The Greatest Show on Earth

Ten years of Babylon 5 (and counting)

Over ten years ago, in February 1993, a pilot movie for a tv-show called Babylon 5 aired for the first time in USA. The first episode, "Midnight in the Firing Line", followed in January 1994. Now, looking back, those seem like very different times. It was time before the Star Wars prequels, Matrix, Quentin Tarantino's breakthrough and Titanic. It was a time when no-one could have guessed that a movie about a talking pig could be nominated for the best picture Oscar, or that someone would actually be brave or stupid enough to make a live-action movie of Lord of the Rings. Hell, in 1993 we were still living in the 20th century.

I would like to tell you what it was like to be there in the beginning of the third age of mankind. Sadly, B5 only entered my life almost five years later, in August 1997, when the show finally reached the Finnish shores. At first it seemed like any other scifi show, just one more Star Trek clone. Then came "And a Sky Full of Stars" and nothing was ever the same. I had been a fan of The X-Files since the beginning, but that show had began to lose its charm near the end of the second season when the mythology episodes and the stand-alone 'Monster of the Week' episodes parted company. I had also realised that Chris Carter had no intention of giving Mulder and Scully any room to grow - they would always be Mulder the Believer and Scully the Sceptic. Now suddenly there was Babylon 5, a show that had everything I wanted to see on the X-Files. It had characterization, it had continuity, and most importantly the show seemed to know where it was going. Don't get me wrong, I love the X-Files, but I love B5 more.

The five years of B5 gave us some magnificent moments from the first glimpse of a Shadow vessel to the fleet of Whitestars on the sky above Geneva. From Sheridan's fall on Z'ha'dum to Babylon 5's destruction and the last shot of Delenn watching the sun come up. It also gave us characters that were flawed and real. Garibaldi's alcoholism, Franklin's drug addiction, Londo and G'Kar's progression from enemies to friends, Ivanova's failed relationships, Lennier's unrequited love towards Delenn. Five years we lived and loved with these characters. They weren't stereotypes or stock characters. They were real.

Of course B5 wasn't perfect, nothing is. The acting was occasionally wooden, the small budget shone through more than once, and even the Great Maker himself had his bad moments, but you rarely noticed the flaws. The reason for this was that the show had a story to tell, and that story was so good nothing else mattered. B5's greatest strength was its occasional weakness - the fact that it was the vision of one man, J. Michael Straczynski. The X-Files, although the brainchild of Chris Carter, was in the end written by a committee. There were some brilliant moments but the overall story disappeared into the different styles and ideas of the dozens of different writers. On B5 JMS wrote most of the episodes and the plot moves with grace. There were not many episodes that did not contribute to the story arc, and just as rare were moments that would have to be deemed non-canon. For every appallingly bad episode like "Exogenesis" or "Learning Curve" there were plenty of episodes like "Severed Dreams" or "Sleeping in Light" that left you breathless because of the sheer magnificence of the story.

When "Sleeping in Light" ended and the series came to an end, I cried. I had never before or never since been this touched by a tv-show. When three years later I watched "The Truth", the last episode of The X-Files, all I could think was how cold and unemotional it was, how unlike "Sleeping in Light" it was, and I realised how Babylon 5 had ruined television for me forever. I could never again watch a tv-show without comparing it to B5. As Ivanova said, there would never be another Babylon 5.

In the end Babylon 5 did not change the world. It might have changed American television, maybe given good quality science fiction a better chance to exist (or not... seeing what has happened lately), but it did not change the world. Most people have never heard of B5, even less have watched it. However, for those of us who watched it and loved it, B5 did change something. And that is all that matters.

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