Whatchu Watchin?

[Jumpin]

28 ____ Later trilogy.
Still on a rewatch of Babylon 5… I always come back to that show. Particularly when crazy stuff happens in politics because of how much reality resembles the art. I’m currently in season 3 where the pro-Earth and anti-alien Gestapo known as the Night Watch is gaining more funding and power, and now President Clark is firing upper military brass and replacing them with people loyal to him.

Also in galactic politics, the Narn republic has been completely conquered by the Centrauri Republic, and all their home world cities were destroyed with orbital bombardment using mass drivers. The Centauri then turned toward some of the smaller interstellar states, because they worry about aggression by anti-Centauri alliances, and feel they deserve a firm buffer zone.

The Minbari, most powerful of the “younger races” has had their ruling council taken over with a majority leadership by the aggressive Warrior caste.

So, basically, all the major civilizations have moved toward fascism. And, of course, they anll refuse to recognize it.


Some extra thoughts below, this is a tangent aside from the rest of my post:

For anyone not familiar with Babylon 5, it’s a show from the 1990s that was written in the 1980s. It has a lower budget, so it looks older than many shows despite having impressive CG for its time. Earlier, the creator of the show pitched it to Paramount, they rejected it but then a few years later came out with Deep Space 9, which clearly ripped off Babylon 5. They replaced the Shadows with the Dominion, the Centauri with the Cardassians, and split the role of Narn into Klingon and Bajorans. The Vorlons were heavily reduced to “worm hole aliens”. And other elements were heavily simplified, or heavily dumbed down (the war and military elements, particularly). Deep Space 9 was a great show IMO, and had better production values, but was thematically incoherent and often felt broken/disconnected in its storyline and was filled with plot contrivances… in the 1990s this was true about most shows as they found that contriving their way through a plot kept viewer attention more than a show which actually followed through organically and might not fit into a cookie-cutter 5 or 4 act structure (the 4 act usually used for 30 minute shows, while the 5 was used for 1 hour shows). Babylon 5 was an outlier, as it was written more like a novel, and focused on developing longterm arcs that posed questions and dilemmas surrounding the central themes and topics….

Just to explain what I mean here. A theme is an abstract question while a topic is a material and tangible event or situation, or something filling a similar role. Themes are meant for coherence, like a language, while a topic is where the action takes place. So, for example, a theme in Star Wars would be freedom vs authority (the characters, societies, and institutions all wrap around this… even the force is a manifestation of this theme. A topic in Star Wars is battles in spaces, and the this also ties around the theme in the form of rebels vs empire.

This is a storytelling strategy used in novels primarily, and in some films. But usually films differ as they’re far more passive, and that type of coherence isn’t as necessary as repetition of a structure people are already familiar with… when watching passive media, people often don’t want to have to think too clearly. Star Wars actually does this strategy too by wrapping it around a plot formula that is common in comedy films, romance films, and adventure stories. At least the first and third one do, Empire Strikes Back takes a different sort of approach. The problem with many of the sorts of films that fit into the plot formula is that they tend to connect the pieces using plot contrivances: that is mechanics or sudden motivational changes, or new information falls into the lap of the protagonists so they can solve the problem… I notice horror does this often where an idiot character gets separated from the main crew only to return a few scenes later and somehow during the absence discovers the history of their foe, the strengths and weaknesses, and just about everything important about their situation, and you get one big exposition dump scene…. Or, in Star Wars the Force Awakens when characters just randomly change their motivations and comfort with violence for no other reason than the plot needs it. The reason films, but not books, get away with plot contrivances has to do with people passively absorbing film while books are more actively engaged with… and so contrivances stick out like sore thumbs in books, while in film they pass by like a telephone post out the window on a train ride. Film is more about getting to the main points…

I’m rambling on now, but I’ll say not all films are like that. Many films engage the mind of the viewer by purposely interrupting that smooth structural flow (Hitchcock does this, Kubrick takes it further, and others like Antonioni took it way further into WTF territory… he might have been an undiagnosed functional schizophrenic). And other films satirize it (like Fight Club).