Babylon 5 was an historically important show. Have you ever had someone tell you that you should really be watching some show, but you can't bring yourself to do it because it is three seasons in, and the time commitment of starting a show is bad enough, and there's no way in hell you can find the time to go back and catch up on the previous two seasons? Yes. Yes, you have. There was a time when you didn't need to have seen the previous two seasons. That was the time pre-Babylon 5. It was the first series planned out in advance. Five seasons, with a single story arc, planned out in advance, with the glitch that expectations of cancelation led to seasons 4 and 5 being condensed into season 4, and then a fifth season tacked on with.. stuff in it. In other words, Babylon 5 really did change television.
That doesn't mean it was Breaking Bad-level quality (although Breaking Bad once referenced it, possibly because Bryan Cranston had a bit part in an episode of B5). The dialog sucked, most of the actors couldn't act their way out of a paper bag, stand-alone episodes were paint-by-numbers sci-fi cliches, and the special effects just look really cheesy now, as is often the case with anything that attempts to look futuristic on a tv budget, decades later. Yes, I'm really making the sale here. But, the ideas, the mythology... there's great stuff there, and it did raise the bar.
So, what's the story, and why am I writing a series of posts about it? A few centuries in the future, Earth is one of a bunch of space-faring civilizations that are constantly either at or near war with each other. The title of the show comes from a space station built as a neutral ground for meeting to not go to war. Yeah, that doesn't work so well, as you can expect.
The background mythology is that the original space-faring civilizations, known as "the first ones," were the first beings in the galaxy to achieve sentience. Most of them left the galaxy because they got bored, or something, but two stayed to influence the development of the younger races (that'd be us, and the other civilizations you see in the series). The "first ones" that are involved in the show are the Vorlons, and a race whose name we don't know, but that get called "the shadows." The Vorlons believe in advancement through order, and the shadows believe in evolution through war and chaos. So, the shadows go around manipulating the younger space-faring civilizations into starting wars, and the Vorlons help the ones whom they see as orderly, and everything that happens is basically the Vorlons and the shadows playing games with the younger races. That's the mythology.
That's not exactly what's important for my purposes here. Were I to go on some conspiratorial rant, that would be fodder for one, but what was particularly interesting about how Babylon 5 structured itself was that it put humans at the center, of course, but Earth wasn't the heroic center. After a cast change, the main hero of the show was John Sheridan (although give me G'Kar any day!), but Earth wound up being the bad guys. They were controlled by the shadows. It was an interesting perspective that you don't normally get in this kind of thing. Why? Short answer: It can happen here. That was the point. Sinclair Lewis.
And that's where I'm going with this series. Babylon 5 was told from the perspective of the space station, but so much of the interesting political commentary was about what was happening on Earth. Using science fiction to comment on politics is neither new nor shocking, and frankly, much of the commentary in Babylon 5 was rather ham-handed. That's part of what makes it disturbing how prophetic some of it is, 20 years later. So, there's the background. More to come, with interruptions, obviously. We'll see where this series goes. Straczynski had Babylon 5 planned out from the beginning, but I'm going to improvise more because, well, that's what I do.
