by that demand it places upon us. During my mother’s first watch, I looked up some commentaries on the show, and one pattern I saw was of critics who’d seen the show in their teens or early twenties looking back and condemning it. Several called it worse things than “naive.” It was childish, something to outgrow. I see that as a defensive maneuver, the sort of thing that the Baby Boomer generation can insist to themselves about how they sold out all their ideals. It’s not a childish show, it is child-like, in the best sense, the sense of someone who keeps asking “why” until all the excuses are exhausted and your true motives stand stripped to the world. (“Comes the Inquisitor” more or less shows us this on-screen.) “I outgrew this show” is just a way of justifying one’s own compromises, a way so defensive that it reveals a hidden shame.
As for the “amateur” angle of critique, which Jennifer means kindly but other people deploy as a weapon against the show, along with old favorite “cheap,” it’s interesting that where Trek tends towards a tactical classness (in the sense of social or economic class), B5 is distinctively walking the line between blue and white-collar. Whatever Doyle may have been in his life, he plays Garibaldi as working class; elite characters don’t tend to do well on the show, with a few exceptions. B5 seems to invite a kind of sneering, snobby critique from a certain set of watchers which I always find hard not to read along this line of engagement with the classes. There’s homeless in space, and most of our heroes do nothing about them at all. (Marcus and Doctor Franklin are two obvious exceptions.) The show even has the cheek to present us with an alien species that’s Social Darwinist and praises humanity for how it rids itself of its own dregs. Our Great Men (and Women) don’t solve this problem at all, and show no real signs of attempting to. But even acknowledging the problem (in a way that slyly implicates us, though also somewhat excuses us) may be too much for some viewers. A finger should be pointed back at the showrunners, too, as most of the crew were non-union and weren’t getting the pay and benefits they deserved, in part because the show was being produced with no money. Trek was a flagship program for its studio; B5 was made in an abandoned hot-tub factory, not on the Warner’s lot.
I’ll also point out that a lot of the cast for this show died early: multiple people with mental problems, alcoholics, drug problems (shout-out to Jeff Conaway!), addiction to cigarettes. JMS cast performers who were deeply flawed people to play deeply flawed characters. Even the performers who seem like they should be above all that surprise you. Richard Biggs, who died tragically young, was fit and well-adjusted; he was also almost completely deaf. That’s not to argue that the stars of similar shows don’t have flaws; I’m simply suggesting that this show isn’t about the “best of the best” going into space to fight the space Nazis. It’s about flawed and imperfect people trying their best in the face of crisis, in the face of seeing the average Joe embracing fascism because it didn’t seem that harmful at the time.
A correction about S5: the show had LESS MONEY per episode under TNT. They cut the production schedule by one day per week. This also meant that the cast technically got paid less money despite getting raises. In addition, JMS had less money to spend on salary, which is why several characters appear so infrequently in the final season. (The Lennier arc was always planned, though, since Mumy told JMS he thought he was in love with Delenn: JMS immediately thought “Lancelot” but didn’t tell Mumy where the story would go.)
Also, it’s Richard Biggs, not Briggs.
@124/Narsham: “Where Trek offers a better tomorrow which demands little from us now–for to achieve it, we need limitless energy and the ability to “materialize” food out of that energy, a post-scarcity future–B5 is demanding. It asks us how we would face dilemmas and consequences. It presents us with situations that occurred in the past and have recurred since, again and again.”
I would argue that the same is true for Star Trek. Limitless energy doesn’t solve all problems and doesn’t do away with dilemmas and consequences. Do we have to pin these two against each other? I like them both. For me, personally, it’s the original Star Trek that reliably inspires me to do some good; for others, it may be Babylon 5, or a later Trek show, or Doctor Who, or something else.
“B5 is distinctively walking the line between blue and white-collar.”
Yes. That’s one of the things I liked about it too.
This is actually a great treatise on B5, The only complaint I have, is that (unless I missed it) you bring up the failings in S5 without bringing up the reasons for it, S5 was awful because it was never supposed to happen, not as written, Remember they didn’t know that they were getting renewed for S5, so they had to finish the 5 year arc in 4 seasons, Then after they had already told the tale… “Oh By the way, S5 is a go”. There was also the change in networks, and TNT wanted the show to go in a different direction, and was MUCH more heavy handed with the show, dictating artistic decisions. They wanted a more sexual and violent show, which lead to many a soft ‘FSCK YOU’ from JMS, I mean they wanted more sex, so he gave them Pak’Ma’Ra porn…
I’m also a fan of the show. And I think a weird fan.
I never watched season 1. When I started watching it, it was in the middle of season 2 and later I could watch the beginning of it in rereuns. But somehow, the network that aired it never showed the first season, at least not in any time I could watch it.
So I watched it from season 2 to season 5, and I loved seasons 2-3-4 (one of the best TV shows ever, IMO). Later, when DVDs were invented, I decided to watch it again, but I again started from season 2. I heard so many people talking badly about season 1 that I never actually watched it.
And I think this works for me, and could work for people who don’t have patience to wait for a series to get good, like the partners of some commenters. Why this works? Because you’re basically like Sheridan. You arrive at this station, it’s in the middle of a crisis, you see how people react to others in that crisis, and then you move to the next day. You see people referecing stuff from the past, but since Sheridan didn’t experience the first season, people have to explain it to him, and then to the members of the audience that didn’t watch it, like me.
So it works, for me at least. I don’t think I missed much (I read the summaries of the episodes later, just to see if I lost much, and apparently I didn’t).
#21, @rob: “One man has faced a Minbari fleet and survived. He is behind me. YOU are in front of me.”
I’m always amazed how no one realizes she was bluffing.
By this time in the story Delenn realizes that humans and Minbari are a single species. At this time, she is also still living under the “Minbari do not kill Minbari” rule. She would never have ordered her fleet to fire. Bluff. A really, really effective bluff.
BTW, moderator: footnote 1 is duplicated.
@128 – Fixed, thanks!
FDIRST… DAMNED fine piece you wrote here. Not a whisper of critique, and several sighs and tears in memory…
thank you
Just a note… it wasnt a ‘lack of reference monitor’ or ‘secret Hi-def film final copies” that kept the dvd release less-than-optimal… IIRR The show was shot in super 35 film.. a very good image to start with and very 4/3 in shape but using a lot of the negative. The FRAMING on set kept all that height, but was eyeballed by DP/director that future use could crop top and bottom (no critical content really put there) for later 1.87 framing. HOWEVER ( and some of us raised this issue early on when there was talk of a widescreen release) the workflow was FILM-transfered-to-DIGITAL video files, and then all FX work was done at 4/3 with the full image. Editing was completed in this domain leaving a finished 4/3 digital video air final. It was NEVER, as I know, printed back to film. The only FILM of B5 is the original camera negative.
This leaves two ways to get a ‘widescreen’ version: RE-TRANSFER the original 35mm scene shots (unless the original pre-post transfer files are existent and good quality) and COMPLETELY REDO THE FX AND EDITING PROCESS from film-transfer on through, which of course, is a complete redo of -all- post-production image work and editing for each episode with matching cost… (which also implies re-framing every shot and matte and VFX and edit ) … and so ONLY one damnable AFFORDABLE way to get a ‘wide-screen’ version: take that final original version and crop **further** top/bottom (including whatever VFX and matte work was added there) and lose resolution and content, which is what we have. Woulda rather had great transfers of the 4/3 aired originals…
And with all that said… more than ANYTHING else… THANK you Mr Straczynski!
John V GEnie (SHOWMAN)
@113. jfreund: I don’t recall the context of the scene, other than the lines you quoted. Ivanova is talking about a feeling of dread: “it’s always darkest before the dawn.” And she’s felt that way for days. The dialogue still works for me.
Plus, in space, “dawn” is always a metaphorical, not literal, concept.
I find it amazing that this is now one of the heaviest commented on articles on this site. I mean I love the show but I’m the only one in my whole network of friends and family.
I love it too. Thank you for this article. Babylon 5 made me love and hate it in equal measure which isn’t really as easy a thing as one might think. You’re right, B5 is imperfectly perfect.
@131/Sunspear:
Well, except for that stock establishing shot of the sun rising over the limb of Epsilon 3… But, following up on Susan-the-best-lines-Ivanova, this exchange with Sinclair:
Byron was gorgeous too as gorgeous as Marcus, but I hated the self righteous, entitled creep from the first moment I saw him. Was that intentional?
Great article!
I remember watching the episode where B5 secedes from the Earth Alliance and excitedly saying to my friends “YOU’LL NEVER GUESS WHAT’S HAPPENING ON B5!!!! IT’S AWESOME!!!”
@106
When HG Wells wrote The Time Machine he could not know how it worked. It didn’t exist yet. But he still began by drawing an analogy between the spatial and temporal dimensions. He did not know exactly how a thing could work – Relativity was decades in the future – but he made it as plausible as it could.
When George Orwell wrote 1984, Oceania did not exist. But he still managed to show how it worked, and what life in it was like.
And when Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia, it did not exist. But he still managed to show how it worked, and what life in it was like.
But when Star Trek calls the Federation Utopia it does not show anything about how it works. It should not make claims about the civilization its major characters live in, if it cannot make them credible.
@137/ad: Oceania was basically Stalinist Russia in England. And anyway, dystopias are easy.
If you want to portray a good fictional society, you can either invent its inner workings, which may lead to people disliking it (I wouldn’t want to live in More’s Utopia) or coming to the conclusion that this couldn’t really work. Or you only hint at them, which may lead to complaints that it doesn’t feel real. Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. I like them both, and find them both more interesting and more believable than a future that’s exactly like the present (or worse, that turns the whole world into a carbon copy of the country the writer happens to live in).
@127: Season 1 is a bit rocky, but it’s in no way unwatchable. And the Sky Full of Stars, Signs and Portents, Babylon Squared and Chrysalis are among the best episodes of the entire series, and The Parliament of Dreams, Deathwalker, By Any Means Necessary, A Voice in the Wilderness and The Quality of Mercy are pretty strong episodes as well.
Infection and The War Prayer are pretty horrible though. Overall I would rank Season 1 far above Season 5 in quality.
@45.
You astound me.
I remember this exactly as you describe, but somehow, it never occurred to me the Vir may be the only character who got *exactly* what he told Morden he wanted.
if Morden was never really “alone,” then *someone* watched that little exchange, and granted Vir his wish.
But . . . why? What did they get, and what did Vir provide them?
I have the DVD set in a box somewhere, and I will have to watch again. I really doubt JMS intended what I’m inferring here, but it may change how I see some story elements.
The music was absolutely wonderful. Listen to the compositions and orchestrations.
@128/Carl: Hrmm, you so sure about that? Quoth JMS:
Reminds me that quite a number of the observations (particularly of flaws) in both the original post and the comments were things that JMS pointed out twenty-something years ago.
Criminy, now I feel old…
@96 We have some idea of where the show might have gone if O’Hare had been able to stay. In the Babylon 5 Script Book #15 there is a copy of the original pitch that JMS made including his idea for the 5 year arc. It is discussed in the this reedit post https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/synopsis-of-jmss-synopsis-of-the-original-arc-for-b5-spoilers.53739/ Now, obviously, things would have changed somewhat, but this is the original concept. IMHO, I’m glad the story changed because it changed for the better.
I also like Sheridan over Sinclair, but that may be because he was around longer. Certainly, I’m a lot more comfortable with Sheridan falling for Delenn than Sinclair, considering Delenn was part of torturing Sinclair.
@140 I have heard the argument made that everyone got what they asked Morden for. Londo get the Centauri returning to what they once were. G’Kar gets the Centauri destroyed AND after much suffering, his people are safe. Of course, Vir gets what he wants, exactly as he asks, and then the consequences of that are horrible.
I will add my voice to those asking for a rewatch. I would love to have Tor look at the series.
@143 an excellent example of the outline not being the finished story. While I find it hard to be objective due to the outline’s dissonance with canon, it strikes me as laughably bad. I strongly doubt that this outline bears much resemblance to what we’d have gotten from a Sinclair-led series because as JMS did the creative work to flesh out the outline, it would have moved away from the elements that couldn’t make sense.
The greatness of B5 is the juxtaposition of the great and the mundane that gives the realism. The episode told around the janitors while a huge space battle goes on outside the station has always been one of my favorites.
As to politics, the ongoing themes are about the deep state versus the elected proper and open authority. Throughout the series, the conflict is between those who work out in the light and those who work in the darkness. The literal Shadows. The totalitarian Earth government comes about when the deep state assassinates the elected president. Our current parallel where a despotic deep government is trying to overthrow the elected POTUS and the movement being led by a Clinton and their cohorts is remarkable given the show originally came out in the first Clinton era.
B5 is, in my opinion, one of the best things to happen on TV. One had to pay attention to everything, as it might pay off in brilliant detail years later. The writing sometimes rose to the sublime — I once wove J’kar’s preface into a sermon — “No matter the sun,no matter the world, no matter the skin, no matter the blood, we are one”
I love the show, and cannot watch Sleeping In Light without sobbing the entire time. Goodnight, the brightest star in my sky.
1. That’s an awfully long article to have only one point.
2. I hated every minute of Bruce Boxleitner but Mira Furlann made up for them all and then some.
3. Wearing my physicist hat. There are only two SF shows or films I ever saw that bothered to get the physics right. The first was Doug Trumbull’s Silent Running with its silent explosions. B5 is the only show ever to make spacecraft obey Newton’s laws. That Star Wars garbage is impossible unless you are in an atmosphere. George Lucas is an idiot.
@@@@@ no. 147:
c/~ Just repeat to yourself, ‘It’s fan-ta-sy, I should really just relax/For big, loud, and colorful/Space operaaaaa’ c/~
Or as Isaac Asimov said, sometimes you should put your intellect somewhere safe and cool and just enjoy yourself.
This is a really well-thought and well-written article, and I appreciate it as a longtime B5 fan, even if I don’t agree with everything in it. I’m a big sci-fi fan, and there’s a place in my heart for B5, Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica (reboot), and others, each for a different reason. I don’t necessarily see B5 as a reaction or answer to the ST universe; they’re two different universes and two different visions of the future. ST is the future we all hope will happen, where Humanity has learned to rise above itself and create a virtual Utopia; B5 is the future we all know, deep down, is more likely to happen, where Humanity is still what it is today, just hundreds of years in the future.
For me, one of the greatest things about the show was its all too human portrayal of the future. Humanity’s future is not the gleaming white and shining future of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek universe. It’s a future where we’re still the same humans we are today and have been for previous millennia. We still have the same problems to deal with, the same tools to address those problems, the same vices, the same insecurities as we do today. Humanity’s base instincts haven’t significantly changed in more than 5,000 years; why would we expect them to drastically change in the next 200? Humans are flawed creatures, tragically flawed, and I see B5 as a parable not about changing the world, but learning to live within it and make the best of what we’re given. It’s not about what you leave behind as a legacy when you finish, but how you lived that time that you were allotted, making the best decisions you could and leaving things slightly better than you found them.
As others have commented, the realism in B5 was one of the first things that drew me in. Starfuries that turn on a dime but keep moving in the direction of their inertia. EarthForce warships look like ships humans would build: utilitarian and without the need for the graceful aerodynamic lines of Star Trek’s Starfleet vessels, since there’s no resistance in the vacuum of space. The fact that humans are not at the forefront of galactic technology as in Star Trek, evidenced by the fact that Earth ships and stations are the only ones that still have to rotate to create artificial gravity and we still equip our warships with missiles. We’re the new kids to the spacefaring neighborhood, and we’re trying to make a name for ourselves. We get involved in other people’s wars. We pick fights with the big kid on the block because we don’t know any better. We’re not the technologically or morally superior galactic leaders that we’re often shown to be in other sci-fi series. It’s a more realistic, I think, look at Humanity’s future and more likely position in the hierarchy of spacefaring races.
Yes, the sets on the show were often cheesy, as were the costuming, the dialogue, and the overacting. But the chemistry was real, the vision of the future was real, and you became part of it. You were invited into the mundane moments of the characters’ lives and made you part of the show. And the storytelling was real, and it was an amazing story being woven through its 5-year arc.
While we’re all dishing out quotes, many of my favorites are already listed. But I think some of the best came from the Psi-Cop Alfred Bester (to this day, I believe, probably Walter Koenig’s best acting role!):
Episode “Ship of Tears”
SHERIDAN: So how did you find out about all of this? [referring to the Shadows’ “weapons shipment”]
BESTER: I’m a telepath. Work it out.
Later in the same scene, talking about the ability of telepaths to find ships by homing in on the thoughts of the crew and why the Psi Corps has kept that talent secret.
BESTER: Otherwise the military might start putting telepaths on the front lines. We’re not expendable. Mundanes are.
GARIBALDI: That would be us.
BESTER: Got it in one, Mr. Garibaldi. Takes generations to breed a telepath. Mundanes breed like rabbits. Supply and demand.
Thanks again for the trip down Memory Lane about one of the best sci-fi shows I’ve had the pleasure to watch!
It’s very sad that so many cast members have passed away. I listened to an episode commentary recently and realized that many of the people I was hearing weren’t with us anymore.
@145. Alan: “Our current parallel where a despotic deep government is trying to overthrow the elected POTUS and the movement being led by a Clinton and their cohorts is remarkable given the show originally came out in the first Clinton era.”
If you dropped the word “despotic” or replaced “deep (state)” with “permanent bureaucracy” you’d have a legit political comment, but this is just Orwellian propaganda.
The Federation is not communist, it is post-capitalist. Doesn’t do much good to cast the future in the current binary way people look at the world.
Let’s steer the discussion away from current politics, folks. Thanks!
While I would hate to see them do a reboot with an all new cast, I would however be all for redoing all the space scenes with modern CGI. ESPECIALLY good with making the space battles bigger and longer.
What’s somewhat amusing is JMS’s franchise envy. I recall he took a lot of potshots at Trek during the ’90s, bemoaning the fact that it turned into a franchise. But the moment B5 ends, what does he do? Tries to make it into a franchise.
@138 A writer cannot describe a society in which every character always does the right thing, if only because different moral codes will sometimes lead to different ideas about what the right thing is. Some people are bound to disagree about whatever is right. Some people could find any possible action by the characters to be wrong, because any action that did not conflict with one of their values would conflict with another.
But as long as the characters are trying to work out what is right, and try to do it, they will look like good people to most of the audience.
So a writer can certainly depict a good society. Just not a perfect one. Star Trek could have depicted a society of better people than us, and it did, when the action was confined to the Enterprise. Not when they depicted the rest of Starfleet. They barely depicted the rest of Earth at all. Except for the DS9 episodes where elements within Starfeet attempted a military coup. Which rather contradicted all the times they told us how great that society was.
The societies we see in B5 were at least as dysfunctional, but it did not spend so much time telling the viewers how perfect they all were. Except perhaps for the praise of the spiritual Minbari, when their last major act that anyone knew about was an act of genocidal lunacy.
@157: Was Minbari society really portrayed that positively in the show? Aside from the aforementioned act of genocidal lunacy, their government also proved totally unresponsive to the threat of the Shadows, and neither the Warrior Caste nor the Religious Caste came off well during the Minbari Civil War arc. It’s also notable that of the four major younger races, the Minbari were the only one whose political system was failing so badly that they had a genuine revolution during the show. (Earth and the Centauri both had evil leaders overthrown, but their underlying political systems remained unchanged.)
Really interesting article and lots of interesting comments.
Again, @35 – not at all true. To get the mostly full story on the development on B5, Joe’s relationship with San Diego, and much other stuff, definitely check out Straczynski’s Biography when it comes out in July.
Definitely time for tor.com to do a Babylon 5 rewatch, I think, Just the number of people commenting on this article should give them a good idea of the ongoing interest for the show. I put together a proposal five years ago that they opted not to go with.
Now back to digging through my B5 stuff for finding things to help Jason Davis out with his Babylon 5 Preservation Project…..
“Was Minbari society really portrayed that positively in the show?”
The culture wasn’t flawless but Minbari spirituality was portrayed positively, and the teenage telepath ends up going to the Minbari.
religious caste, mostly good; warrior caste, mostly bad; worker caste, mostly unseen but Delenn gives them more power at the end. Not that we were told they’d asked for, she just doles it out. IIRC.
@160:
The culture wasn’t flawless but Minbari spirituality was portrayed positively
Human and Narn spirituality were also portrayed positively, so that was more in keeping with the show generally being sympathetic to spirituality rather than it favoring the Minbari way of life.
the teenage telepath ends up going to the Minbari.
Was that really an endorsement of Minbari society though or more a criticism of how exploitive the humans and Narn were in regards to telepaths? Being a better option than Psi-Corps is clearing a very short hurdle.
religious caste, mostly good; warrior caste, mostly bad; worker caste, mostly unseen but Delenn gives them more power at the end.
“Religious caste, mostly good” doesn’t really follow. Religious Caste members tried to forge an alliance with the Drakh, were willing to poison an entire ship full of people (that was on a diplomatic mission), and of course it was a Religious Caste member who provided the deciding vote to commit genocide. Delenn’s action at the end of the Minbari Civil War was as much a repudiation of the Religious Caste as it was of the Warrior Caste, showing that both castes had too much power in Minbari society and that that needed to change.
The teen telepath going with the Minbari was just her accepting a less unpleasant form of servitude. Psi corp was the clear badguy but Minbari culture is just as exploitative as the Psi Corp in its own way with its whole service is its own reward credo. Ironically the Narn might have been the better and freer option, just the Narn had horrible PR and inspired a lot of judgemental hostile reaction at their “alieness”. It is really another metaphor for poor judgement and falling for PR over actual issues.
I do love huge chunks of B5. I adore Delenn and Lennier, and Londo and G’Kar, and especially Ivanova. The chemistry between Londo and G’Kar was brilliant and unreproducible. Majel Barrett showing up as a Centauri was a bit of really lovely Star Trek interplay that I enjoyed the hell out of. I never liked Sheridan — the white savior golden boy was just sickening, especially cast into a combination of Aragorn and Gandalf in JMS’s explicit riffs on LotR.
The one point that both stands out and periodically threatens to ruin the whole thing for me was JMS managing an entire lesbian cliche hat trick — dead, mad, evil — in one moment with a single character. Even Whedon couldn’t beat that, he had to use two characters.
The subsequent nastiness of JMS toward Talia and her actress just really play up his other “humorous” bits of misogyny (the one that leaps out is the name of Londo’s wife Timov), which make me cringe and loathe the man. He’s like a bunch of other cishet white men in spec media in Hollywood, doing some groundbreaking and memorable work while also fundamentally f*cking up some other things, and then, as far as I can tell, never actually learning from his mistakes.
Likewise, B5 was one of my all-time favorite TV shows. JMS was doing something no one was doing. He did well with his relatively small budget and the effects turned out well.
It was well written and scary with the Shadows. Finally, B5 did get eclipsed by Battlestar Galactica.
GREAT write-up by Jennifer G. and wonderful comments!
@163. Jude: “(the one that leaps out is the name of Londo’s wife Timov)”
Don’t remember that one. It is very juvenile. Maybe he was using some scripts as (bad) therapy to work out his issues.
@163, @165: The script for Soul Mates was written by Peter David, not JMS, and the Timov-vomit connection was an artifact of the character’s being symbolic of Famine (with the other two wives being Pestilence and Death, with Londo of course being War).
JMS might very well be a homophobic misogynist (I think not, but I’ve never met the man), but if you want to demonstrate it via his B5 work this is a particularly poor example.
Difficult to imagine someone who wrote Susan Ivanova as being either homophobic or misogynist.
@166. Ian: Calling your three wives Pestilence, Famine and Death is not flattering. Londo flees from the homeworld to B5 to escape them. Naming your character Reverse-Vomit or She-Who-Makes-Me-Vomit is still juvenile, regardless of the intended association (and I’m a Peter David fan (or used to be; haven’t read anything of his in awhile)). As I said, I don’t remember the context (just started a re-watch), but I’m visualizing a parallel with Harry Mudd and his wife.
Btw, a side question: Anyone remember where Galen says a line about having no enemies left because none are alive? And what’s the exact line? It may have been A Call to Arms…
@168: Oh, noes, a single bad joke doesn’t hold up to standards of wokeness from 25 years later. Is this the part where we declare JMS a heretic and a monster, or simply try to excise the entire series from existence for the crime of being problematic? Hard to keep up with established Party doctrine these days.
You woke up very pleasant memories. Thank you for this.
@170. Devin: “or simply try to excise the entire series from existence for the crime of being problematic”
Either/or? Black or white? There are degrees. No one’s been a literal absolutist here. In this case, it’s a minor issue.
“Calling your three wives Pestilence, Famine and Death is not flattering.”
And it’s not meant to be. Londo has three marriages (arranged?) that didn’t work well. I don’t see this as a flaw of the show.
“JMS managing an entire lesbian cliche hat trick — dead, mad, evil”
Evidence suggests Talia is bi, not lesbian, but I take your point. Though are mad and evil really distinct here? (Or with Willow?)
Problematic bit that most people don’t seem to mention: “we live for the One, we die for the One”. Creepy cult of personality as the core of power of the new Interstellar Alliance…
Talia is neither mad nor evil she is a victim of psycorp meddling which has efffectively given her a full blown and very nasty secondary personality Her arc has nothing to do with her sexuality and EVERYTHING to do with being a telepath. Londo’s wives are unpleasant, so is he. Timov proves to be the best of the lot.
“I work for Ambassador Mollari, after a while nothing bothers you.”
Yeah, ‘We live for the one, we die for the one.’ is creepy. Sinclair seems to find it so.
“Babylon-5: the story of how a personality-driven death cult with alien backing overthrew our elected government…’
I find it hard to imagine JMS being homophobic given he was a co-creator of Sens8.
How will all this end?
IN FIRE!
@168: There’s no disputing that the names and dialogue are nasty towards Londo’s wives, or that Timov was a juvenile joke (Peter David himself described it as ‘cutesy’). But the production history reveals that the name was primarily a riff on story elements from previous episodes—specifically, Londo’s line from The War Prayer where he points to pictures of his wives and gives their names as—wait for it—Pestilence, Famine, and Death. That severely undercuts any attempts to claim that her (actual) name reveals something meaningful about the showrunner’s character; it seems to simply channel the attitude of the fictional character.
The same sources can be similarly used to debunk the claims regarding the treatment of Talia Winters. It was never a secret that Andrea Thompson spent nearly her entire run on the show griping about her screen time. JMS commented that when he saw an opportunity to rework the story in a new (and potentially better) direction while simultaneously ridding himself of a troublesome employee, he took it. One can certainly argue that it was an a$$***e move on his part, but it would seem to reflect more strongly on the sometimes-cutthroat nature of the the TV business than on his personal feelings toward women or LGBT or whatnot.
A meta-point is that there is really no excuse for getting some of these details wrong regarding the show’s production background, because commentary on these and other points (e.g. JMS’s grudge against San Diego) has been available online (e.g. The Lurker’s Guide) since the days before before Google even existed.
Andrea Thompson certainly got treated better than Robert Rusler when it came to screentime and storylines, poor bastard. Caught between a network which said that the first season was seen as a bit dull and could they get a fighter pilot to punch the action up a bit, and a showrunner who was all “you’re not the boss of meeeeee” in return.
I wish JMS could have found a better way to deal with both characters. Certainly, due to the nature of prevalent (and not yet extinct, either) there are much more unfortunate implications of making an lgbt character evil and also defacto killing her and never having her girlfriend get another woman. JMS might not be homophobic himself, but he was playing with some inherently homophobic tropes. Decent people can still do bad things.
This line sort of baffles me. “One of the first”? What came before? What has even come since? The only examples I can think of are books adapted to film—True Blood, Game of Thrones, Outlander, The Expanse, etc. But even then, none of those attempted to plan a single multi-season story, did they? Aren’t they all roughly doing one book per season? Only one I can think of that tried something similar was How I Met Your Mother, and even then they didn’t plan very well: they had an ending in mind, but then wrote much of the middle seemingly without considering that ending, and then insisted on sticking with an ending that would’ve made sense 4-5 seasons earlier but no longer did.
Seems to me that Babylon 5 is, to this day, almost unique: a single story, plotted out before episode one airs to cover the entire multi-season run of the show.
That’s very different, in both intention and result, from the single-season stories that have become basically the norm in dramatic TV. Which isn’t to say that one is better than the other, just that they’re different. They are a different structure. And they’re a different experience for the viewer.
@46: I hear that a lot, and I always wonder “compared to what?” Infection was bad. TKO was bad. That’s 2 out of 22 episodes. Meanwhile Born to the Purple, Mind War, War Prayer, And the Sky Full of Stars, Deathwalker, Believers, Survivors, By Any Means Necessary, Grail, The Quality of Mercy, and Chrysalis (half the season) were all above-average to great. And several of those, plus Midnight on the Firing Line, Soul Hunter, Signs and Portents, Eyes, A Voice in the Wilderness, and Babylon Squared all set up really important things in the future. DS9 and TNG both had much weaker first seasons and many fewer of even DS9’s episodes had major “payoffs” with later seasons. Ditto the first seasons of X-Files and Buffy. There are definitely shows with stronger first seasons, but most of them are also much more recent. (And unlike B5, most of them didn’t get /stronger/ with later seasons—they started out strong, and stayed at that level.)
@179. Ian: that website is truly a relic from the 90s. It’s something that could’ve shown up on Halt and Catch Fire as cutting edge.
Sure Londo’s bad marriages are reflective of real life ones, perhaps the ones that end in bitterness and divorce, although not literal attempts to kill the spouse. Personally, I would never dare such terms of endearment. I would lose some things and end up sleeping outside. I’m with Rumpole on this one: it’s She Who Must Be Obeyed.
Interesting detail: Timov’s father is named Alghul. Londo is married to the daughter of the Demon. And there’s a Talia running around… (name association is fun)
@96: My recollection, from JMS’s writings at the time, is that Sinclair was always planned to be Valen and thus leave the show permanently during season 3, and at least at one point (perhaps, I now realize, in response to O’Hare’s illness) he was slated to become a recurring (rather than main) character well before that point (presumably going off to Minbar for some while prior to War Without End). So Sheridan or someone similar was always planned to come in during 2nd/early 3rd season. The story at the time of the airing of 2nd season was that rather than keep O’Hare as a sometimes-appearing character during the 2nd season who then left completely before the end of the season, it was logistically easier to just have him leave outright at the beginning. Again, I now suspect some of that is cover story. But I suspect some of that was also true. Check out JMS’s comments on the Lurker’s Guide for the first couple eps of season 2, where he talks about all this stuff. Now, obviously he was carefully not talking about O’Hare in that context, but that doesn’t mean that the stuff he’s saying about Sinclair isn’t also true. I would’ve loved to see that because I always liked Sinclair more. Also, there were some plots points in 2nd season that really felt like they were written for Sinclair but then had to be adapted for Sheridan. In particular, Sheridan as a “collector of conspiracies” (Spider in the Web) still feels out of left field to me, and just not true to his character.
@176. The Rangers had very little to do with the Earth Civil War, by Sheridan’s own orders. He wanted to counter the propaganda from Clark and cronies that he was a puppet of alien regimes. EarthGov was overthrown by EarthForce members who restored the rule of law.
@Sunspear – The Lurker’s Guide actually started out as an ftp site (ftp.hyperion.com), collecting all the images, text files and such that were being shared on the internet, including the Babylon 5 Frequently Asked Questions List (B5 FAQL), which I originated and shared on all the SF TV related newsgroups at the time. . Once the web became available, Steven Grimm started up The Lurker’s Guide to collect all the information as the television series progressed, making it the main fan reference for the show. Straczynski definitely took notice and named one of the Earth Force ships Hyperion as a nod to the website. Yes, it is very 90”s but it also stands as an historical reference for the era and for the show as well as a good example of what fans came up with in the early days of the web.
@185: The White Star Fleet (manned by Rangers) carried out Sheridan’s initial attack on Clark’s forces (breaking the blockade of Proxima III) and also destroyed Clark’s squadron of Shadow Tech Omega destroyers (Clark’s most powerful military force.) Thus the Rangers were immensely important to Sheridan winning the Earth Civil War.
@187. But the bulk of the fighting was carried out by EarthForce vessels. Sheridan knew that having a fleet of Minbari-built warships attacking Earth would look bad to the general public.
@186. Lee: Thanks for the work. I appreciate it and suspect I’ll use it during my re-watch. And the design fits the TV content and era.
@188:
Certainly Sheridan was sensitive to the politics of the situation and preferred to use rebel EarthForce ships but as soon as the rebellion was facing the prospect of actual military defeat (from the Shadow tech Omegas) then the rebels immediately committed the White Star fleet, politics be damned. (Which was absolutely the right call since the rebel EarthForce ships would not have stood a chance against Shadow tech Omegas.)
@@@@@ 124, Narsham:
During my mother’s first watch, I looked up some commentaries on the show, and one pattern I saw was of critics who’d seen the show in their teens or early twenties looking back and condemning it. Several called it worse things than “naive.” It was childish, something to outgrow. I see that as a defensive maneuver, the sort of thing that the Baby Boomer generation can insist to themselves about how they sold out all their ideals. It’s not a childish show, it is child-like, in the best sense, the sense of someone who keeps asking “why” until all the excuses are exhausted and your true motives stand stripped to the world. (“Comes the Inquisitor” more or less shows us this on-screen.) “I outgrew this show” is just a way of justifying one’s own compromises, a way so defensive that it reveals a hidden shame.
When I was a teenager I read a lot of ee cummings. Then life moved on. I read other things.
A few decades later I looked at ee cummings again. My instant reaction was, “What immature nonsense!”
What had changed? Not ee cummings.
My re-read had awakened the adolescent self I had been when I last read the poet. There was nothing immature about cummings. There was something immature about his reader.
I figured that out at that time. But…suppose I had not? I might have decided that Edward Estlin was shallow, and unworthy of adult attention.
I suspect that any reread or rewatch after a long absence risks a similar confusion. How much is a critic reacting to the work? How much to his younger self?
@157/ad: I agree with that. My favourite Star Trek is the original one, where the Federation was clearly good without being perfect. I stopped watching DS9 after “Homefront” because in it, the entire Federation government seemed to consist of a single guy and his military advisor. Ridiculously easy to corrupt. Not my idea of an advanced interplanetary society.
I remember being disappointed when the spiritual Minbari embarked upon a civil war as soon as the last big war was over.
Great article, and IMHO, spot on. The series always seemed to be a mixture of awful and awesome. But to me, the awful moments were always outweighed by the moments of awesome.
Okay, I have to share my two favorite quotes now.
We are all the sum of our tears. Too little and the ground is not fertile, and nothing can grow there. Too much, the best of us is washed away. –G’Kar “Objects in Motion”
And:
The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. –G’Kar, “Z’ha’dum”
@193. Keren: Sooo… G’Kar is your favorite character?
Minbar is portrayed as a society that’s been repeatedly meddled with by the Vorlons and Shadows, their government reflects the involvement of Valen/Sinclair. SFF more than once resorts to older civilizations guiding young ones and Joe Stracynski more than once uses B5 to say “Be careful what you wish for.”. SFF is better off for that.
@194, Is there anybody who doesn’t love G’Kar.
At a convention Q&A I asked why the Vorlons and Shadows couldn’t leave the rest of us alone and JMS congratulated me on identifying the theme of the upcoming season Four.
“…The Lurker’s Guide actually started out as an ftp site (ftp.hyperion.com), collecting all the images, text files and such that were being shared on the internet, including the Babylon 5 Frequently Asked Questions List (B5 FAQL)…”
The Lurkers Guide was must-see TV back in the early/mid ’90s, yes indeed. Thanks for allowing us to watch. ;)
Heck, in the canonical novel where Sinclair is on Minbar, the Vorlon “ambassador” is attending the Minbari planetary council. (Which seems to be making decisions in lieu of the shipbound Grey Council.) I’ve always called the Minbari the Vorlon servitor species, like the Drakh for the Shadows. Granted it seems somewhat hidden from the ordinary Minbari.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was a White Star shipping line. The Titanic was a White Star ship.
Did Stracynski do that deliberately? Were the B5 White Star ships a shout out to those old Earth steam ships?
Such pretty ships! One reason to hope the software still exists is that one could print models of the ships.
Boxleitner was too smiley for me.
I hated how the human staff went out of their way to indulge Minbari customs like sleeping on a tilt. Sometimes I thought Delenn and Lennier must be chuckling “…and they bought it!”
There was an Earth liner called White Star arriving at the station in season one episode 14: “TKO.” Ivanova’s rabbi is on it. Not sure if they just recycled the name later for the Minbari fighters, but seems likely the first reference was intended to reflect Earth history.
IIRC Sheridan had destroyed the Minbari warship “Black Star”, so…
IIRC the White Stars were first described as a blend of Vorlon, Minbari, and Human technology. Fans snarked “what could humans contribute, the toilets?” As it happens, “beds” or “seatbelts” might have been appropriate.
(I know the Hyperion, being a zero-gee ship, did have seatbelts, we see the captain strapped in. I think Starfuries did too, can’t swear to it. Or the Agamemnon with rotating gravity.)
” Babylon 5 depicts a future rife with stratified poverty, union busting corporations, xenophobic hate crimes, colonial legacies blossoming into new conflicts, and the tide of fascism rising right in our own backyard.”
That doesn’t sound so much like the future but as the present.
The love pulsing in every word of this essay brought me so much joy and happiness. I literally just started rewatching B5 with my husband, who’s never seen it before. We’re halfway through the first season and I accidentally let slip that this is Sinclair’s only season — whoops. (He’s eagerly been pushing us to watch more than one episode every night and I’ve never been prouder.) Several of your lines made me absolutely howl with delight (“In navy blue, he’s a war criminal”) and others made my heart swell with fond affection for how impactful this show was for me when I first watched it — at 8, when it started airing on TNT!
One of my most precious memories is sitting with my older brother on our old couch in our basement late at night, watching the series finale, watching Sheridan in his ship alone in space, and sobbing together. We were what, 12 and 16? So yes, my love for this show is deeply tinged in nostalgia, but this rewatch is proving to me my love was not misplaced.
Gosh, this article is wonderful. Thank you for sharing this with us. With me.
(Also, your mother is RIGHT and she should SAY IT.)
@203, And your point is? The more things change…
One of my all-time favorite shows – which I can’t bring myself to watch the last few episodes of, because then it will be over.
One of my favorite quotes, which I have always remembered and cherished:
“A unicorn?”
No mention of the Lurker’s Guide?!? Did anyone else actually see the show?!?
I know Wikipedia is old hat by now, but in the 90’s, not only did we get reviews and recaps for B5, WE GOT JMS TO SPEAK!!!
Forget terrible; all TV is terrible, its constraints make it so. The fact that it was produced and went five seasons plus ancillary movies, etc. and so forth, and that almost the entire business, including scripts, was a product of one man’s brain puts it in a category by itself. As things in this genre go, it’s a masterpiece.
A. Regarding the similarity between B5 and DS9, JMS claimed that he first pitched Babylon 5 to Paramount; when they turned him down he went to WB. B5 was never meant to be a Star Trek story; that bit is false.
It seems that Paramount then turned around and ordered the Star Trek department to come up with a new space-station based spinoff, and broadly included elements from Straczynski’s pitch.
In short, not outright plagiarism but still a d*ck move.
B. Regarding the “archived” prints of the show:
JMS tweeted that as part of the producers contractual obligations to the WB network; they had to provide them with a complete season archive on 35mm film. This meant, according to his recollections, they had each *final* (conformed) rendered episode, with CGI included, ‘printed’ to film. This print was supposedly stored in the film vault, and could have been lost to a fire, misfiled, was missing CGI or perhaps never existed at all.
A possible explanation is that Mr. Straczynski’s recollections are incorrect – the master archive was made, but stored on a Betamax or telecine rather than a 35mm.
If it’s true that a 35mm 480 master does exist in the Warner Brothers vault I find it hard to believe that they wouldn’t provide it to Amazon for an HD upscale.
@@@@@ 207 I was originally going to talk about the Lurker’s Guide & JMS’s work paving modern fandom in this essay, but someone already wrote a fantastic essay about that for tor.com, which people should read instead: https://www.tor.com/2012/10/08/all-alone-in-the-night-when-babylon-5-invented-21st-century-fandom/
To this day, I still believe Londo Mollari is the greatest tragic character ever envisaged.
Hamlet, Othello, King Lear – Shakespeare’s best can’t hold a candle to him.
So complex and so three-dimensionally… human.
Layer upon lay of expedience and immorality that conceal an intensely moral core.
A man who so desperately just wants to do good but is enmeshed in chains of evil he can’t escape.
He is Aziraphale and Crowley rolled into one being. Deep down inside, a spark of goodness. Deep down inside, just enough of a bastard to be worth liking.
I came late-ish to the party, with “A Late Delivery From Avalon” after which I went back and binged on the rest.
It was interesting to see some names I associated with Star Trek the original series among the writers. Peter David wrote some novels. Harlan Ellison, of course, though his entire Trek episode was rewritten and he complained bitterly about it ever after. (He was wonderful in his cameo B5 appearance as the computer voice that drove Garibaldi nuts) D.C Fontana, who wrote some of the most beautiful Trek episodes.
Oh, and David Gerrold, author of “The Trouble With Tribbles.” He was here for a convention once, when he spoke about his B5 episode, “Believers”, saying he wouldn’t have got away with it in Trek. He was right – he wouldn’t. If that had been a Star Trek episode, Dr McCoy or Captain Kirk or both of them would have found a way around the dilemma and the family would have been most grateful.
Whatever you think of Season 5, that Neil Gaiman episode was well worth watching.
@211 and @212: Aziraphale and Crowley and Neil Gaiman…
This is the best laugh I’ve had today:
petition to cancel good omens
20,000 signatures “marshalled by the Return to Order campaign, an offshoot of the US Foundation for a Christian Civilisation” sent to Netflix protesting the show. Problem? It was made by Amazon and it’s already complete.
Best thing about this is Gaiman’s response:
“I love that they are going to write to Netflix to try and get #GoodOmens cancelled. Says it all really. This is so beautiful … Promise me you won’t tell them?”
@212 Harlan Ellison also showed up as the Psi-Corps psi-surgeon Bester tells to [spoiler].
My favourite quote from B5:
Made all the better (and more believable) for the reaction being a confused look and a “Yes, but what is a more straightforward answer that doesn’t require me to actually think?”.
Just started watching season 2 and they immediately spoil what happens to Delenn in the credits. She’s supposed to be in a cocoon still and they show the new Delenn under Mira Furlan’s credit. Already miss Sinclair. Also, somebody upthread mentioned this, Sheridan really does smile too much.
Before he won his recent Tony, and played Walter White on Breaking Bad, a much younger Bryan Cranston was a Ranger cameo. I haven’t watched B5 for many years, but was pulled back in by episodes on Comet TV this month – quickly switched up to Amazon Prime and have been having an enjoyable summer binge. Amazing how memorable certain scenes are to this day. With binge watching, the inter-season connectivity really shows up – JMS must have had one hell of a white board to keep all the details to be woven foreward (and sometimes, backward!).
And shout out to the Lurker’s Guide – back in the original run, I didn’t get into the series until Season 2, and the Guide was invaluable to catching up until I could see those re-runs. And the Jane Killick books were awesome as well!
I loved this article, but it suffers from the fact that it is written many years after it occurred. Things were different then and it was entrertainment, not prophecy. The show never really rang true and is did not portent things as they are today.
@209. The DS9 writing staff, on the other hand, laugh at the notion of them being fed ideas from the studio.
The low budget was one of the things that made B5 work. The original Star Trek used salt and pepper shakers as medical implements in the sick bay. B5 did what it could with what it had. As a friend of mine said at the time, they did it all the CGI on a desktop PC. B5 was a writer driven show. It was all about the writing, and Straczynski has a story he wanted to tell. It was a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. That’s why every hung together so well. It wasn’t written by a committee, Season 5 excluded.
I started watching in Season 1, and the parallels with the Fellowship of the Ring was obvious. Tolkien was writing in the foreshadow of World War II, so a lot of the atmosphere was there, hence the Casablanca analogies. There was a new evil in the land, and the little guys, functionaries on a neglected deep space station, were going to have to rise to the occasion.
Sheridan was great. He was one of those rare people who love playing politics, and he was good at it. He had his principles; he was one of the good guys, but he did what he had to. Frodo, and even Sam, had to wear the ring. Sheridan was the one earth man who took out a Minbari cruiser.
I really enjoyed Deep Space Nine, another post fall of the USSR shows, but B5 was the clear winner.
@218. Jake: “The show never really rang true and is did not portent things as they are today.”
Unless you’re joking… do you mean a right-wing government taking over Earth? One who believes in “Earth First!” and hates aliens?
JMS and Joss Whedon are responsible for teaching people that TV can tell stories, fully fleshed out long form stories.
Babylon 5 is still my favorite SciFi of all time, maybe The Expanse has now tied it. The only thing I don’t like is the time travel aspect, it is handled much better then anything in star trek or mostly any other SciFi show but I don’t like time travel. The only time travel I have watched and not intensely disliked is a netflix show called Travelers.
@216 The Delenn reveal is spoiled on the DVDs and Amazon, when it originally aired, Delenn was either shown as full Minbari, or in the cocoon, but not as she became. It was really quite a shock at the time.
No one has mentioned one of my favorite little exchanges among so many other wonderful exchanges on B5:
Londo Mollari:
But this…this, this, this is like… being nibbled to death by, uh…Pah! What are those Earth creatures called? Feathers, long bill, webbed feet…go “quack”.
Vir Cotto:
Cats.
Londo:
Cats! I’m being nibbled to death by cats.
That aside, wonderful essay, Jennifer. Thank you and thank Tor.com!
I’m another one of the many Usenet readers at the time B5 aired (one of the First Ones? Grin!) and I’ve always appreciated the access to fans that JMS allowed (within limits, on the moderated group), and the discussions on the unmoderated group were always as much fun and frustrating as the show itself. I remember very few discussions about the cheapness of effects and sets, or the amateurishness of the acting, it seemed that most discussions involved the story and the characters. Side note: the root word for “amateur” is “to love”, which is why an amateur may not have the skill to perform well, but they are motivated to perform out of love of what they are trying. That’s why I cut amateurs a lot of slack, and try to pay attention to what they try to do, more so than how well or poorly they do it.
BTW one of my favorite lines was in the “commercial” for the PsiCorps: “We’re everywhere… for your convenience!”
Just watched the “My Three Wives” episode. I actually liked Timov (Temov in the subs) quite a bit. No nonsense, no bullshit. She saves Londo’s life and doesn’t want him to know about it. Tough lady deserving of respect.
I think you are supposed to like Timov and wonder what Londo did to alienate her so completely.
Londo being Londo is enough.
Back in the Never-Never [DownUnder signifier] Babylon 5 was refreshing for a few reasons. The space ships looked menacing. The art of going insectoid hybird sleek menace as a look really worked. The quick flash past of the Shadows [no not Cliff’s band] and of course the Station where amazingly there was more than just one plot going. This Amerikan[sic] franchises like StarWreckage still cannot get into their one dimensional scripts. In B5 the ambassador very late in the series goes a little unhinged talking to the skulls of the dead. Actually in the neolithic humans used skulls as repository of ancient knowledge which the departed had acquired. B5 was far better than the endless cliche of current sociological non-issues now infested the conversation in space junk cluttering up a great genre.
@227 I’m not sure I would go as far as saying people are expected to like Timov. You can easily see why people would not like dealing with her. But she is clearly admirable in important ways, and intended to be worthy of respect.
You can easily see why Londo was wise to pick hers as the marriage to maintain, even if they could hardly stand to be in the same room as each other.
Superb article
@38, Thank you for that. I had not seen that and it has always bothered me that Sinclair was replaced. IMO, he was a vastly more interesting character than Sheridan. I know many folks call(ed) O’hare’s acting wooden, but that was the character. Plus I fail to see how anyone watching Sinclair’s (friend/comrade) chemistry with Garibaldi can call the character wooden. His eyes twinkled when they needed to. That was the kind of guy he was and I found him to be a much more believable and relatable military officer, than the action-hero Sheridan.
But a medical explanation, means that there really wasn’t much choice in the matter, and that makes me feel better in some ways. Worse for O’hare and his suffering, but happier than it was not a misguided attempt to dumb down the show.
@67 Reading the news group discussions and JMS’s comments at the time, my belief has always been that by some time in season 4 he was experiencing some level of burn out. He was just doing too much for one person to carry.
Still, season 5 was truly awful in spots. A simple point that continues to irritate me, but is actually relatively minor is that the telepath hippies burned candles for light. Presumably because they were poor. Electrical lighting is vastly less expensive than burning candles. On a station where meat is a luxury and everything not grown in hydroponics is expensive to import, candles would have been a freaking extravagance. There’s no way the poor telepaths could have afforded one candle, much less gobs and gobs of them.
@34 I find it telling that the first items you list for your displeasure are effects and sets. I think that folks who care strongly about that kind of thing just won’t liek B5 and probably don’t like classic Dr. Who either. Folks who care mroe about story telling than the trappings of story telling do seem to like these B5 (and classic Dr. Who). That’s okay, we’re all different. I think your priorities are probably not compatible with what is good in B5.
Good point about the candles! Electric lighting is orders of magnitude more cost effective than burning fat for light.
Power bills currently do have a minimum monthly charge, but if you can’t afford that I’m not sure you can afford many candles.
Everyone used candles on Babylon 5, not just the telepath hippies. Usually for ritual purposes, but still. I remember joking with my husband about the ubiquity of candles in that multi-species high-tech future.
Just finished season 2 which ends on the revelation of Kosh outside his encounter suit. Every race sees some version of angelic creature. Except for Londo… he sees nothing, which is telling as a he’s client of the Shadows now.
Supposedly, perhaps apocryphal… Peter Jurasik said as an outtake, “I tawt I taw a puddy tat.”
Season 2 was a noticeable improvement over season one. Much more taut. And Londo’s arc hits hard. For such a Falstaffian figure, who loves life, friendship and drink to fall to rage and ambition is tragic. I remember feeling surprised when I first watched the show a couple decades ago that G’Kar could be a sympathetic figure, but Londo’s humiliation of him here at season’s end really hurts.
And the special effects are better too. No more ships splintering into pixels. There’s actual wreckage.
Candles on B5 are almost always symbolic, representing life in some way. If they’re in scenes with Byron’s people, they’re telling us something about the telepaths.
@235 Sunspear: Jurasik did indeed say, “I thought I saw a puddy tat. I did. I did see a puddy tat.” It’s on the season 2 gag reel. And he delivers it in exactly the same tone and emotion that he delivers the real line.
@223
And the strange thing is that on region 2 DVDs the credits are non-spoilery…
I was an ardent fan of the first run of the show and I particularly want to do a shout out to the wonderful fan run summary and analysis of each episode that was a joy to read each week. JMS emails to discussion groups as the show was going was also a pleasure as he gave us looks into its creation. Which led to a teary watch of the very last scene, where JMS himself plays the tech who turns out the lights for the last time on the station.
Well, I am now convinced of a rewatch. From the very beginning. I confess that I did not like Season 1 (sadly, largely because I had no patience for Captain Sinclair). In the LA market, the WB or whatever network aired this was having issues and around Season 4, episodes would get pre-emoted or move to the wee hours and I gave up after a while.
i would say there is one show that seems to have been hugely influenced by Babylon 5: its heterogenous and hostile mix of aliens, direct takes in both sex and religion and an unflinching, even despairing sense of war and realpolitik.
Farscape. Of course, it had puppets on its side. Filthy, perverse, amazing puppets.
I love your passion for B5! I agree with nearly everything you said. Every time I’ve watched the series it has seemed relevant: in the 1990s I saw international politics but especially Nazi Germany during WW2 because it was so overt. Post 9/11, B5 seemed even more relevant. And so it goes. A few weeks ago, my partner noticed iTunes had a sale on the B5 boxed set and, because our boxed set is in storage thanks to moving into a tiny apartment a few years ago, my partner told me to buy it again. We’ve started watching. We both remember season 1 being pretty bad but, so far, we’ve been surprised by how not-crap it has been. And I’ve been surprised by how much of the dialogue I remember off by heart. Not all of it, but key lines, like the other night: “And Vir, DON’T GIVE AWAY THE HOME WORLD”.
My reaction to talk about remaking B5 has been static: DON’T DO A REMAKE. Until watching it again. Even I can tell some scenes are pixellated because, on my 55 inch TV, they make my eyes water due to being out of focus. I still don’t think a remake could possibly be as good without G’Kar, Londo, Delenn & co, however.
I’ve interviewed a surprising number of the actors considering I live waaaaay over the water in Australia: Bruce Boxleitner (who also gate crashed my interview of Cindy Morgan), Mira Furlan and Claudia Christian. It’s a shame so many of the actors have died, and so many of them so young as well. (All my B5 posts are here: https://www.darkmatterzine.com/?s=babylon+5.)
A thought about the overt messaging and simplicity of B5, though. I’ve just finished watching season 1 of The Son starring Pierce Brosnan. It’s a fictional exposé of historical facts and trends, including Texas being stolen from the Mexicans, racism and murder as means to acquiring wealth. What disturbs me about The Son is that the themes could be interpreted by white supremacists and some on the fence as support for white supremacy and USA nationalism. However, you’d have to be wilfully ignorant or so biased that you’re not seeing or hearing B5 to interpret B5 that way.
I still don’t know if I’d support a remake of B5 although I’d have to at least start watching it if one was made. I was pleasantly surprised by Star Trek’s reboot although IMO Star Trek does not hold a candle to B5 because of its lack of depth in storytelling and character work. Star Trek is simply shallow fun, whereas a B5 remake has a lot to live up to.
@240/Nalini: “I was pleasantly surprised by Star Trek’s reboot although IMO Star Trek does not hold a candle to B5 because of its lack of depth in storytelling and character work. Star Trek is simply shallow fun, whereas a B5 remake has a lot to live up to.”
I loathed the Star Trek reboot, but then, I don’t agree that the original Star Trek was shallow fun. Some episodes, sure, but many others were quite serious and thoughtful. And some were thoughtful and fun at the same time. If it had been shallow fun, it would never had the impact it did.
I remember reading a comment by Straczynski where he said that he loved the original Star Trek, that he loved the characters, pointing to a story he had written for them (the DC comic “Worldsinger”), but that he thought that Star Trek should have tried something new since, and that he hoped to have accomplished that with Babylon 5.
IMO the Star Trek reboot was a very bad idea, and a Babylon 5 remake would be an equally bad idea. Anyone who wants to tell meaningful SF stories these days could use the Star Trek universe, or the Babylon 5 universe, or make up a new one, but it should be new stories about new characters. Anything else is nostalgia at best and an insult at worst.
“My reaction to talk about remaking B5 has been static: DON’T DO A REMAKE. Until watching it again. Even I can tell some scenes are pixellated because, on my 55 inch TV, they make my eyes water due to being out of focus.”
Couldn’t that be solved by digitally remastering it?
@Jana: B5 used some Trek tropes. One example is the avatar for one of the First Ones that Ivanova discovers. It’s an almost comical angry totemic deity. (And for a supposed elder race, she taunts it pretty well.) We saw a few such on Enterprise view screens. Then again, the Wizard of Oz was way ahead of both.
Just finished the Shadow War arc and it was fairly obvious that it was compressed and accelerated. When the next episode starts with President Clark wanting B5 gone, it’s jarring. Didn’t they just save the galaxy? Give ’em a bit of a break?
Then again, the concise storytelling didn’t bother me. Fewer filler walkabout stories.
Thank you for bringing up these memories! I loved the show and turned others on to it. (I also loved ST:DS9 for many of the same reasons.) I was lucky enough to be at the reunion at Phoenix Comic Con some years back, and the love and respect these folks still have for each other and the work they did is wonderful.
“And for a supposed elder race, she taunts it pretty well.”
IIRC her graduating to taunting seemed the point. She starts out acting very reverential, and it replies with “Zog”. Only when she stops groveling and acts like a grown-up does it do so as well. I assume it was treating her as a Vorlon lackey and mocking her, and/or the Vorlons. (“Zog” being not much less informative than most of Kosh’s utterances.)
@244. zdamien: I’d say that taunting is not very grown-up. Part of the humor in the scene is that the supposed wiser elder is very much concerned with what the Vorlons think of them. They are about to bail until she says that the Vorlons told her they would be afraid. That’s the equivalent of saying, ” Nyah, nyah, bawk, bawk, chickeeeen…”
@@@@@ 31. Steve Schramm
It’s possible that they may have to pay out money on any potential new B5 Tv successes to other current entities originally tied to PTEN. This is what i believe they’re avoiding. They never ever seem to have anything against potential movies (JMS has rights ownership). But rights belong to PTEN(defunct) which falls back to WB and any existing groups originally affiliated apparently. Sucks!
Just finished my re-watch of the main series. I knew what was coming in “Sleeping in Light” and it still got me. Godsdammit.
Also, watched Call to Arms and started Crusade.
Captain Gideon: I thought you didn’t hold grudges.
Galen: I don’t. I have no surviving enemies. At all.
“Understanding is a three-edged sword.”
That’s not how swords work, Kosh!
“We are all Kosh.”
That’s not how names work, either!
This is truly a spectacular essay. A good companion for the show.
@249. Except there actually are 3 edged swords.
@@@@@ 251, wingracer:
@@@@@249. Except there actually are 3 edged swords.
Indeed!
The best known of them—at least in the West—is the épée. It’s the dueling sword in fencing. Unlike foil and saber, the whole body is the target. Making it as close as fencing ever comes to a realistic weapon.
There is no point trying to cut with one. The weapon all point.
(Sorry. I’m a sucker for a pun.)
I have rarely, if ever, read a more erudite and loving account of Babylon Five. I have so enjoyed the “warts and all” approach to the subject. I am still a fan of B5 and am about to binge watch it with my wife who retires in a few weeks time. This at her request but my suggestion. I also love Star Trek but B5 holds the largest place in my heart. I can still remember first watching it and meeting up with a work colleague the following day to discuss all the ramifications, especially the first appearance of “The Shadows” and just looking at each other saying, in unison “What the F**k was that”. We both knew instinctively the story was going to change big time. Thank you for giving me the enjoyment of reading your article.
JMS wasn’t just mugged in San Diego. He lived in Chula Vista–a suburb of San Diego–as a young man, went to high school there, attended Southwestern College in CV, and attended San Diego State University, where he worked for the Daily Aztec newspaper, which, because of his constant writing, was nicknamed “The Daily Joe.”
He has a long history here, and frequently pops into SWC, where I work. I also believe he was mugged and nearly killed in Chula Vista, but since no one knows where that is, he says San Diego.
Something that I’ve come to really respect about this show (and one of the reasons it holds up so well, 20-25 years later) is the effective use of plotting, particularly when it comes to the core mysteries of the series. JMS, by and large, never knits the parachute on the way down. He never introduces a mystery that he doesn’t have a concrete answer for, and he never interminably drags out giving the audience that answer in hopes of padding out the suspense. In an era of storytelling replete with mystery-box TV shows that completely fizzle out the instant the audience catches on that there’s nothing inside it, and when even Star Wars, one of the most valuable IPs in existence, can’t have its core trilogies plotted worth a damn, B5’s more thorough approach really is a breath of fresh air.
It’s a great show but watching it now is rather sad. It ran from 1993 to 1998 and in the more than 20 years since it ended more cast members have died than on shows from 40 years ago. In 2013 a 20 year cast reunion panel took place and already several cast members and guest stars had passed on. You can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w2pK_uBpXQ&t=110s During the panel they actually show an in memoriam film and it features a lot of people! A couple years later a couple of the people on that panel also passed away. So it is well worth seeing. Jerry Doyle is at the top of his form on that panel and he is really missed.
@255 JMS does know how to plot, does’t he. Those arcs that shaped each season of B5 were remarkably well constucted.
The perspective here is interesting but also a bit puzzling. For example, the author states, “The literal text of the show suggests that the natural result of Capitalism’s decay is a re-emergence of Fascism, and Earth is already locked in what we can now recognize as a familiar pattern of increasing technocratic censorship paired with a loss of political efficacy on the part of normal people when the series begins.”
This is actually a disconcertingly prescient and a perfect description of the world we live in right now. Yet, in the very next paragraph, she calls Babylon 5 “politically naive” despite having just shown that the show was right on the money. It’s almost as if she’s determined to criticize the show but can’t quite figure out how to do it and the deeper in she gets, the more she has to reach.
Just an addendum: I LOVE Babylon 5, even in it’s weaker moments and spin off’s as it always dared to try. And for a young Dawfydd in the early 90’s United Kingdom it became essential viewing. And the fact that for several seasons they aired here before anywhere else (Warners had this weird idea to hold back the last four episodes of several seasons when it aired in the States ) gave it a unique geek cachet.
And it was this show that led to the purchase of the Sidewinder Pro joystick I’m still using over twenty years later, when it was bundled in with the VHS release of the Season 3 premier alongside I-War, one off my all-time favourite space combat simulations (if you want some glorious cheese, go track down the 10-minute intro movie on youtube – glorious)
Some of the dialogue was cringy, terrible. Garibaldi in particular got some dreadful lines. But the characters were wonderful. And the little plot points that were dropped so far back but became relevant later because they were part of a whole story, not just a patchwork cobbled together by committee. And yes, I can not watch the last episode without bawling my eyes out like a toddler.
@258: “It’s almost as if she’s determined to criticize the show but can’t quite figure out how to do it and the deeper in she gets, the more she has to reach.”
It’s 2019 (at least for a few more days): if you’re not nitpicking any given story to death for insufficient wokeness, you’re “not taking a firm political stance” or some-such other nonsense.
@260: “And the little plot points that were dropped so far back but became relevant later because they were part of a whole story, not just a patchwork cobbled together by committee.”
Agreed. It really strikes me lately how the best storytelling of recent memory has a clear vision behind it and a decisive, confident leader at the helm (B5, NieR: Automata, the 2018 God of War game, Spartacus, the Powder Mage novels), while the biggest creative failures of the past five years try and make things up as they go (Bioware’s Anthem, Matthew Rosenburg’s X-Men run, and of course the Star Wars sequel trilogy).
@261: or Game of Thrones, at least earlier on when it was following GRRM’s books.
Lots of anime which follows a light novel or manga, thus some authorial direction. Though there’s a lot of good original anime too — I guess Japan is friendlier to The Creator. Accepting finite show lengths helps with that.
As for B-5, I can’t not make fun of:
“As you know, Garibaldi, all Earthforce vessels have a transponder for…”
Such a literal “As you know Bob”.
Three times the article mentions embarrassment, and this is something that has been a lot on my mind about high quality narratives recently.
Why are movies today mostly so forgettable, when we still have a a huge library of timeless classics from the 80s. Why do all fantasy novels from the last 20 years sound so uninteresting and interchangeable to me?
I feel what narrative art in the last decades has been missing is a sincerity that we have in many older work. A sincere believe in having something important to say without cynicism or making jokes about how silly your work really is. Many of the greatest works dare to be embarrassing. To be dorky, corny, and a bit naive, but having no fear of shame or ridicule. Most contemporary works don’t take themselves fully serious, either poking fun at themselves or having only a message of society being corrupt and broken and people being ultimately selfish and amoral.
I think Christopher Nolan said in an interview about making Interstellar that somehow western society has come to be disturbed by intimacy and emotion, at least in entertainment. Showing personal convictions has become embarrassing and so it’s deflected by cynicism and sarcasm. But really good stories are sincere. They are not embarrassed about saying what they have to say and genuinely enjoying things that other might see as silly.
@263. Martin: If you addressed your comment to a millenial, the response would be be “OK, boomer.” They would just assume you have nostalgia for the 80s and probably tell you that that decade, and any other decade that’s held up as a golden age also produced a lot of crap,
I tend to agree with you, though. There is a sense of cynicism, snarkiness, and irony across media. Some of it may be defensible. Prior generations have messed up the planet and the financial security of the youngest adult generation. The thing is: these things aren’t new. Cynicism and irony have been around for a very long time. The young folks didn’t discover them. I remember having to read Soren Kierkegaard’s book on irony in college philosophy class. That book was published in 1841.
If millenials aren’t more careful or become more nuanced maybe the response “OK, millenial” will catch on.
@264/Sunspear: But is this the young people’s fault? As far as I can tell, a lot of the men responsible for the current films and TV shows were born in the 1960s or 70s.
@Jana: No, it’s not their fault at all. They’ve been dealt a lousy hand. That’s why I said prior generations have severely degraded their futures.
But it’s still hard to talk to a young person that is full of snark and ironic putdowns. (I speak from experience.) I get why it’s hard for many of them to be optimistic and I am sometimes sad for the difficulties they will face. I do have sympathy.
I may have been focusing too much on the reception of media products. You’re right that a lot of current producers, directors, writers, and other Powers That Be are from the generation between boomers and millenials, the Gen Xers. If we blame them for the current state of cynicism and making formerly bright and hopeful things into dark and corrupted ones, like the trend in Trek shows, then we’d have to blame the media they were raised on and the very thing Martin was praising, “a huge library of timeless classics from the 80s.” That complicates things.
@Sunspear: “But it’s still hard to talk to a young person that is full of snark and ironic putdowns.”
I agree, but I wonder if that’s a millenial thing or something young people have always done. I remember that I deliberately decided to stop being snarky sometime in my twenties. If you’re only just grown up, and the world belongs to others, who don’t really manage it all that well, and you’re still insecure, snark can seem like the appropriate response. Later you gain responsibility, perhaps even some wide-eyed, eager, sincere children of your own, and cynicism and snark stop looking sophisticated and start to look immature.
“You’re right that a lot of current producers, directors, writers, and other Powers That Be are from the generation between boomers and millenials, the Gen Xers. If we blame them for the current state of cynicism and making formerly bright and hopeful things into dark and corrupted ones, like the trend in Trek shows, then we’d have to blame the media they were raised on and the very thing Martin was praising, “a huge library of timeless classics from the 80s.””
But have the majority of people raised on these media become cynical, or is it just the ones who call the shots now? Perhaps it’s the selection process that’s broken. Since you mention Star Trek, I have the impression that the main problem of the Abrams-Kurtzman era of Star Trek is that these people have nothing to say. They have a shiny box full of storytelling tools and no theme. So they go for the low-hanging fruit, war and conspiracy, broken characters and broken societies. It may even appeal to the commercially interesting young people.
I understand now why I like Babylon 5 even though it has all the ingredients I have come to loathe, wars upon wars, a future society no different from the contemporary US, age-old conspiracies (in this case, aliens pulling our strings). I like it for its sincerity, for the fact that it actually has something to say. Perhaps story universes originally built on political or moral messages shouldn’t run into the third generation.
@Jana: Abrams in particular has been dismissive of old Trek, saying he’d never watched it as a kid. Even while rebooting Trek for the big screen, he said he’d rather be doing Star Wars. So if he treated the Trek assignment more as an audition, it’s not a surprise that he delivered a less than thoughtful movie.
Multiple creators in various Trek properties have shown a willingness to dismiss or ignore good science in their storytelling. (This was true of Discovery.) Maybe they are as careless in developing deeper themes, or higher-hanging fruit (to use your metaphor), and going for the action movie tropes they grew up absorbing. I agree with you about B5. I did a full rewatch of the series last year and it held my interest throughout. It wasn’t perfect, and some episodes were clunkers, but JMS had a vision. Even when things looked dark, there was light at the end. The whole point was to get to the light.
babylon-5-sleeping-in-light
As to the bigger questions you ask, you could probably write a book on the subject of influence. I can only judge from the young people in my family environment. The teenagers, and one in his early twenties in particular, do seem more cynical than I remember myself at those ages. I didn’t really discover irony as an attitude till college.
Here’s an interesting article from a millenial defining the existential crisis of being a millenial, defining it as “burnout,” a term that has been around as a diagnosis since the 70s (long article; haven’t read all of it yet):
millennial-burnout-generation
@268/Sunspear: I wasn’t impressed with Abrams’ Star Wars debut, either, except for Finn. The reformed stormtrooper was a cool idea. But then, I’m not a Star Wars fan.
Beautiful article about the Babylon 5 finale.
“I didn’t really discover irony as an attitude till college.”
Okay, that’s true for me too (except there is no college in Germany). On the other hand, the know-it-all attitude is pretty typical for teenagers. And of course individuals will always differ; thankfully, my twenty year old daughter is as idealistic as it gets.
Concerning the article about the “burnout generation”, I’ve seen similar pieces from German journalists, with the difference that accumulating debts during education isn’t quite as bad here, and affording healthcare isn’t an issue. One thing I find remarkable is that the division between work and play, which has been criticised so much, turns out to have its advantages.
@268: Ahh, AV Club Classic, back in the day when the site was about loving pop culture, rather than shoving the word “problematic” into every other sentence.
@269: The Legends continuity had a pretty good example of the “reformed stormtrooper” trope in the Hand of Judgment, it’s worth checking out their novels if you get the chance.
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Hand_of_Judgment
@270. Devin. Lol. Yeah, I used to comment there a lot. I remember arguing with the reviewers about The Killing, for example. Some of them seemed to think it signaled the end of civilization or something, instead of just being a mediocre show. Gave up on Kinja pretty quick when they converted. Now that whole suite of websites is owned by some investment group and they are getting gutted.
“The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.”
@272 A perfect example of the show. A smart assesd bit of dialogue and a meaningless show. But everyone remembers that dialogue and thinks they’re remembering a very otherwise forgettable show.
I heard a story that Doyle came in to audition, and when asked about which part, he said something along the lines of, “I’m here to audition for the part you’re going to give me.” To which JMS said, “That’s Garibaldi.” Dunno if it’s true, I hope it is.
Ah, Marcus, poor, poor Marcus. I was sad to see him go, but he really went out in the most Marcus way he could, dying to save the woman he loves, even though she found him tremendously annoying.
@wlewisiiiii: “a meaningless show.”
Whenever people make blanket statements like that, I always wish the text editor would insert “FOR ME” automatically. It obviously had and has meaning for many viewers, so it strikes me as very headstrong and mistaken to forget one’s subjectivity.
@BonHed: Ivanova crying about his loss, “I wish I’d boffed him.” Yeah, so did he.
I loved Babylon 5. I never bothered to analyze why.
@276 Love rarely bears up under close analysis. It just is.
@273: Well, good to know you’re absolutely wrong about everything then…
@277: I have to disagree with you there; knowing all the crap going on behind the scenes with B5 and the struggle to actually get it on air has only made me love the series more, despite its occasional rough edges.
By the time of Babylon 5’s initial broadcast, I had largely given up on the idea of good space opera in film and television, having begun to seriously dig into SF literature, which outclassed much of what was available on screen. I remained fond of the original Star Trek and the Star Wars trilogy (it had not yet been … revised), but I had dismissed B5 as derivative of the latter-day Star Trek I occasionally watched with scorn in the absence of anything else. I was lucky enough to catch a string of B5 rebroadcasts the summer before Season 2 began … and my opinion of what TV can be—not just televised SF—was forever changed. I eventually quit on the initial broadcasts of DS9 and Voyager (returning to them in reruns when other shows like Firefly or Farscape weren’t highlighting what I regard as their superficiality).
It’s pretension to be a novel for television isn’t pretense; it succeeded in the immersion typically found in good novels, managed novel-like pacing for it’s long arc despite the necessarily episodic nature of most individual episodes (it wasn’t designed for the era of DVRs and binge-watching—I’m not sure that effect makes for the best entertainment anyway), and despite the vagaries of television production that mitigate against telling this type of story; it succeeded despite losing the star of the show (I preferred Michael O’Hare’s Sinclair to Boxleitner’s Sheridan and regret the absence of true payoffs to a portion of the Season 1 setups), a contingency no novel would need and proof that it helps for a show to have a narrative point capable of surviving cast changes. (Compare B5 to Lost where it’s solution was apparently to have no overarching narrative point at all—and I enjoyed Lost … especially the finale that so heavily evoked B5’s send-off.)
Unlike many shows I enjoyed, but will never revisit, B5 remains watchable for this very finicky viewer. I think it’s strength lies in the sound fundamentals of the narrative, especially the balance of all its narrative elements. The dramatic tension in so very many shows seems to depend on the audience being kept ignorant of what’s going on, but that’s never the case in B5. Even on an initial viewing, dramatic tension is created by characters‘ ignorance and, thus, remains as dramatic irony when B5 is revisited and the viewer has full knowledge. It does not suffer from that clumsy aspect of some storytelling where characters unnaturally withhold information they know from the viewer … despite such characters being our window on the world they inhabit and the story in which they play a part. B5 relied on revelation as much as anticipation, and since characterization was not a secondary element, revelations always had value for the emotional and psychological affect on characters. Setups in B5 were never there to string along viewers (my primary criticism of Lost and all the entertainment that uses it as a guidepost); they were always intended to have their payoffs and those payoffs were almost always delivered (with the exception of changes to the latter half of Season 4 and all of Season 5 forced by network uncertainty, the misses all seem to be the direct or indirect consequences of departed actors, which is a reality of TV production for which the show itself can’t be blamed).
Since B5 concluded, I’ve yet to see a show successfully accomplish what B5 managed. The closest to come might be Person of Interest, but it seemed as if it lost itself by overemphasizing the “Samaritan” plot (in what I believe was an attempt to stretch out a successful show beyond the initially-envisioned number of seasons, only to have CBS pull support for a production that wasn’t in-house) and prematurely concluded on less of its own terms than B5. Straczynski’s Jeremiah might fit that bill too. I believe these shows made legitimate, intended-resolution-and-path-to-it-at-inception attempts only to have some combination of network missteps and premature cancellation rob us: Millennium, Nowhere Man, Firefly, Jake 2.0, and Journeyman.
I’ll be a happier TV camper when “mythology” dies and narrative structure ascends that throne, when payoff stops getting the short shrift and is valued as much as setup.
I remember dismissing Anna Sheridan’s death as an unnecessary bit of angst. Boy was I wrong!
Best TV show ever
I’ve just recently re-watched B5 from beginning to end and found it to be Fantastic, Thought Provoking, and Entertaining. I have also read the comments and maybe I missed it but I didn’t see any comments about the Casting. The casting was phenomenal. I’m particularly talking about the Human Characters. Every shade, color, and ethnicity, from every country on earth was included in a natural normal way. No Butts on the Head or Weird Glasses or Certain Death after a few scenes and they ran the range from Maintenance to Doctors, Telepaths to Ship Captains, Good Guys to Bad Guys, TV News Casters to Singers to Station Security to Fighters and to Brown Level Dwellers and everything that a Human could be in the future of B5. Look at all of the background scenes and see the huge variety of unaltered human characters going about their business. The depiction of Interracial Relationships was also very natural. No Forced Kiss, or Dying because of the relationship. I know that other Sci – Fi shows had a few of these positive things but only a few here and there. B5 was loaded from beginning to end with Humans of all types and persuasions set against the foreground of Aliens of different races from ancient to newer. How refreshing that the Humans were varied but natural.
The depiction of Strong Women was also a highlight for me. From Ivanova to Delenn, Lyta Alexander to Lochley, and let’s not forget Number One. Didn’t three Strong Women (Lyta, Delenn, & Ivanova) go to Z’Ha’Dum to find Sheridan)?
Yes, I very much enjoyed the show from beginning to end. Viewing the bloopers was also very entertaining and being a Musician, I thoroughly enjoyed Chris Franke’s Music on all five seasons of the show. (I know, Steward Copeland was also Composer on the Pilot). Anyway, every show has its pluses and minuses and for me the pluses far outweigh the minuses. I kind of hope that there is not a remaking of B5. Let this Jewel stand on its own.
(Post Script, I used to live in Las Vegas and played in a band that performed at Jerry Doyle’s house 4 or 5 times for parties he would through. I’ve talked to him many times but never about B5. Just his talk radio show and of course about music and other things not pertaining to B5. Of course, I wish that I could have asked him many things about the show but once again, Let this Jewel stand on its own).
Yes, Lyta, Delenn and ivanova rescue Sheridan. I remember watching that episode and suddenly realizing every one of the guys is down and the ladies are in full charge.
When I think of great sci-fi I always look to B5. It’s serial format was well constructed and when put together it worked out fairly well. I watched and loved both B5 and DS9 as a kid but B5 turned out to be a sci-fi epic. DS9 never quite reached that level of stakes. The shadow war and the human civil were amazing story arcs. No televised sci-fi has ever matched it. Reimagined Battlestar and the expanse are great but the ambition of B5 still staggers the imagination. The premise of what if the old myths and legends were real? Watching as new legends were born? It was a good time to be watching syndicated TV. I only one none to pick with the article. What’s wrong with Sheridan? He had ghosts in his closet too. You don’t get the name starkiller because people love you. A missing wife presumed dead? He was a good man and a good officer. Anyone who disagrees can answer to Ivanova :) he was far from a ruthless commander. I do seem to remember that he had a Churchill moment. He wasnt a space Jesus either. Just the right person for the job. The entire cast had their roles to play which just added to the depth of the show.
Interesting point you make “What I’m saying is that Babylon 5 is… a little politically naive. It succumbs powerfully to the temptation to paint its central characters as the Great Men (and Women!) of History.” That view is repeated by the know-it-all but factually inaccurate lecturers in The Deconstruction of Falling Stars, who are then called out by Delenn.
But large political movements are rarely the work of any one person. The individual at the center gives permission for others to act and inspires but the individual really cannot effect change as an act of will. They did not do. They allowed others to do.
By “they,” you mean Sheridan and Delenn?
We all have a profound psychological need to believe in heroes. The shining knight on the white horse. If they don’t exist, we create them. Sheridan and Delenn are two classic examples. If you look at the social dynamic around them, they actually didn’t do anything. They were the open vessels in which people poured their hopes and their dreams that sets up sort of a gestalt where events take on a life of their own.
So the record of their accomplishments is overrated?
Absolutely. Good PR, as Tashaki said.
I agree that Bablyon 5 believes in great people in history, sometimes called them “a nexus”. However, I think it is an deliberate choice in how to interpret history rather than accidentally falling for a temptation.
#285 Tim Sheerman-Chase
I don’t agree with the statement: “Sheridan and Delenn are two classic examples. If you look at the social dynamic around them, they actually didn’t do anything. ” They constantly in ever episode they appeared in did do a lot of things. They were portrayed as conscious people who made choices and felt the results both good and bad of their actions and choices.
History is not made by fictitious general abstract forces. It is made by people,
individual people who consciously and unconsciously take or not take action. Even in an army or a mob – it is made up of individual people who take and make individual choices consciously and unconsciously. There is nothing abstract about it. Individual people always act and react and thus move events along. This TV show was a fictional representation of how individuals shaped large events. It was an excellent portrayal of that. Which was one of the major themes of the show.
“There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities, it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope. The death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender.” The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future, or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born…in pain.
Side note: the root word for “amateur” is “to love”, which is why an amateur may not have the skill to perform well, but they are motivated to perform out of love of what they are trying. That’s why I cut amateurs a lot of slack, and try to pay attention to what they try to do, more so than how well or poorly they do it.
To quote Pterry, “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly”.