Why it is my humble opinion that you should watch Babylon 5.
I first watched this television show when it was new. It aired in 1994 and I was very much a nerd in high school. I was also completely ignorant of the ways of the world. That is after all the privilege of growing up in a first world country that seemed to have everything on autopilot but I digress. I watched it a second time while I was in Iraq. I bought it from haji outside the FOB. Five dollars for the entire series. Quality was good for a pirate. I don’t remember having any profound feelings for it this time around, just satisfied in the ending. That’s the thing about watching television shows from your youth over again, the memory of how you felt when you watched it is usually a good indicator of how good it was, whether you remember the details of the story or not. Today I finished the series for a third time.
This time around I did not remember the major story details before watching, merely the arcs and characters. Enough that I could have described the premise of the show semi-accurately from a layman's point of view. This time though, there was something about this show. Something that was awe inspiring in both its creativity and how it captured interactions in space with a myriad of alien species and interstellar commerce, economics, politics, religion, and the sentient desire for domination could play out. It is a story under appreciated in the zeitgeist of not only American SciFi culture, but the world. Take Star Trek. Roddenberry is often hailed as a visionary in how once the law of scarcity is defeated socialism really does become a utopia. It stuck it’s tongue out at nationalism and embraced “Earthism”. Globalism doesn't quite describe the world Roddenberry created. Babylon 5 is in every conceivable way, a more realistic view on the future of humanity in space.
Babylon 5’s premise is hard to pin down into an easy to read snippet, but I will attempt it. Humanity pissed off an alien species called the Minbari, because of a misunderstanding in culture. Earth kills the Minbari leader Ducat and then the technologically superior Minbari bring the fleet to Earth and are poised to destroy Humanity’s home. They could easily achieve this feat. The rest of the series is about why the Minbari didn’t destroy the planet at the last hour, and how the only Captain in Earth Forces to destroy a Minbari ship in the war, is assigned to a space station 10 years after the war to create a waypoint for multi-species peace and cooperation. The themes this time around though stood out much stronger than the story itself.
It is a series about authoritarianism vs free will and order vs chaos. There are multiple protagonists and antagonists, who often switch places to create moral ambiguity and impossible decisions front and center with philosophical undertones that once seen, can not be unseen. Babylon 5 is the greatest space epic ever put on television. Better than any Roddenberry franchise, The X-files, Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly or The Expanse(That’s a hard one for me to say.) I’m not gonna make a blog series telling you about every season. I want you to watch it. I think the show itself can tell the story better than I can tell you about it.
If you choose to watch, by any means at your disposal, pay attention to the growth not of Sheridan, the main character, but to G’kar and Londo Mollari. G’kar’s growth is uniform and orderly while Mollari’s looks like the price graph of Etherium, erratic with huge Highs and lows but in the end, it's worth holding on to. I would watch a series about those two characters, if one were possible.
The idea of Liberty stands strong even though government corruption is at the forefront of earth politics in this show. Liberty as a constitutionalist would see it anyway. The idea of Anarchy isn’t at all explored, as if humans could never live that way, which I think we all know we are not ready for as a whole, just using my daily interactions on twitter as a guide. What is discussed perfectly is the idea of revolution under tyranny though. I liked it, but found the resolution of this arc wholly unsatisfying until the final episode of season 4. Honestly the whole thing could have ended there and I could have been left at peace with the resolution. I had to think about it as I watched the melodrama play out in the last two episodes of the final season. I found these episodes to be not an ode to the fan, but from the writers to the characters. They did them all a great justice. Season 5 is the sucker punch to that part of your psyche that gets worked up when you know you shouldn’t feel so strongly about something, but you do.
So honestly if the ideas of order and chaos, authority and liberty are ideas that you care about and you can make it past a lack luster season 1 that is hard to get through but worth it by season 3 and wholly necessary, then Babylon 5 is the perfect series. If you just want space opera, Babylon 5 is the perfect series. If you just need entertainment because you are still living in a state that has you locked down, this is the perfect series. It’s everything Star Trek should have been and deeper than Battlestar Galactica. It’s solid. It’s written by those who understood the ideas and weaved them into a story that permeated an entire series. It shows. Hats off to you J. Michael Straczynski.