[SERIES][TVPOSTER]
[/TVPOSTER][SERIESWRAP]
[EPISODENAME]Babylon 5[/EPISODENAME]
Genre: [GENRE]Drama[/GENRE], [GENRE]Sci-Fi & Fantasy[/GENRE]
First Aired: [RELEASE]1994-01-26[/RELEASE]
Overview: [PLOT]Babylon 5 is a five-mile long space station located in neutral space. Built by the Earth Alliance in the 2250s, it's goal is to maintain peace among the various alien races by providing a sanctuary where grievances and negotiations can be worked out among duly appointed ambassadors. A council made up of representatives from the five major space-faring civilizations - the Earth Alliance, Minbari Federation, Centauri Republic, Narn Regime, and Vorlon Empire - work with the League of Non-Aligned Worlds to keep interstellar relations under control. Aside from its diplomatic function, Babylon 5 also serves as a military post for Earth and a port of call for travelers, traders, businessmen, criminals, and Rangers.[/PLOT][/SERIESWRAP][/SERIES]
I was surprised I couldn't find a B5 post in this thread so I'll create one.
I see B5 pop up in sci-fi threads in this forum and it usually ends up like the infographic below
nsfl/nsfw)
I don't really understand why because I personally enjoyed both TV shows. A word of advice to anyone who has tried to get into the show and not succeeded:
Struggle through the first season because seasons two through four are better.Like DS9 or any other successful long running TV show there are some bad episodes, and a lot of them are in season one. But season one also contains enough necessary information story-wise I can't advise skipping it or you'll be lost in season 2.
Why should you watch Babylon 5?
Because it's a good scifi TV show and most new ones suck. Modern scifi TV shows try to appeal to the whole family and end up sucking because of it. They take the following stereotypes, crank them up to 11 and try to cram them into 45 minutes: Exploding shit and large boobs for dad, adult romance for mom, teen romance/drama for the children and maybe some JarJar inspired stupid for little Timmy. In all that there's no room for an actual story to be told and it's no surprise that they turn out to be steaming piles of shit. But I digress. Babylon 5 was planned from beginning to end, has large story arcs and compelling characters that have lots of entertaining dialogue. Three things that are pretty much gone from modern sci-fi TV.
Why are Babylon 5 and Deep Space 9 so similar?
There's a full description in the link below but I'll paraphrase. J. Michael Straczynski (JMS) shopped the concept of the show around Hollywood in 1987 and specifically Paramount in 1989 before it was picked up by Warner Bros in 1991. It's not clear whether producers who were tasked with making DS9 were aware of the source material so there are lot of similarities early on, but the shows ended up in very different places. JMS later denies that DS9 is a direct ripoff and accepted it as "inspired by" in sever of his quotes relating to the similarities.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Babylon_5
Regardless some executive somewhere new what was up and tried to push DS9 out first. I think it's a tried and true Hollywood practice to try and crank some stuff similar out if you see your competition doing something that might be successful. The result of this competition was two great scifi TV shows.
Characters and Themes
I'm not going to into detail but the best I can summarize it: The show is set in the future and deals with the political, militaristic and cultural clash of alien empires in one space station run by humans. The show has an ensemble cast that gets occasionally mixed up as the show progresses. The shows themes include order vs chaos, religion, war/peace and addiction(
From Wikipedia). My three personal favorite characters are Londo, G'Kar and Garabaldi. Who for me represent the politician, the philosopher and the layman. If I get really bored one day I'll try to do a breakdown of episodes by characters.
I ran along this quote earlier this year and it got me to watch the show again. Mined from wikipedia which mined it from an old news group.
If you look at the long history of human society, religion ? whether you describe that as organized, disorganized, or the various degrees of accepted superstition ? has always been present. And it will be present 200 years from now? To totally ignore that part of the human equation would be as false and wrong-headed as ignoring the fact that people get mad, or passionate, or strive for better lives.
?J. Michael Straczynski, , 1993[39]