Babylon 5 was fairly big in the 90s and has a fairly big cult following among science fiction fans since it’s the original science fiction TV novel, before Battlestar Galactica and Farscape. But, unfortunately, in this fandom climate, I guarantee you pessimists and gatekeepers will flood social media with campaigns of negativity and inauthenticity of the show (even if JMS himself makes it) until it’s cancelled halfway through season 2. It sucks, but those sorts infest, spoil, and/or destroy nearly every fandom these days.
Babylon 5, on the other hand, was a fantastic show which JMS created a bunch of branches for to wrap major storylines at any point in the case something happened to one of the cast members or early cancellation. The original show was intended for five seasons, but it got cancelled for the end of the fourth, until fans campaigned to get it back for the fifth - by that point, the show had already put the final storyline and series finale into production. What happened was they created an epilogue season, it wasn’t the strongest, but it had some really great episodes toward the end to wrap up the character driven storylines. Even though you kind of already get a gleam of what happens at the end via season 4’s finale.
But one of the great things about Babylon 5 was its formula which was planned ahead of the launch of the show (years ahead). The first season featured a number of short stories where the birth of character plot threads occurred then toward the end the major setup for the main overarching container plots occur. For fans of Tolkien, they’ll recognize a lot of the storylines as a reimagining of The Silmarillion—with differences, as the characters lead to different attitudes and actions. Long ago, in fan forums (I’m talking back late 90s or so), the fans worked out the whole story relationship between the two, with the Vorlon’s as the Valar, and the Shadows being the forces of the shadow. (I won’t go further than that, because there would be some massive spoilers)
Anyway, apart from that, Babylon 5 features a better take on military than Deep Space 9 - which was a bit contrived about how guys like Sisko and other DS9 crew members were significantly more competent than the military forces of the Federation and Klingon Empire at managing the war in the later seasons: the military could do no right, and Sisko and crew could rarely do no wrong (except that one time, and he had to go to earth to find himself). Not saying DS9 is a bad show, I like it quite a bit (the promenade area of DS9 was one of the most compelling settings in any science fiction show, and there were fantastic characters, as well as some of Star Trek’s best episodes - Duet, for example). What I’m saying is that Babylon 5 had a far more believable war scenario than Deep Space 9. So, while Deep Space 9 excelled at showing the effects of war on the crew and civilians, Babylon 5 provided a much more exhilarating war story with far more believable characters in the role of war commanders. I think Deep Space 9 suffered from a bit of a 90ism of approaching character roles backwards (example: training miners to be astronauts instead of the much more reasonable option of training astronauts to be miners). Babylon 5 did the more realistic military people to be diplomats/politicians instead of diplomats and politicians to be military people (which is more like what DS9 did).
Speaking of Deep Space 9, the show likely based on Babylon 5 as JMS pitched it to Paramount when they were searching for ideas for a new show. There are quite a number of similarities between the two shows; Babylon 5 is a much larger scale universe with stakes that get much higher. Also, a greater involvement of our own solar system.
Anyway, I highly recommend Babylon 5, watch at least the first season, it picks up a lot in the second season as that’s when it kicks into full novel mode, but usually you’ll know if you like it or not at the end of the first season. It’s usually fairly cheap to buy as a bundle for the entire series, like 2-3 months of Netflix cheap.
For the record, though. I’d fucking love a Babylon 5 reboot. Although I hope something blows away this fandom climate of pessimism and gatekeeping or its not likely to be successful.
Last edited by Jumpin - on 12 March 2023I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
