Babylon 5 Is Still the Best SF TV Show

Recently tor.com publishied a long article about the 1990s TV series, Babylon  5, titled Babylon 5 Is the Greatest, Most Terrible SF Series. It's a premise that I would agree with, although I have reservations about the "most terrible" part.

As the article points out, Babylon 5 was a wildly inconsistent show, but you could say the same thing about almost every science fiction TV series, including Star Trek (any one of the many variants), Firefly, Stargate (any variant), or the Battlestar Galactica reboot. But at it's best, it had few rivals. The only series that had its emotional depth was Star Trek: The Next Generation, and that only occasionally. (I'm withholding judgement on The Expanse until I see what they do with the fourth season later this year, although I will say that it has consistently maintained a very high level of quality.)

Babylon 5 remains emotionally evocative in all the places it has become perhaps thematically irrelevant: in the jagged edges of the sets, the stumbling waltz of its plot threads, the lush indulgence of its dialogue, the patchwork aspects held together by glue and determination, as imperfect and brimming with colourful quirks as its most beloved characters. My favourite scenes in the show are the little things: Ivanova’s illegal coffee-plant, Londo and Vir singing Centauri opera together in the station’s hallways, Marcus regailing a beleaguered Doctor Franklin with his nerdy headcanons about which characters in Le Morte d’Arthur he thinks the B5 crew are most like, Delenn and Sheridan telling each other quiet, ordinary anecdotes about their very different childhoods. Babylon 5 is a story that is truly greater than the sum of its parts. Modern plot-driven shows tend to do one thing, and do it very well. Babylon 5 does a little bit of everything: mostly okay, sometimes horribly, and occasionally with an earnest beauty that is almost transcendent.

I think the value of Babylon 5, and indeed its entire thesis statement, is best summed by Ambassador Delenn’s sage invocation of Carl Sagan. She says:

“I will tell you a great secret… the molecules of your body are the same molecules that make up this station , and the nebula outside, that burn inside the stars themselves. We are starstuff. We are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out.”

Babylon 5 is currently streaming on Amazon Prime. If you have not seen it, do yourself a favour and check it out.