[B5] Babylon 5 Is a Perfect, Terrible Series

[Jesus Cea]

https://www.tor.com/2023/08/09/babylon-5-is-a-perfect-terrible-series/

Adjunto transcripción, en beneficio de los archivos de la lista de correo.

"""


     Tor.com 15th Anniversary

Babylon 5 Is a Perfect, Terrible Series
Jennifer Giesbrecht
Wed Aug 9, 2023 10:00am 92 comments 50 Favorites [+]
Image: Warner Bros.

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 Diego.

Pour one out. (Screenshot: Warner Bros.)

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 it .

—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!

Hugo winning dialogue. (Screenshot: Warner Bros.)

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.

The blocking and body language here is so good I bet you could make some 
pretty accurate guesses about what’s going on between these two 
characters even if you’ve never seen the show. (Screenshot: Warner Bros.)

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.

This episode is brave enough to show alien genitalia on screen. A 
landmark milestone that Star Trek has yet to match. (Screenshot: Warner 
Bros.)

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.

Screenshot: Warner Bros.

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.

In purple, he’s stunning. In navy blue, he’s a war criminal. 
(Screenshots: Warner Bros.)

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.

Screenshot: Warner Bros.

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.

Screenshot: Warner Bros.

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.

This one’s a Canticle for Leibowitz pastiche, but the monks are all 
drawing fanart of the show’s main characters. (Screenshot: Warner Bros.)

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.

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.

Screenshot: Warner Bros.

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.

The show has a lot of gut-punches. (Screenshot: Warner Bros.)

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.

Maybe it’s just because I grew up in the ’90s, but this blurry 
screenshot of objectively hideous neon interior design feels like home 
to me. (Screenshot: Warner Bros.)

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.

Here it is: King Arthur knighting a guy in a rubber alien mask. 
(Screenshot: Warner Bros.)

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?

Will you? (Screenshot: Warner Bros.)

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.

Screenshot: Warner Bros.

     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…

Originally published June 2019.

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.
Footnotes

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.
"""

-- 
Jesús Cea Avión                         _/_/      _/_/_/        _/_/_/
jcea at jcea.es - https://www.jcea.es/    _/_/    _/_/  _/_/    _/_/  _/_/
Twitter: @jcea                        _/_/    _/_/          _/_/_/_/_/
jabber / xmpp:jcea at jabber.org  _/_/  _/_/    _/_/          _/_/  _/_/
"Things are not so easy"      _/_/  _/_/    _/_/  _/_/    _/_/  _/_/
"My name is Dump, Core Dump"   _/_/_/        _/_/_/      _/_/  _/_/
"El amor es poner tu felicidad en la felicidad de otro" - Leibniz