“Our last, best hope for peace.”
Back in 1993, science fiction shows set in space were a scarce commodity. Star Trek: The Next Generation had the market more or less cornered, and no other sci-fi show with a space setting had ever lasted more than three seasons before being cancelled. Then, in February of that year, a two-hour TV movie aired called “The Gathering.” This movie was set on a five-mile long space station located in neutral territory that had been created as a place where humans and aliens could peacefully work out their differences. That space station was called Babylon 5, and what a lot of people who watched “The Gathering” didn’t know, at the time, was that this TV movie was actually the pilot for a new series that had been in development for the previous five years, a series that would bear the same name as the location it was set in.
This series was the brainchild of J. Michael Straczynski, who, prior to Babylon 5, had worked mainly as a writer on animated television series like He-Man and The Real Ghostbusters, with stints on The New Twilight Zone, Jake and the Fatman, and Murder, She Wrote scattered in, as well. Straczynski was a life-long fan of science fiction, and for Babylon 5, he set out to do something no other American TV series had ever done — tell a complete story over five seasons, with a defined beginning, middle, and end. Babylon 5 was envisioned as a novel for television, a novel that would tell an epic, galaxy spanning story by showing how that story affected life on a single space station (which would, over the course of the five year run, become one of the most important places in the galaxy).
Babylon 5 was envisioned to be quite different from Star Trek. In the Babylon 5 universe, things wouldn’t be perfect, and there would be a lot of room for conflict. Realistic scientific concepts would be on display wherever possible, with a minimum of the handwaving and technobabble that most fans of Star Trek were used to. And, from episode to episode, and season to season, the characters would grow and change — sometimes in unexpected ways. There would be no reset button pressed each week, and not everything would be wrapped up in one episode — or even in one series.
A lot of people said that Babylon 5 would never work. It faced its fair share of challenges, right from day one, and, right up until the final episode aired on November 25, 1998, there was no certainty that its five year arc would be able to play out the way that J. Michael Straczynski intended. But, in the end, it did everything it set out to do, winning Mr. Straczynski two Hugo Awards along the way, and also winning an Emmy for its groundbreaking use of CGI (some of which doesn’t stand up as well to today’s standards, but which, back then, had never been used on such a scale, before). Even though it was never a ratings smash, Babylon 5 would go on to change the way a lot of genre television worked, with shows like Lost and Fringe later going on to develop multi-season story arcs of their own.
Babylon 5 was, at the time, a science fiction show unlike anything else on TV. It wasn’t cute, and it wasn’t afraid to take chances. And, even now, almost thirty years after “The Gathering” first aired, it still holds up, whether one looks at the writing, the acting, or, even, in most cases, the special effects (which were produced on a budget that was half that of the average Star Trek: The Next Generation episode). Without Babylon 5, TV audiences would never have gotten the chance to have shows that told multi-season, serialized stories. Is it the greatest science fiction TV show of all time? This writer contends that it is.
