OzPod

A friend of mine has started watching Babylon 5 for the first time and she is blogging her thoughts about each episode as she goes. Reading her blog entries has brought back lots of memories about Babylon 5.

I remember seeing a lot of the early episodes when they were first broadcast on TV. I can’t remember when that was but it was probably on Channel 9 at 1am on a Thursday or something! But I also remember not liking the show much (especially the early episodes) because, to me anyway, it seemed to be mostly about alien politics and not enough about space battles.

At one point I remember going to a sci-fi convention (or it could have simply been a university club meeting) that was going to show a season finale episode that answered some pretty big questions (and asked a few more, of course!) and it was so exciting sitting in that room squinting at the tiny TV set with a group of other geeks. It gave me a whole new impression of B5.

Shortly after that I moved to New Zealand and I distinctly remember one weekend walking down one of the main shopping streets in Wellington and seeing in an electronics store a TV showing an episode of Babylon 5. It turned out that it was being shown regularly on TV4 on a Sunday afternoon! I remember getting very excited that B5 was on and I immediately made a point of watching it whenever I could. This time I was several years older and I could appreciate the nuances and plot threads sprinkled liberally through what would otherwise be completely unrelated episodes. That was it, I was a confirmed B5 nerd.

In these enlightened days, of course, I’m no longer subject to the whims of television networks and I own the full set of B5 episodes and movies on DVD. I watched them years ago when I first bought them but after reading a couple of Debbie’s blogs about the early episodes I realised that I’d forgotten most of the episodes already. So I’ve started watching them again.

It amazes me every time just how much of the story arc is set up in the first season. Babylon 5 was one of the first TV shows to do that. While it seems like every show on TV these days has long-running plots, if you look at them closely you realise that nearly every episode features the main plot as a major part of the story. Sure, there are other stories going on at the same time but the main story arc is very obvious and you know when you’re being fed some more arc tidbits. B5 did it differently. On the surface it’s your average sci-fi show. There’s aliens and space battles and weird stuff going on. But under the surface, in nearly every episode, little clues about the main plot are put into the story. They’re so subtle that you don’t even realise they’re there until you go back to watch the episodes with hindsight (or is that foresight?). I guess the reason they’re so subtle is that the writers had to sneak the multi-season story arc into the show without the executives at Warner Bros noticing. It would have been a concept too far out for the suits to understand!

Anyway, I’m really enjoying Debbie’s analysis of each episode from the point of view of a B5 virgin and I’m glad that this has prompted me to rewatch the show from the beginning. If you’re a sci-fi fan but never got into B5 I recommend that you give it another try. While the early episodes can be a little flaky by season 2 they’ve really hit their stride and there’s no turning back!