Back to Babylon

I don’t generally sit down and give myself a stern talking to (my friends and family would probably suggest I should). One of the few occasions when I do recall something like this happening was in very early 1999, just after Buffy the Vampire Slayer had started its BBC transmission. A show which enjoyed a massively dedicated following ten years ago, and critically acclaimed as well.

Anyway, I remember saying to myself, No, you’re not going to tape all the episodes of this series to keep – too much hassle, too much space! You’re never doing that again. And, unusually, I pretty much stuck to that.

In the mid to late 90s I was a bit of fiend for VHS archiving when it came to off-air copies of my favourite TV shows. A few years later it was exactly the same when it came to buying box sets. Now, of course, I consider the enormous stack of tapes (two series of West Wing, two series of Angel, the complete run of The X Files, every surviving original series Doctor Who episode prior to 2004, large numbers of Avengers episodes, to name but a few) and realise that I’m probably never going to watch most of them ever again, and this makes me inexplicably sad. All that time and effort and money and stress over nothing.

The world has moved on, and the nine seasons of X Files that filled a large trunk on VHS fit into a carrier bag on DVD – and if you pick your moment, they won’t cost the earth either. I don’t own them myself, nor the run of Buffy, come to that, but I do have every episode of The Avengers and The New Avengers (oh, boy, that latter one is a show which is really variable), also Hammer House of Horror, the revived Doctor Who…

And this weekend, pretty much on impulse, I bought the complete Babylon 5 as a box set. This pretty spiffy collection includes all 110 episodes of the main TV show, the ill-fated spin-off, pilot movies for both of them, and a bunch of other TV movies based on the series (the only spoo in the breakfast buffet is the absence of the re-edited pilot, which apparently is much better than the broadcast version). I couldn’t really tell you where the impulse involved really originated, but I found very little reason to resist it.

Babylon 5 is another show which was massive in SF circles 15 or 16 years ago but which has slipped almost completely into obscurity nowadays – apparently it hasn’t been shown on TV in over a decade, there haven’t been any tie-ins published in a similar period, and the last attempt at a spin-off quietly foundered back around 2005. And yet I genuinely think that this is probably the single most influential TV show of the last two decades.

They’ve only got one chair, so only the commander gets to sit down.

Cast your mind back to American TV around 1992 or 1993 and it was all very much story-of-the-week territory more or less as far as the eye could see. If you mentioned the words ‘arc plot’ people would assume you were talking about zoo animals and a big boat. The storytelling prime directive was that every episode had to be standalone and accessible to a complete newbie.

There are still shows around these days which are like that, most notably in the forensics-procedural subgenre, but look at things like Homeland, look at Dexter, look at Desperate Housewives – there’s a story of the week, but they always have an eye on the story of the year as well. Partly this shift in emphasis is down to the way we consume TV now (the possibility of sitting down with a box set for a whole weekend), but I think some credit has to go to B5 for pioneering this kind of storytelling.

Does the show stand up at all as a piece of drama, nearly twenty years on? I’ve barely watched an episode since 2003, when I revisited all of the first two series, and so I am curious to find out. Regular readers coming here for movie guidance/ukulele testimonials/complaints about losing at wargames may be turning pale and starting to choke at the prospect of a series of detailed Babylon 5 reviews: relax, friends. Only selected, exceptional episodes will (possibly) get this sort of treatment. But I will be checking in occasionally as I progress through the series and its peripherals.

So far I’ve seen off the original pilot and the first four weekly episodes. Before we go further, brief guidance on how B5 came to the UK: the BBC didn’t want the show, presumably as they already had the rights to the Trek franchise at that point, and it ended up being bought by Channel 4: this was good news, as had ITV picked it up it would likely never have received a proper broadcast. C4 showed it on Mondays at tea-time (this was long before The Simpsons even had a terrestrial broadcast, and nor was Hollyoaks on the air), but due to the hour-long slot they opted to skip the pilot and launched straight into the weekly show.

I watched it with a friend and he was broadly dismissive of it as being a low-budget Trek knock-off with dubious CGI (not similar to Seaquest DSV, which reached the UK around the same time), and I don’t recall him watching it again. But there was something there that rather appealed to me – possibly it was the insane ambition of the show, having so many extraordinary characters and trying to cram them all into a 40-minute story, in addition to a fictional universe that seemed easily as complex as Trek‘s, despite the fact it was new-minted and not 30 years old.

(It’s an inescapable fact that it’s quite difficult to talk about Babylon 5 without comparing it to Star Trek, given they both essentially use space opera trappings and many of the regulars are military or paramilitary personnel. Watching B5 again now brought it home to me that there isn’t currently, as far as I’m aware, a programme of that description being made anywhere in the world (or is some offshoot of Stargate still plodding along somewhere?) Massive gap in the market there for the right product, I would have thought.)

The thing is that Babylon 5 reached the UK without much in the way of pre-publicity or attention and the very thing that made it not just different to Trek, but unique amongst TV shows – the fact that the five projected series would tell a single epic story – was never mentioned at all. So it arrived as just another imported SF series – I didn’t fully cotton on to what the show was doing until the start of the second season in 1995.

So obviously, with the benefit of hindsight, these early episodes look quite different to how they seemed at the time – they’re setting things up and establishing character rather than indulging in telling peculiar stories of the week. As I mentioned, I watched all these episodes back in 2003 and found my responses this time to be broadly similar in most cases – the CGI in the pilot is shockingly primitive, and it has an enormous storytelling problem in that it has to establish the whole universe, its politics, and about nine major characters and their relationships all in about 90 minutes. No wonder it feels like the actual plot (someone tries to kill the enigmatic Vorlon ambassador within moments of his arrival on the eponymous space station) is a dinghy weaving its way between icebergs. Given what we later learn of the true nature of the Vorlons (electric squid of vast and mysterious potency) how the assassination plotline works out doesn’t quite ring true either, but there you go.

The first episode has another go at introducing everyone, together with a reasonably basic galactic-politics storyline, by the end of which it’s becoming clear that while Trek is a show which uses SF trappings to explore basic moral issues and its characters, B5 is more interested in painting a bigger picture and going into some slightly grittier places. More specifically, while Trek aliens tend to exemplify particular human preoccupations (Klingons fixate on honour, Vulcans on logic, Ferengi on money, Cardassians on… er… big necks), most of the races of B5 are fairly clearly emblematic of real-world geopolitical states. Earth is, obviously, America (‘Earth can’t be the galaxy’s policeman,’ someone growls early on, just to make the point), Minbar is Japan (we even meet the Minbari ambassador while she’s sitting in a Japanese zen garden, for heaven’s sake), Centauri stands for the fading Old World powers (it’s kind of amusing that all of Europe and Russia gets lumped in together), and Narn, judging from their habit of launching unprovoked invasions and putting prisoners-of-war on TV, is very much like Iraq (possibly ironic given how real-world history worked out).

You can’t fault Babylon 5′s ambition, but at this point, if you’re not aware that the big story exists and that all this is setting it up, all a lot of this boils down to is fat men in fright-wigs shouting at each other in mittel-European accents. I understand now why Londo, the Centauri ambassador, has such ridiculous hair – he’s being sold to you as a likeable, slightly pathetic clown of a man, so there’s scope for a real transformation later on as he becomes… well, we’ll come to that, I expect. But part of me is slightly amazed I stuck with this show long enough to get hooked.

At this point, the hair is much more apparent than the heir…

So why did I stick around? Well, like I said, there is the ambition of the thing, plus the fact it has a slightly darker, grittier, crunchier flavour to it than that other franchise I keep comparing it to – although then again it’s not afraid to get into peculiar metaphysical waters as early as the second episode, about a race of soul-stealing aliens. And then there are a batch of consistently striking and memorable performances from the actors playing the alien ambassadors – Peter Jurasik possibly has to work with the broadest brush and is limited as a result, but there’s clearly something interesting going on with Mira Furlan’s performance as Delenn. Best of all, though, is Andreas Katsulas’ very theatrical turn as G’Kar – he’s the character you’re always hoping to see in a given episode.

Certainly, of the initial four, the episode without any of the ambassadors in it is the drabbest and the most Trek-ish. It could conceivably be rewritten as Trek fairly easily, much moreso than any of the others – that said, it retains the series’ writer’s fondness for awkwardly on-the-nose dialogue and scenes where characters unload enormous wodges of exposition at each other.

Staking a claim to be the star of the show right from the very beginning…

It occurs to me I’ve got this far without writing the name Straczynski once. J Michael of that ilk was the creator of Babylon 5 and wrote the vast majority of episodes, including four of the five under discussion here. For conceiving the thing in the first place and getting it made in any form whatsoever, JMS deserves considerable praise – but it has also got to be said that, whatever his strengths in terms of shaping the enormous scope of the narrative, the complexity of the backstory, and the development of the characters, problems with iffy dialogue are never far away. Perhaps the main problem with early Babylon 5 is that the former are still so far in the background that the latter are that bit more noticeable in comparison.