It was the dawn of the third age of mankind, ten years after the Earth-Minbari War. The Babylon Project was a dream given form. Its goal: to prevent another war by creating a place where humans and aliens could work out their differences peacefully.It's a port of call, home away from home for diplomats, hustlers, entrepreneurs, and wanderers. Humans and aliens wrapped in two million, five hundred thousand tons of spinning metal, all alone in the night. It can be a dangerous place, but it's our last, best hope for peace.This is the story of the last of the Babylon stations. The year is 2258. The name of the place is Babylon 5.It may not have quite the same ring as “Space, the final frontier”, but the opening narration of Babylon 5’s first season does a good job of summarising its basic premise. The idea behind Babylon 5 was that it would be a galactic UN – a place where representatives from different alien races could interact, and decisions affecting the entire galaxy could be made.
Babylon 5 was a show that beat the odds. It took a long time before a TV network could be convinced to produce the show, and it continually faced the threat of cancellation. Despite all this, it went on to become one of TV science fiction’s classic shows.
Despite his successful track record in television, creator J. Michael Straczynski battled to get Babylon 5 made. In the late 80s, the opinion of the networks was that there was only room for one big-budget science fiction TV show, and that show was Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Babylon 5 differed from Star Trek in that it wasn’t portray quite as utopian a view of the future. There was definitely a darker tone to it, and the alien races didn’t coexist quite as peacefully as those of Star Trek. There was also the additional factor of being stuck in one place – it wasn’t possible to move on to the next star system at the end of the episode, as the consequences of actions taken in one episode would be reflected in subsequent episodes.
It actually went even further than that. Babylon 5’s main selling point was that it was a story that had been mapped out over five seasons, and while each episode was a complete story in itself, they also contained elements which advanced the overall storyline.
The notion of an overlying story arc has become common recently, with shows like Prison Break and 24 making good use of it, but no TV show that I’m aware of has done it to quite the same extent as Babylon 5. This was something that also discouraged the TV networks, as they were reluctant to commit to a 5-year show, and they felt that it would be harder to attract viewers who may only tune in occasionally.
But Straczynski persisted. Babylon 5 was eventually produced, and received widespread critical acclaim. Of course, there were the obvious Star Trek comparisons, particularly considering that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, another space station based show, made its debut around the same time as Babylon 5, and it was highly likely that Deep Space Nine was intended as direct competition to Babylon 5.
Babylon 5 differed from Star Trek not only in its darker tone and 5-year story arc, but also in its special effects. Star Trek made extensive use of models, whereas Babylon 5’s effects were all computer generated.
This meant that Babylon 5 was able to show a greater variety and number of spaceships than Star Trek. An example of this would be Earth’s Starfuries – single man fighter ships that played a major part in the series.
To portray something like these ships using models would be near impossible, but it was fairly easy to do with a computer. Babylon 5 brought the world of CGI to television, and the groundbreaking work probably paved the way for future science fiction shows – it was now much easier to create a show requiring elaborate effects.
I’ve made no secret of the fact that Babylon 5 is my favourite TV show, and for me the main attraction was the 5-year story arc. I’m a fan of epic fantasy and science fiction novels, and Babylon 5 brought that epic feel to the small screen.
There was definitely a feeling of you not knowing what to suspect. Straczynski took the bold step of changing the protagonist at the end of the first season, and the show was never a case of “they’ll all be OK because there’s another episode next week”. Characters could (and did) die or leave the series, and something that happened in one episode could have consequences further down the line, be they major ones like war breaking out, a series of events that gradually built up to one moment, or something that is only realised 10 or 20 episodes later.
And when you add in the excellent special effects and the touch of humour that Straczynski brought to the Babylon 5 (not too dissimilar to the way it would be done in Firefly a few years later), you have what was for me a winning combination. Star Trek may have proved that science fiction could work on television, but Babylon 5 undoubtedly took it to another level.