Babylon 5

So, about 20 years late (21, actually, from when the very first episode first aired), I've finally watched all of Babylon 5. It's actually a show that I'd be avoiding for quite a while, even though I've been in and out of a space sci-fi mood since about last April (when Fathead got me hooked on Farscape) because let's be honest, when you first look at Babylon 5, it looks super hokey. The CGI is awful, especially now (they should have stuck with models instead of pioneering something new, frankly---it would have aged better) and honestly, just look at the Centauri---they're basically entirely human looking, but with super funky hair. You look at those guys and you just think, "No way is a show that's basically just saying it's enough for aliens to have crazy hair actually any good. No way."

Except it it. It really is.

The first season is, I think, a bit maligned, but even it isn't bad. Now, it's definitely not the best season of the show (although it's not the worst either---that dubious honor goes to season five), but it certainly has its moments and, having watched the original pilot for the show, "The Gathering," I could see where it was building to something the whole time. Hell, I didn't even entirely mind Michael O'Hare's performance (although I quickly decided I liked Bruce Boxleitner better---and not just because he's way more attractive). It starts the ball rolling in terms of the main, overall plot, and it quickly sets up my favorite character, Susan Ivanova, as a hell of a lot of fun (and also, unfortunately, as having no luck in love whatsoever, which I'll get to more later).

It's not wrong to say, though, that the show really gets rolling in the second season. Because Michael O'Hare couldn't stay with the show, due to his battle with schizophrenia, we end up meeting the real hero of our story, John Sheridan (played by Bruce Boxleitner). In turn, he first meets Delenn, who ends being his love interest in the story. We also start really seeing the Shadows, from whom all troubles over the course of the series come, even if it's not entirely direct, as well as the Vorlons (who really only actually appeared in a handful of episodes in the first season) starting to step in more. Essentially, the threads that the first season laid down are really picked up and run with in the second season.

The show then rolls right ahead into greatness in seasons four and five. Babylon 5's greatness is in the tightness (and epicness---the scale of Babylon 5's plot is enormous) of its overall plot. That overall plot is served, of course, by other elements---like the actors and the character development arcs it encompasses---but the fact is that what makes Babylon 5 so great is that the whole plot was (basically) planned from the get go. Yes, there were some changes that had to happen due to actor changes (O'Hare's Sinclair being replaced by Boxleitner's Sheridan, resident telepath Lyta being replaced by Talia and then Talia being again replaced by Lyta, and, of course, Ivanova leaving the show after season four), but overall every plot twist was planned out and you can definitely see that. Things that you would have thought were certainly throwaways from even as far back as the first season always come back. Things are foreshadowed heavily and prophesy is used liberally (Babylon 5 is decidedly a space opera). Furthermore, the show, despite having that well-planned arc, didn't just have one overall plot that was stretched out over the course of five seasons. Instead, it had interlocking, nesting plots. Thus, at all times the main plot felt foreshadowed, but you couldn't just look at what episode you were on in a season to guess whether a plot would be tied up. Indeed, I remember sitting in awe when, in the middle of the third season, what I thought was going to be the big plot that stretched the whole series was neatly tied up. Even more strikingly, the show didn't stall out there but instead launched into another major plot that had been started and paused earlier---one that was still big and epic but which had been forgotten about in the excitement of the other storyline. The show kept going strong despite major plots being tied up long before the end of the show and didn't miss a beat or stall out at all until the fifth season (which is discussed in more detail below).

Another element that worked really well was the way that the show, partially, I think, because it was a work of such a grand scale, referenced other stories. Sheridan, for instance, is a decidedly messianic figure---he literally dies and then comes back. More interestingly is that his messianic nature isn't embraced by him (because he knows that despite the parallels, he may well not live up to what everyone expects and is still just human), but is instead simply lampshaded by the person who ends up being his Judas (another role the that Judas lampshades himself with a reference to the 30 silver pieces). Another lovely bit of reference was that of I, Claudius. The Centauri emperor Cartagia is not only explicitly a Caligula figure, but one that is definitely informed by the portrayal of Caligula in I, Claudius---at one point Cartagia points to a head he has sitting on his desk and mentions that it was the "cure" to an incessant cough, a direct reference to a scene in I, Claudius where Caligula does the same thing to a young boy named Gemellus. Vir and Londo are then, of course, both Claudius figures. Vir is the everyman, a person who still keeps his sense of principle in a world gone mad, and while Londo has gone down the rabbit hole to a certain extent in regard to horrors his people are visiting on others, but he's still just a sane man trying not to lose his head when it comes to Cartagia. And, of course, both Londo and Vir become emperor, eventually, which is a fate that no one would have ever thought of for them. World War II is also referenced a certain amount, which makes sense in a show that puts a lot of its focus on war. All of these references, though, work pretty well, and add something to the show, even if they are somewhat heavy-handed at times (the reference to "Peace in our time" being especially so).

The way characters are able to grow and change over the course of the show is another one of its great elements. G'Kar, in particular, grows. In the first season, I (and, I'm sure, everyone else) thought he and his race were going to be the show's main antagonists. They aren't---and what a tragedy it would have been if they were. There was nothing wrong with the way G'Kar and the Narn started out---beaten down by having been occupied by the Centauri and blinded by a need for revenge---but where it actually ends up going is so much better and so much deeper. The Narn become a living tragedy and G'Kar goes from angry to angrier to someone who is able to selflessly do what's right, becoming a religious figure for peace among his people. It's one of the (many) truly delightful things about the show. You would hardly recognize G'Kar in the later part of the show (starting perhaps mid-season three, although his transformation certainly isn't complete then) but even despite that, the core elements of his character remain the same. G'Kar, much like his foil, Londo, is incredibly dedicated to his people and that always remains. The difference, really, is in what he does with that dedicated, how he directs it, and that really is a world of difference.

Londo, is another character whose story is a great delight to watch. Londo is, essentially, G'Kar's opposite. Both of them are driven by a love for their people (although Londo also always had decidedly more personal ambition as well) but unfortunately that is placed in opposition. The Centauri and the Narn are enemies with a lot of bad blood between them---the Narn resent (rightly) what the Centauri did to them (they had been a peaceful agrarian world) and the Centauri resent that the Narn were able to free themselves; they see it as the beginning of the unraveling of their empire, their prominent place in the galaxy (and indeed, they are a society in decline). Unfortunately for Londo, the fact is that the Centauri's ideals for what they should be as a society aren't necessarily moral and it leads him down a very bad path. The things Londo does out of love for his people are terrible. His actions directly result in the deaths of a lot of innocent people. At the same time, it's an incredibly tragic, sympathetic story. It's heartbreaking to watch Londo innocently make a bad decision out of love for his people and then, having realized, on some level, that it was bad, double down on his decision. He spends a lot of time doggedly continuing down his bad path and working hard to convince even himself that he did the right thing. Then every once in a while you will see a crack in him---see that he thinks he made the wrong decision but feels trapped and so simply tries to convince himself he's right. Eventually, of course, when he sees the path he's on ready to destroy his people, Londo finally changes course. By then, though, he's gone too far and things do not end up well for him. By the end of the show, Londo is a redeemed man (at least arguably---he's certainly turned away from his old mistakes and is trying to atone), but his bad choices catch up to him and now he is forced to do what he can acknowledge is wrong in order to avoid having the blood of even more innocent people on his hands. Honestly, it's a great storyline and having it opposite (and intertwined with) G'Kar's, just makes it that much better.

It wasn't just characters that changed, though, that were good. Ivanova was, in my opinion, the best character on the show, and frankly she stayed pretty static. She had storylines and things happened with her, but that being said, she did stay the same. Throughout the show, she was a tough Russian who'd had a hard enough life (especially in regard to losing people she loved) that she kept people shut out. Indeed, a lot of what happened to her seemed to be her losing people. Her mother and brother die before the show starts. Her father dies in the first few episodes. Her first love turns out to be a reprehensible person. Her girlfriend turns out to be a sleeper agent. The man who's pining after her but whom she's too scared to love sacrifices his life for hers. It's tragedy after tragedy after tragedy, and yet she's still an interesting character despite never really changing. She's tough and sassy but rather uniquely among characters like her, we get to see her cry. Indeed, one of the things I really noticed about her during the first season was how many times she cried. Other shows would have had her be a stoic and to push down her emotions (and she did actually do plenty of that too) and the crying would have been lost with that. Instead we get a person who personifies that fact that strong women can cry too (and often) and still be just as strong and as badass of a character as they were before the waterworks.

One character arc that was much less surprising than where the show went with Londo and G'Kar but actually ended up working very well was the romance between Delenn and Sheridan. It was obvious from the moment they stuck the two characters in a scene together that they were going to hook them up. Boxleitner plays the scene like he's kind of a starstruck by her and you just know where they're going with it. That said, by the time the show is ended and we're seeing the two characters after they've been married for about 18 or 19 years, it's incredibly powerful. A certain amount of that, of course, is that the actors actually have pretty good chemistry with one another. A lot of that is that while at first the romance was somewhat clumsily executed (which was pretty par for the course in Babylon 5 romances and is a point I will cover more in a bit), with this being the main romance of the show they do eventually really start building the romance. By the time we get to the last episode, these characters have had hints of a romance for four years and they've really been working at building it, making it real, for about three and a half. Thus, that last episode was incredibly powerful and a total tearjerker because of them as a couple. Frankly, I never really expected to be that interested in the pair when they first came on scene but by the end I loved them.

Unfortunately, most of the other romances in the show aren't handled so well (and again, the beginning of the Sheridan/Delenn relationship was messy too). They all suffered from what I think the earliest parts of the Sheridan/Delenn suffer from: they drops hints about it every few episodes and we get nothing in between. Half the time the characters barely have scenes together in between. A believable romance cannot be built on so thin a foundation. We don't need dialogue where two characters sit around and pine after one another, but we need enough scenes of them together to at least get those long looks that fangirls are so wont to read into. We need to see enough of them together that we can see good chemistry, a real attraction. Dropping a hint of something and getting back to it way later works great with plot points and even character arcs (we don't need to be following every character all the time and Babylon 5 definitely realized that), but it doesn't work at all for romance. This was one the reasons why the tragic ending of the nascent relationship between Marcus Cole and Ivanova never quite hit home the way it was supposed to. I liked the relationship (especially the way that Ivanova, despite leaving the show immediately afterward, carried what happened with her for years), but it just never quite did what it should have. I should have been bawling when that played out (like I was when Sheridan and Delenn finally did in the epilogue episode). I wasn't. Claudia Christian (Ivanova) put out a great, powerful performance for the end of that relationship but it was undermined by the fact that the relationship consisted entirely of about half a dozen "moments" spread out over the course of an entire two seasons (a whole 44 episodes). Ivanova's relationship with Talia Winters was even worse---they make up one episode and then over the course of just one more, we realize (well, it's strongly implied) that Ivanova and Talia have started a real, honest-to-goodness romantic relationship with each other. One episode. It works, to a certain extent, but again it's only because Claudia Christian puts out a good enough performance that she seems legitimately heartbroken (and good enough to sell a bit of nervous flirting). Garibaldi's relationship suffers from the same problem, except with an added dose of "aw, come on" added to the equation when the love he's been pining over ends up conveniently without her child and married a second time so that Garibaldi can conveniently bust in and get her back. Frankly, I think it would have been much more interesting if she'd been married only once and they would have let her keep her kid---navigating a relationship where the other party has kids is complicated and it would have been interesting to see Garibaldi having to deal with that instead of just having an infant put on the bus because it interferes with pairing its mother off with a main character. Add to that the fact that Jerry Doyle (Garibaldi) just never turned out the sorts of performances Claudia Christian did, and, well . . .

Honestly, the most tragic thing about how poorly executed a lot of the relationships on the show were is that the show works a lot---and quite successfully---with the idea that it's really hard to get over losing someone you love. Many, many of the characters have this. Sheridan, of course, comes to the show still mourning his dead wife Anna 2 years after her death and only gets over her by falling in love with Delenn (which he admits to feeling guilty about). Lennier never seems to be able to let go of his unrequited love for Delenn (which is one of the few romances which didn't suffer from poor development---probably because their roles gave the two so many scenes together) and it's a fair assumption that this same sort of unrequited love was at work with Delenn and her mentor Dukhat. Her relationship with him mirrors the one she has with Lennier (she even repeats many of the the things Dukhat told her to Lennier in the form of direct quotes) and when Dukhat is tragically killed, she starts an entire (genocidal) war in her anguish. When Sheridan finally dies, she never gets over him. Garibaldi never gets over leaving a woman he loved and finds himself trying to fix that mistake more than once years later. Londo gets back into bed with the Shadows just to get revenge for the poisoning of a woman he loves.

Then, of course, there is Ivanova, who is the trope-namer for All Love is Unrequited. Her inability to get over Talia means that she never lets herself have a relationship with Marcus. Then when he dies, she's so distraught over it that she leaves Babylon 5 and can barely speak his name 20 years later---indeed, word of God (in the form of the audio commentary for that episode) tells us that it's the first time she's spoken his name in 20 years. You get all of this lovely, lovely tragedy about how, as great as love is, it leaves you really, devastatingly vulnerable to loss, and it's great to watch, but I do think it would have been so much better if we'd been given more development for some of those relationships. Indeed, it's very surprising how well the tragic theme of not getting over lost love works in this show given that so many romances were developed so poorly.

Romances were the only relationships that were poorly executed, at least in terms of writing, however. For all that the reconciliation between Londo and G'Kar was lovely to watch, it wasn't because of the writing itself. Certainly, we were given a reason why the two would get along now---it wasn't as though they were suddenly simply getting along with no working having been done---but that said, despite the fact that some effort was put into the reconciliation, it didn't really feel earned. Frankly, I think it would have fallen really flat (much like Garibaldi's return to the fold at the end of season four did) if it weren't for the fact that the actors just work really well opposite each other whether they're enemies or friends. It's because of that that, actually, despite the reconciliation feeling unearned, it's delightful to watch the two becoming pals, but that doesn't change the fact that it should have been less rushed, that more care should have been put into it. They got lucky with it and that definitely shows a flaw in the writing.

The addiction storyline for the show's doctor ends up being another poor point as well. It was a really well done, well-developed storyline that ended up going exactly and precisely nowhere. The seeds for the addiction are planted way back and we get to see it very slowly develop into a problem, stay that way for a while and then it comes to head and . . . nothing. Seriously, every other subplot in the show ends up having some impact on the overall plot but this one just results in the doctor wandering around, trying to find himself and then he just goes back to his original job. The addiction is mentioned again, because Babylon 5 forgets nothing, but it doesn't really have any impact. It just goes nowhere and that's very unusual for this show. Indeed, that makes this storyline relatively unique---and not in a good way.

The other poor storyline basically ended up, I think, stalling out much of the fifth season---the damn Byron storyline. It just didn't work. What they were trying to do is add a third side to the telepath war, make it more than just Bester (Mr. Chekov without the Russian accent and a delightful, complicated recurring villain for the show) and Psi Corps versus the rest of humanity. They wanted give us sympathetic telepaths that might be against normal humans, might feel wronged by them. There might have been a way to do it, but unfortunately, Byron was just not likeable as a character. He was supposed to be a Martin Luther King analog, but the issues with telepaths were just way too different from those is racism. Mostly it seemed like Byron talked a lot about peace and being wronged---and then gave normal people very good reason to fear telepaths by casually invading their privacy. Racism was a pretty clear-cut issue, ultimately; the racists were wrong. Telepaths didn't have that, but in dealing with Byron, it often felt like they didn't realize that. Byron also seemed to suck all of the interest out of Lyta as a character. She just sat around being in love with Byron (who was basically just a cult leader). It wasn't until he was finally gotten rid of that Lyta got to do anything again. Frankly, the whole Byron thing actually made me glad that Ivanova (who, again, was my favorite character) left the show. Apparently they were originally going to give her a romance with Bryon. With her leaving, not only did I not have to watch her struggle through yet another failed relationship (which would have made tragically bad relationship number four for her), but it didn't undermine her relationship with Marcus (which, while it could have been executed much, much better, I did still ultimately like).

Once Byron was gone, the fifth season did pick up, finally getting back to stories we could actually care about, like what was happening with the Centauri Prime and the Londo storyline, but it did ultimately make the whole fifth season pretty tragically bleh. Again, the third and fourth seasons were epically awesome, but the fifth season, which did still have interesting places to go, was ultimately kind of a let down after those. It almost certainly would have been a different story if they hadn't thought they were being canceled after the fourth season and quickly tied up some of their main plots, but that's mostly just because we would have gotten an extension of the awesome plot from season four instead of stupid Byron.

Overall, though, this show is amazing. Ultimately there are better sci-fi shows out there (Farscape also had a pretty tight, if not as well-planned, overall plot, and ultimately had better characters), but that mostly just says something about how good sci-fi can get. Babylon 5, despite looking like it should be terrible, is actually a great gem in the world of sci-fi. It's a deep show that looks a lot dumber than it is, and it has one of the most engrossing plots I've ever seen. Indeed, because of this, I will be very excited to see what is done with the show when the original writer and creator reboots the series as a movie. Honestly there is plenty that could deal with being fixed (there was some pretty stilted acting in some places, especially the beginning and that CGI has got to go), but the core is so good that I'm definitely of the opinion that a reboot could be exactly what the doctor ordered. Babylon 5 suffers a bit from its age and from being first in what it was trying to do (giving American audiences a continuous plot over a number or years) but TV and movies keep getting better, both in terms of effects and in terms of executing big plots like Babylon 5's that I can only imagine a reboot will be amazing.

And in the meantime, at least I'll have the canon novels to read.