Asking the Wrong Questions

Some scattered thoughts, having finally managed to watch the end of the fourth season: I suspect I'm alone in this, but I really do think that out of the show's three main 'battle arcs'--the original break from Earth ( "Messages From Earth" through "Ceremonies of Light and Dark" ), the final battle against the Shadows and the Vorlons ( "The Summoning" through "Into the Fire" ), and the fight to liberate Earth ( "No Surrender, No Retreat" through "Endgame" )--it's the last one that is the most successful and the best made. There's a darkness and a complexity to the storyline that simply wasn't there before. Sheridan is leading a partly alien fleet to attack his own home planet, in a decision that, while ultimately correct, is still questionable. The face of the enemy is not only familiar, it is our own (in sharp contrast to the Shadows and the Vorlons, who have no faces). The stakes are higher on ...

At my brother's prompting, my family and I have gone back and re-watched that seminal 90s SF phenomenon, Babylon 5 . Now that I'm nearly at the end of the show's four-season run* I find myself having to rethink my assessment of it. Up until now, I've always thought of B5 as a better-than-average show with a poor first season, an execrable fifth season, and three deeply flawed yet ultimately successful middle seasons. And as it turns out, I was wrong, because Babylon 5 , from beginning to end, both sucks and blows. I suspect this is something a lot of people already knew--people who watched the show when they were older than 15, the age I was when I became a fan, and people who have gone back to it in the intervening years. More than anything else, Babylon 5 is a show for teenagers. The overblown dialogue, the broad humor, the melodramatic plots, the frequent monologues and speeches, and just in general the show's palpable sense of its own profundity must have been ...