Otter's Rock

firecat asks, "Why is Babylon 5 your favorite show?"

(schneefink, you may want to look away, because this will be FILLED with spoilers.)

Because it's awesome?  Seriously.  I mean, okay, it does have some flaws.  There are parts where the dialogue is pretty clunky and definitely NOT helped by the fact that the supporting actors couldn't always, well, act.  (Look, the main characters were pretty much all awesome actors, with the exception of Bruce Boxleitner who still did a decent job, but the guest stars were often pretty low-budget and given clunky scripts to work with and were simply not up to it.)

But the overall arc of plot, character development, worldbuilding, was breathtakingly groundbreaking in its day and is still a darn sight better than most of the long arc-driven shows we have today.  It paved the way for every show since that had a long story to tell.  Lost could not have happened without Babylon 5 showing the way.  Except that Babylon 5's arc was better than just about any other TV show arc since.  Most of them fizzle out or go weird or jump the shark; Babylon 5 didn't.  It all fits together, particularly if you chop off season 5 which was an add-on.  It makes sense in a way that a lot of the latter part of, say, Battlestar Galactica doesn't.  Most arc-driven shows, they peter out or lose steam or the writers lose track of what they're aiming for or they never had an endpoint planned out in the first place and as time goes on it really shows and the whole thing falls apart.

The thing was, Babylon 5 was J. Michael Straczynski's baby, start to finish.  He had a whole five season arc figured out from the beginning.  Not only that, he had redundancy built in.  For example, he knew he was going to need a Very Powerful Telepath for Reasons.  Like, a telepath who is WAAAAAY more powerful than any other telepath ever.  That was going to be Talia Winters (whose lover Jason Ironheart had been experimented on and turned into some sort of metahuman, and had given her a "gift" before he died that was supposed to be developed into the Very Powerful Telepathy needed for plot purposes).  But Talia's actress left the show.  So Joe Stracynski wrote her an awesome final episode ... which also happened to bring back Lyta Alexander, a telepath who'd been in the show's pilot, in which she telepathically "scanned" a Vorlon (a really mysterious and powerful alien) and then went off to try to contact the Vorlons, who then took her in and altered her and used her as a proxy, thus giving her the Very Powerful Telepathy needed to fill the plot arc originally filled by Talia.  The two women were very different, character-wise and history-wise, yet either of them could fill the same plot arc, and when one replaced the other it felt like it had been planned that way all along.  I still look back at that (and several other instances like that) and shake my head in wonder.

And the reason he could do that, that he had such tight control and move things around, is that he wrote most of the show.  There's at least one season where he wrote every single episode himself.  In a lot of ways, the series is like a novel written by one man.  So, yeah, it didn't always get as polished as it could be, but dang.  And even with all the places where the dialogue was clunky, there are other places where it's so incredibly awesome that it gives me chills.

When it first came on, of course, that wasn't why I loved it.  No, I loved it because it had wonderful characters.  The show was billed as "not Star Trek!" and it wasn't, but part of that was that the characters were allowed to be a lot more real and human and funny.  And they were allowed to grow and change over the course of the series.  Londo and G'Kar, for example, both start off very petty, and yet they also had heart and the possibility for something more.  They both change dramatically over the course of the series, together and separately, and they both have reasons to do so.  It feels natural.  It feels like real life.  They make mistakes, they learn, they grow, sometimes they backslide--they felt real.  All of the main characters felt real and three-dimensional in a way you seldom get on TV or movies.

And the worldbuilding!  Wow!  Each alien race had a culture all their own, that felt three-dimenional, too.  (Except maybe the Drazi.)  Most SF shows, each alien species has A Characteristic.  They're Stoic Warrior Aliens or they're Logical or they're whatever, and they all come from a planet that is All One Thing (a desert, or oceans, or whatever that one geographic feature is).  But there were a lot of species on Babylon 5, and any that showed up more than once got developed into something deeper.  Something complex.  Something like a real culture might actually be like, with a history and everything.  I love the Minbari the most, but the Centauri and the Narn both had some fascinating complexities.

And it had a message.  Sometimes subtle, sometimes clunky, but it was about something.  In a deeper way than Star Trek was, by that point.  You can watch the show on a number of levels--just the SF action adventure, or the political commentary, or the religious level--there was always something to explore and go deeper in.  You didn't have to delve into its message or buy into it to enjoy it, but it was there if you wanted it.

I loved it, and still do.  I love the characters.  I love the world.  I love the thoughtfulness.