Babylon 5

I recently started re-watching season 2 of Babylon 5, and it made me remember why I liked the series so much when I first watched it about a decade ago. Season 2 was, I think, by far the best season of Babylon 5, as it contained the least of the bad and the most of the good.

The bad of Babylon 5 for me are as follows:

1. Michael O'Hare

This is the guy who played Commander Jeffrey Sinclair in season 1 before being relegated to a bit part in later seasons. The quality of the acting on B5 was always a bit mixed, because SF shows generally don't have massive budgets to throw at talent, but he was by far the most wooden actor. His departure alone made season 2 better than season 1.

2. Cheese

B5 always had a certain amount of cheese, but it was worst in the beginning and the end, and less bad in the middle.

3. Descent into militarism for conflict resolution

Later on, the removal of the dictatorship on Earth and then the resolution of various disputes within the Interstellar Alliance show a gradual slide towards militarism as the solution to conflicts. Earlier in the series there was more of an emphasis on diplomacy and negotiation, whereas later in the series the primary mechanism for resolving conflict is Sheridan turning up with high-tech ships and threatening people (and basically always winning). I think this was a disappointing simplification into the typical action movie 2D world-view from something a bit more interesting.

4. Season 5

This season was truly terrible, mostly because they thought the show was going to get cancelled after season 4 so they prematurely resolved all the open plot lines. After they unexpectedly got renewed for a final season, they had to cobble together a selection of mostly bad ideas to fill up the season.

Having got that out of the way, the things that made earlier B5 good were:

1. Mystery

Earlier on, there was a lot to learn about what was actually going on, especially who the Shadows were and the motivations of the Vorlons. Obviously, those mysteries had to be dissolved during the course of the series, but I think they were a very appealing part of the series while they lasted.

2. An attempt at complex intra- and inter-species relationships

A lot of SF has somewhat simplistic politics. Star Trek, for example, favoured Cold or Hot War style relationships between the Federation and most other major races / polities for most of its run. Other states were either subsumed into the Federation, at which point they lost much of their distinctiveness, or there were tense highly militarised relations between them and the Federation. The Romulan and Klingon empires are both good examples of this.

This wasn't the case with Babylon 5. Yes, there was war, but the series attempted to make the relationships between the races more complex than just war versus perfect unity. Babylon 5, the focus of the show, was at least partly a diplomatic hub, and was presented as being a much bigger and more diverse place than a star ship or the space station Deep Space 9.

3. A comparative lack of techno-babble handwaving

Star Trek is justifiably famous for inventing random rubbish to achieve resolution to their plots, but B5 for the most part tried to avoid this. Advancements in technology were rare, and typically occurred via transfer from an alien race that had a well-established history of using the technology in question.